Page 49 of Rescuing Ally, Part 2 (CHARLIE Team: Guardian Hostage Rescue Specialists #8)

FORTY-TWO

The Space He Left

ALLY

The galley of the trawler smells like coffee and diesel fuel. Yellow light casts everything in warm tones that feel wrong for a night this dark. We claim the space, turning it into a sanctuary where grief can exist without judgment.

Jenna sits beside me on the worn bench seat, her bandaged hand resting on mine. The absence of her fingers hits me fresh—another piece of wholeness Malfor stole from us. Mia curls up in the corner, Rigel’s jacket draped over her shoulders. He’s somewhere above deck, keeping watch.

“He loved you both,” Rebel whispers. Her voice rasps through swollen lips, one side of her face stitched and discolored. “Anyone with eyes could see it.”

“Could see what?” My voice sounds hollow to my own ears.

I can’t breathe. The air burns as it drags into my lungs. My chest stays hollow, no matter how tightly I wrap my arms around myself.

“How complete you made each other.” Malia shifts beside me, wincing with the movement.

One arm cradles her ribs, the other reaches out, brushing my back like she’s afraid I might break apart.

“The way you fit together like puzzle pieces. How you looked at each other like nothing else mattered. Like you found home in the same place.”

My legs go. I drop, knees slamming against cold metal. Hands catch me—Stitch’s, trembling from the lash marks that haven’t stopped bleeding. Rebel sinks down beside me, pulling me in with her unbroken arm.

“And now? What do we do now?”

“Now you learn to fit together differently. You learn to live with the space he left behind,” Stitch murmurs, crouching beside me, voice thick as the sea beyond the porthole. “But you’re not empty. Not alone.”

The women close in. A shield of love. Bruised, broken, bleeding—and still, they hold me.

The boat rocks gently, a rhythm that should be soothing but instead feels like a clock counting down to an uncertain future. Somewhere below, Hank’s body lies in the ship’s morgue. Somewhere above, Gabe bleeds on the deck rather than accept comfort.

“He’ll come around,” Jenna says softly, reading my mind. “Men like that—they process differently. They need to hit bottom before they can climb back up.”

“What if he doesn’t come back up?”

“Then you drag him.” The certainty in Rebel’s voice surprises me. “You grab him by the collar and drag him back to the surface, because that’s what people who love each other do.”

Mia uncurls from her corner and moves to sit across from me. “Rigel told me about the fight they had. Before the mission.”

My stomach drops. “What fight?”

“Something about sharing you. About Gabe wanting more than Hank was willing to give.” She reaches across the small table and covers my hands with hers. “Whatever he’s carrying, it’s eating him alive.”

“He won’t talk to me.”

“He will. When he’s ready to stop punishing himself.” Stitch turns from the porthole, fixes me with eyes that have seen too much. “But you have to be ready to listen when he does.”

The coffee in my cup has gone cold, a bitter film coating the surface. Outside, waves lap against the hull. Time moves forward whether we’re ready or not.

“I should go find him.”

“Give him another hour,” Jenna advises. “Let him bleed a little more. Then go be the anchor he needs.”

The next hours pass in silence, too heavy for words.

We take our grief in shifts. Plates of food go untouched. Rebel pours coffee, no one drinks. Malia dozes upright, pain etched between her brows. Jenna presses her forehead to Carter’s shoulder, her eyes open but unfocused.

Rigel returns, wrapping Mia in his arms like he needs to feel her pulse just to believe she’s real. Jeb finally coaxes Stitch into sitting, her eyes hollow, her back still seeping blood into borrowed fabric. Walt paces. Blake leans against the bulkhead, arms crossed, a silent sentinel.

No one mentions the empty seat at the table.

When I slip away, no one tries to stop me.

I find him on the forward deck, alone beneath a sky smeared with stars and smoke. His back rests against a rusting storage container, knees bent, elbows braced. The shadows cling to him, hiding the blood still drying on his knuckles, the rawness in his silence.

He doesn’t move when I approach. Doesn’t look at me. Just keeps staring out at the ocean, the way you do when you need it to swallow everything you’re feeling.

I sink beside him, drawing my knees to my chest. The cold from the metal deck seeps through my borrowed clothes, through skin and bone, straight into the hollow he left inside me.

“I don’t know how to hold this much pain by myself.”

Still, Gabe says nothing.

“I know what you’re doing,” I say. “Bleeding it out, one inch at a time. Like if you punish yourself hard enough, it might somehow bring him back.”

His head bows low. Shoulders quake once. Twice.

“It won’t,” I murmur. “But I’ll sit here, with you, until you remember how to breathe.”

Silence stretches again, except it’s not empty now. It holds grief. Memories. The shape of a future neither of us knows how to face.

Finally, Gabe turns his face toward me. The ocean wind has dried salt on his cheeks that didn’t come from sea spray.

“I should’ve died instead of him.”

“No.” I reach for his hand, wrap my fingers through the bloodied ones he won’t care for himself. “You live. You live because Hank would’ve bled out a hundred times to make sure we both got out.”

His eyes close.

“The only way through this is together.”

His fingers tighten around mine. A broken thing reaching for another broken thing. And somehow, between us, it feels like the start of something whole.

“You missed dinner.” I settle beside him, close enough to offer comfort, far enough to respect his need for space.

“Wasn’t hungry.”

“The women are worried about you.”

“The women should worry about themselves.” His voice carries no heat, just exhaustion that goes bone-deep. “They’ve been through enough.”

Salt air cuts through the diesel fumes, carrying the scent of open water and distance. Stars reflect on the black surface, fractured by the boat’s wake into a million glittering pieces.

“Talk to me.”

“About what?”

“About why you’re out here bleeding instead of letting someone help you.”

He flexes his damaged hands, winces at the pain. “Pain feels appropriate right now.”

“Hank wouldn’t want you hurting yourself.”

“Hank’s dead.” The words come out flat, matter-of-fact. “What he wants doesn’t matter anymore.”

“That’s not true.”

“Isn’t it?” He turns to look at me for the first time since I sat down. “He’s gone, Ally. Whatever he wanted for us, whatever plans he had—they died with him.”

“His love for us didn’t die.”

“Love.” He laughs, the sound bitter as salt water. “You want to know about love? You want to know what our great love story really was?”

My chest tightens. “Gabe?—”

“It was me being a selfish bastard. It was me fighting him because I wanted you all to myself.” The words tumble out like blood from a wound. “It was me telling him that you belonged to me, not us. That if he understood what you needed, he’d step aside.”

The confession shakes me to my core. I sink back against the storage container, processing the weight of what he’s revealed.

“You fought over me.”

“We fought because I’m a possessive asshole who thought love meant ownership.” He stares at his bloodied hands. “The last conversation we had, the last real words between us—I told him I wanted you as my slave. Complete submission, complete control. Just mine.”

“What did he say?”

“That I was confusing possession with love. That I was too fucked up to tell the difference.” His voice cracks. “And maybe he was right.”

The boat rocks beneath us, carrying us through darkness toward an uncertain dawn. Below deck, his teammates sleep or try to sleep. Above us, stars wheel across the sky in patterns that have guided sailors for millennia.

“He forgave you.”

“Did he? Because his last words sure sounded like he was trying to teach me something I was too stupid to learn while he was alive.”

“His last words were about love. About taking care of each other.” I shift closer, close enough that our shoulders touch. “He used his dying breath to forgive you and bless us. Both of us.”

“I don’t deserve forgiveness.”

“Maybe not. But he gave it to you anyway.” I take his damaged hands in mine, careful of the torn skin. “That’s what love means. That’s what family means.”

He doesn’t pull away this time; lets me hold his hands while tears he’s been fighting finally fall.

“I don’t know how to do this without him.”

“Neither do I.” The admission costs me everything. “But we’re going to figure it out together.”

“What if I’m just a possessive bastard? What if, without him to balance me out, I become everything he was afraid I already was?”

“Then I’ll remind you who you are. The same way he would have.” I squeeze his hands gently. “We’ll teach each other how to love the way he wanted us to.”

Above us, the stars shine down on two people learning how to carry impossible weight. Behind us, the wake of our passage stretches back toward a past we can never reclaim. Ahead, the horizon promises nothing but uncertainty.

But we’re together. Broken and bleeding and barely holding on, but together.

The way Hank wanted.

The way we promised we would be.