Page 71 of Dose

She rests her forehead against mine. “You came when command sent you. You secured the guard. You didn’t turn one bad minute into a failed extraction.”

I look at her. There is a faint rust-colored mark near the cuff where the blood reached past her glove.

“You hit an armed man with a calibration weight.”

“After using the cart.”

“That does not improve the sentence.”

“It improves the sequence.”

My laugh comes out damaged, but it comes.

By the time we reach Chicago, it is late morning. Decontamination takes twenty minutes. Raphael checks Isla again, examines the closure line on my shoulder, and confirms I have not reopened it. Nikolai’s debrief lasts another hour. We account for the failed camera, the hidden cold-storage room, the guard, the single round fired, every child transferred, and whether the guard saw Isla’s face. He did not.

Only then do I take Isla back to our quarters.

The door closes. I lock it.

She watches me from the middle of the room, clean now, dressed in soft black trousers and one of my shirts. The sight of her in my clothes usually pleases something base and possessive in me. Today it is the absence of blood that matters.

“Raphael checked me twice,” she says.

“I was present.”

“And you still need to do it yourself.”

“Yes.”

She unbuttons the shirt and lets it fall.

“Then check.”

I cross the room. My hands move over her shoulders, arms, ribs, hips. I examine the places the vest could have bruised, the wrist that drove the cart, the fingers that released the weight. Her pulse beats hard and steady beneath my thumb.

Nothing broken. Nothing cut. One red mark below her collarbone from the vest strap and a bruise beginning along her right palm.

I lift that hand and put my mouth against it.

“You could have died.”

“Yes.”

No reassurance. No promise that skill makes her immortal. Just the truth, given back to me without decoration.

“I saw the blood.” My voice turns rough. “For one second, before you said it wasn’t yours⁠—”

She grips my jaw. “I’m here.”

I kiss her hard enough to interrupt whatever either of us might say next. She opens for me at once, hands in my hair, body pressed to mine.

“Tell me,” I say against her mouth.

“I want you.” She bites my lower lip. “I want this.”

That is all the restraint I have left.

We do not make it to the bed. I sit against the locked door and pull her over me, keeping my left shoulder out of the work. Her knees bracket my hips. My right hand closes around the back of her neck while she takes what she asked for.