Chapter 43 Sand and Glass
Eli’s POV
I could not get the words out of my head.
You were a kid, and they put you on the auction block.
I had meant it as an observation. A piece of rage on her behalf. Watching her flinch when it sank in felt like I had stuck a knife into soft tissue instead.
By the time we got back to her penthouse that night, she looked like someone had scraped her hollow and propped her back up. Makeup rubbed off, hair falling out of its clip, shoulders slumped in a way she would never allow if anyone but me was watching.
“Day one down,” she muttered, kicking her heels off by the door. “Only, what, fifty more years of explaining myself.”
“Come on,” I said. “Couch.”
We ended up at opposite ends, each with a cushion, our legs almost touching in the middle. The city glowed beyond the glass, a soft smear of light. Inside, it was just us and the hum of the heating.
She closed her eyes for a second, head tipped back. “I told millions of strangers about hacking my dad,” she said. “And about him parading me like a show pony. That is more of me than I have given anyone in years.”
I watched her. The exhaustion in her face. The way her hands twisted together once, fast, before she noticed and stilled them.
Something felt unbalanced. She had been standing in front of cameras peeling her history back layer by layer. I was still sitting in the shadows of my own story, asking her to trust me in rooms that smelled like gunpowder and toner without giving her the full picture of why I was the way I was.
“I have never really told you my full story,” I said.
Her eyes opened, slow. “I know the outline,” she said. “Soldier, bad mission, guilt. You do not owe me more than you want to give.”
“Feels like I do,” I said. “If I am going to keep asking you to live with my reflexes.”
She watched me for a beat, then nodded once. “Okay,” she said softly. “Tell me.”
I looked at the ceiling, at the faint reflection of the room in the glass. “I was nineteen the first time I saw someone die through a rifle scope,” I said. “From a small town where the biggest excitement was Friday night lights and bar fights. Enlisting felt simple. Clear orders. Protect. Neutralize. Escort. Do not ask too many questions.”
I could still smell that first deployment if I thought about it too hard. Hot sand. Diesel. The metallic tang of fear under cheap deodorant.
“First time out,” I said, “we were assigned to guard a small village during elections. Desert country. Mud brick houses. Kids more interested in our gear than their parents. It felt… clean. Bad guys with guns, good guys with ballots. We walked patrols, kept an eye on rooftops. For a while, I thought, okay, this is what I signed up for. Straight lines.”
Sloane’s gaze stayed on my face, quiet, open.
“Then there was Amira,” I said. The name still caught in my throat, years later.
“United Nations conflict negotiator,” I explained. “Dr Amira Khoury. Brilliant, stubborn, thought she could talk people out of centuries of blood. My unit got assigned as part of her protective detail when she rotated into our sector.”
I saw her then, clear as day. Dark curls tucked into a scarf, glasses sliding down her nose as she pored over maps at three in the morning. The way she asked the private making coffee about his family with the same attention she gave a colonel.
“She hated the Green Zone,” I said. “Hated being behind walls while the people she was supposed to help starved in lines outside. She wanted to go to markets, schools, clinics. Touch what she was working on. Our job was to say no. I was good at that.” I huffed a humorless laugh. “Until I wasn’t.”
“We did not sleep together,” I added, because that felt important. “In case your brain wants to make that leap. But we spent a lot of hours in armored convoys and safe houses. You talk. You get to know how someone takes their tea and what they are most afraid of. She was one of the few who saw past the patch and the gun. Asked what I wanted to do when I got home. I did not have an answer.”
Sloane’s fingers curled into the cushion, knuckles pale.
“The ambush,” I said, and my throat went dry.
“There was a meeting in a compound that was supposed to be secured. Concrete walls, metal gate, guards we had vetted. She pushed to go. Said it was important, that the factions needed to see her show up without hiding behind a screen. I argued. Command wanted the photo op.”
I swallowed.
“An inside man at the local level leaked our route,” I said. “We found that out later. Whoever set it up knew our patterns too well. They hit when our radios were mid channel switch, when surveillance drones were on a blind handover. Fifteen seconds when our eyes in the sky went dark, and that is when the world blew up.”
I could still feel the shockwave, the way the ground came up faster than it should have. The taste of dust and copper, ears ringing, trying to count heads and finding fewer than I should.
“Amira died in the first blast,” I said. “I did not.”
The room was very quiet.
“Official reports blamed fog of war, local betrayal,” I went on. “All correct on paper. But part of me has always believed if I had been stricter, if I had not let her talk me into relaxing certain things, if I had forced more armor, more distance, said no louder, she might have walked out of that courtyard.”
I blew out a breath I had been holding for years.
“Every time you ask me to loosen my grip,” I said, “even a little, a part of me hears her voice right before she walked into that gate. I see her back. I hear the radio click. And I know what happened next.”
Sloane’s eyes were wet, but she did not look away. “You have been carrying that alone for how long,” she asked quietly.
“Too long,” I said.
I almost left it there. Then a piece I had pushed aside clicked.
“The tech we relied on that day glitched in ways that did not make sense,” I said. “Feeds cut for seconds at the worst times. Drones timing out. Comms handovers hitting dead zones in patterns that felt… wrong. Like someone or something was pulling wires we could not see.”
Her head snapped up. “Glitches,” she repeated.
“Yeah,” I said. “Could have been bad code, bad luck. Sometimes things just fail at the worst moment. But it did not feel random.”
I watched something move behind her eyes. That sharp, calculating flicker when she saw a pattern spike in a graph. Maybe it sounded like early god mode. Maybe it was nothing. For now, it was just an echo between us.
She slid down the couch, closing the space we had left like a buffer. Her hand found mine, tentative at first, then firm.
“You did not plant the bomb, Eli,” she said. “You did not sell the route. You did not sign off on whatever glitchy black box was hanging over your head. You walked her as safely as you knew how to the edge of something someone else built.”
“No,” I said. My fingers tightened around hers. “But I walked her up to the door.”
She leaned in until her head rested against my shoulder, the angle awkward and perfect.
We sat like that, hands clasped, city light crawling across the ceiling, both of us staring at ghosts only we could see.
And in the quiet, it hit me. Her fear of losing control, my fear of losing anyone I was supposed to protect. Same shape. Same wound. Different battlefields.
Maybe that was why, for the first time, sharing it did not feel like bleeding out.
It felt like finally putting the sand and the glass back in the same story.