Chapter 5 · Stay

"Stay."

One word, and I put myself between the door and the table. Boots kept coming. Four of them, rifles up, and the one in front — Rurik, I know that jaw from six ops — doesn't even blink at me.

"Move, Volkov."

"He's mine to break. Command's orders. Not yours."

"Command's orders changed an hour ago." Rurik's eyes cut past me to the table, to Levi chained there with his shirt open where I tore it checking his pulse point twenty minutes back. "Scent report came in. He's not what the file says. We're not interrogating an asset anymore. We're executing a lie."

Behind me, Levi doesn't move. Doesn't beg. That's the thing about him I still can't get past — twenty years hiding what he is, and even chained to iron with a rifle on him, he just watches. Like he's already run the numbers and knows exactly how this plays out.

"Give me the room," I say. "Five minutes."

"You had two hours."

"And I got further in the last ten than you got in six months." I don't step back. "You shoot him now, you shoot the only lead we've got on the eastern grid. You want to explain that to Command, be my guest."

Rurik's jaw works. He wants to. God, he wants to put one in Levi's skull right now just to watch me flinch. I don't give him that.

"Two minutes," he says. "Then we finish it ourselves."

The door doesn't close all the way behind them. I hear boots pacing the hall, close enough to hear a shout, not close enough to hear what I do next. That's the two minutes I've got.

I turn around. Levi's watching me with that flat, unreadable look he's had since I cuffed him to the table — except now there's something under it, something that wasn't there an hour ago. Fear, maybe. First time I've seen it on him.

"You should let them," he says. Voice rough, low. "Save yourself the paperwork."

"Shut up."

"I mean it, Volkov. Whatever you're about to do — don't. You don't know what it costs."

"I know exactly what it costs." I close the distance, close enough that I can smell it now, the thing that started going wrong the second I walked into this room two hours ago. Not the sharp copper-and-gunmetal scent his file swears he carries. Something warmer. Something that makes my hands not want to be steady. "Claimed omegas don't get executed on a battlefield tribunal. They get processed. That takes weeks. Weeks is enough."

His breath catches. I feel it against my jaw, we're that close now, his wrists pulling the chain taut like he wants to put space between us and can't.

"You'd do that," he says. Not a question. "Mark an enemy combatant. Lie to your own command. For what — intel?"

"Does it matter why."

"It matters to me." His eyes come up, and there it is again, that thing under the fear. "Because if you do this and it's just a play, I'll make you regret it. And if it's not just a play—" He stops. Swallows. "Don't do this if it's not just a play."

Boots outside. Getting louder.

"Levi." First time I've used his name instead of the file number. It does something to his face, something small and cracked open. "I don't have time to make you a speech."

"Then don't."

I put my hand on his jaw, tip his head, and he lets me — that's the part I'll think about later, that he lets me, chains or no chains. His pulse is going hard enough I can see it in his throat. My mouth is an inch from the mark point, close enough to feel the heat coming off his skin, and every instinct honed over six years of breaking men in rooms like this one is screaming that this is the dumbest, most career-ending, most irreversible thing I've ever done.

The door slams open behind us.

"Time's up," Rurik says.

I don't stop.

Levi's hand — free, somehow, chain snapped or slipped, I don't have time to work out which — grabs the front of my jacket. Not pushing me away.

"Say it," he breathes, so quiet only I catch it, rifles already swinging up behind me, Rurik already shouting a word that sounds like *fire*. "Say you want this and not the intel. Say it or I swear I'll bite through your own throat before I let you—"

"Yes."