Page 26 of Laundering Down the Legions
The grief that hit wasn't about Ro anymore. It was about my mother, about years of work no one witnessed, about a love that arrived too late in a blade that fit my hand because she'd made itto. I put my head in my hands for exactly one breath, big enough to hold all of it, and then I sat up and squared my shoulders. Falling apart wasn't going to help anyone. The grief was real. It didn't need a performance. It just needed acknowledging.
CHAPTER 14
Kearan walked into the planning room like he'd been bracing for it the whole way down the hall. I was still hunched over the grimoire with the dagger laid across the open pages, and I looked up expecting something ordinary. What I got was the look of a man barely holding himself together. His hands kept folding and unfolding, like they couldn't find anywhere safe to land. His jaw was tight enough to crack.
"Hey," I said, which was apparently my go-to for anyone. "You look like you're struggling."
He didn't smile. That's when I knew it was bad. Kearan could usually find the play in my crude honesty. This time he pulled out a chair and sat like his legs couldn't hold his weight anymore.
I waited. The compound hummed somewhere beyond the room, people in corridors, and the sound of the ventilation. None of it mattered. Whatever he was about to say sat in the space between us.
"I need to tell you something," he started, and stopped. His fingers gripped the table edge hard enough that it might crack. "I want to tell you the story of my scars… the full story."
"Okay."
"They came from Maren Voss."
My chest did something complicated. Maren. The whole reason he was afraid to bond. He'd never given me the full story, just that he'd been terrified to love again after her.
"The scar came from her burns," Kearan said, flat, worn smooth from saying it in his own head too many times. "An operation went catastrophically wrong. She was dying so I pulled the injuries into myself, because that's what I do. I take on pain. Hers went deep enough to leave marks."
He finally looked at me, amber eyes steady, not asking for anything, just laying it down to see if I'd reject him for it.
"Tell me what happened," I said.
He leaned back, the chair creaking too loud in the quiet. "She was placed as an operative. This was in my time as a Paratrooper before I joined Trux's team and pack. By some inner Division faction. Apparently sent to study me under the guise of being on the same drop team as me. She reported my abilities, limits, and vulnerabilities. She had a handler and objectives, and I never knew. I should have, but I was blinded by her attention. Somewhere under everything, I knew her questions always landed exactly on the side of too much information."
My mouth was dry.
"Wigis are rare. Even among our kind. Rarely do they reveal themselves for fear of being studied and experimented on. But I wanted to prove something. And I got to help other Agenti." He paused before explaining, "Agenti is our word for shifters."
I nodded but didn't want to interrupt.
"An operation came down from the upper divisions. Something they didn't want sanctioned. Something dirty. She was in it, but I didn't have a clue. She wasn't supposed to get hurt, just observe and report, but then there was a fire. It was a targeted attack by the inner division. They'd decided we were both too much of a risk, so they wanted to take care of us. Erasethe problem. She was pinned under burning rubble and by the time I got her out, the burns were severe, and she was going to die. I knew I could stop it."
"So you did."
"So I did. I saved the life of a woman who'd been using me the whole time, and I didn't even know for sure she'd survive until after I'd already paid for it."
He said it as if it had been obvious. But I could see what it had cost him in the set of his shoulders, the exhaustion around his eyes. He'd been carrying the fact that the marks on his body was a permanent record of him choosing to save the person actively destroying him.
"What happened to her? After."
"She lived. That's the thing. The burns healed because I'd taken them. She had a future. And her handler disappeared her. New placement, new name, new everything. I never saw her again."
"You never got closure." It landed cold and clear. Maren hadn't died. She hadn't come back with gratitude or accountability. She'd just vanished, mission done, value extracted, and Kearan had been left with massive scars that told the story of him saving someone who'd never cared whether he lived. I filed her name away where I wouldn't lose it. Maren Voss. If the world ever set her back in front of me, I'd have something to say about it. Maybe more than something.
"Grayson thinks the scar is his fault," I said slowly. "He's carried guilt about it for years."
"I suspected as much."
"And you didn't tell him."
"How was I supposed to, without explaining Maren? Without it meaning I let myself get used and paid for it with my body?" His hands finally went still on the table. "So I never told him thefull story, even if that meant letting him carry the wrong story, because the right one was worse."
"That's not stupid," I started.
"It's exactly stupid," he said, not unkindly. "The specific kind that comes from confusing mercy with wisdom. I've got the scars to prove it."
