Jordan's fingers tightened around the trigger but then a hand locked around his waist. The force came out of nowhere. Jordan was yanked backward so hard the world tilted, his footing vanishing as he collapsed between the two seats, breath knocked clean out of his lungs.
The gunshot thundered a heartbeat later. He felt it before he understood it.
A sudden warmth. A wet splatter across his shoulders, his neck, his cheek.
It was blood.
Moraine's blood.
"No—no, no," Jordan breathed, scrambling upright as the car fishtailed, tires shrieking as Moraine fought the wheel and missed the divider by inches. Jordan's hands shook as they landed on him, gripping fabric, skin, anything solid.
"You're shot," he whispered, the words barely forming. His eyes locked onto the wound—blood pumping steadily from Moraine's arm, soaking dark into his sleeve. The round seemed to have gone through the muscle.
But Moraine barely noticed.
His jaw was clenched, breath sharp, eyes unfocused—not from pain, but from something far worse. Shock. The kind that came when you looked straight at a future where someone you couldn't afford to lose was suddenly gone.
For years, he had tried to hate Jordan with all his being. Cut him out clean, like rot from flesh. Convince himself the boy was just a liability, a weakness he should have buried long ago. Hell, he had promised himself that the next time he faced the boy, he would make him pay for what he had done.
And yet—
Jordan was the last thread tying him to a time when life hadn't been all blood and orders and burn lines on a map. When there had been people. When there had been something that resembled a home.
The last tether to his sanity.
If he ever lost him—
"Keep the windows up!" Moraine barked, pain finally bleeding into his voice as he forced his focus back onto the road. His hand slammed down on the radio switch.
"Burn. them. all," he growled in a low ominous tone that caused a heavy feeling to descend in Jordan's gut.
The announcement wasn't loud or dramatic. It was just final.
Jordan looked up in time to see the men gearing up behind them. The armored vehicles were still in pursuit—but at the intersection, two cars peeled out hard, engines screaming as they cut in with predatory precision. The roofs slid back in perfect unison.
Neil rose from one of them. Jordan didn't recognize the other man—but he recognized the weapons.
Anti -tank rocket launchers.
Both aimed straight at the armoured vehicles. They were military and this act of retaliation would be deemed terrorism against the state.
Neil braced the launcher against the reinforced frame, waited for the vehicles to run parallel—then fired. The recoil jolted the cars, streaking forward in twin arcs of fire. The impact was catastrophic. Metal folded. The armored vehicle lifted off the road like a toy, engulfed mid-air as flame swallowed steel. The explosion hit seconds later, a violent shockwave that rattled windows and sent debris raining across the asphalt.
The pursuit died in fire.
Jordan exhaled, a shaky breath he hadn't realized he'd been holding as more cars surged up around them—sleek, controlled and unmistakably Moraine's. A moving wall of protection snapping into place.
This was disaster.
Jordan turned to Moraine—and froze.
Moraine was already looking at him. Just staring. Like he needed to see him breathing. Intact. Still there.
Jordan swallowed hard, the weight of that look pressing into his chest heavier than any bullet ever could.
"I am sorry…" He began, the words tumbling out thin and useless. "I didn't know it would happen. I swear I didn't mean for it to— I am—"
He faltered. There was nothing left to offer Moraine that wouldn't sound like an excuse, nothing that could soften the quiet accusation in his eyes.
Whenever he was near Moraine, this happened. Something in him slipped loose. The careful, sharp-edged control he had built over the years dissolved, and in its place surfaced that mule-headed, reckless boy who had once believed himself indestructible simply because Moraine had been there to catch him when he fell. Around him, Jordan forgot himself. He became impulsive and childlike.
As though time bent backward and refused to let him grow….taking him back to when he had been eleven. When they first met.
The fever had come without warning—burning hot and unnatural - leaving him shaking so violently the bedframe rattled. He remembered staring at the ceiling, certain he would not see morning. Askai had gone out for work at dawn, promising he would return by evening, but the hours had dragged on and on, he didn't return.
By nightfall, he had stopped calling for help and started bargaining with whatever listened to dying children. His body jerked with shivers so sharp they felt like breaking, breath tearing out of his chest in thin, panicked gasps.
Someone must have carried word to Moraine because suddenly there were voices, hurried and low, cutting through the haze. Footsteps. A door thrown open.
Moraine had finally come.
He barely recognized the woman with him at first—only later did he learn she was Kael's mother. But he remembered Moraine clearly. That dark, unyielding gaze fixed on him every time his eyes fluttered open. Watching. Anchoring him.
In and out of consciousness, drifting like a leaf caught between worlds, Jordan remembered a hand closing around his—steady, warm, unshaking. He remembered someone leaning close, murmuring words he couldn't make sense of, repeating them every time he whimpered Askai's name.
He's coming. Stay with me. Just stay.
And then—finally—Askai had returned.