Naya Ana to the people who had known her before the uniforms had learned early that names could be shed like skin.Ana was the girl.Naya was the weapon. She hadn't planned to remember that night.
But Kairo's words had cracked something open, and memories she kept buried beneath discipline and routine began to rise.
It happened three nights later.
The estate was quiet, the sea restless beyond the glass. Kairo slept upstairs, exhaustion finally winning. Naya sat alone in the kitchen, a single light on, chopping onions with mechanical precision.
Slice. Slice. Slice.
Her hands never shook.
She was nineteen when she enlisted.
Too sharp. Too angry. Too desperate to outrun a childhood that smelled like blood and gun oil. Her father had been a contractor unofficial, deniable, dead before she learned what that really meant. The military hadn't been an escape. It had been inheritance.
Special operations found her fast.
She was good. Terrifyingly so.
She learned to clear rooms before she learned how to rest. Learned how to kill quietly, efficiently, without letting it touch her eyes.
Her call sign had been Ash.
Because after her, nothing remained.
The mission that ended her career had no name.No medals. No headlines.
Just coordinates and orders.
Desert heat. Broken city. Intelligence said high-value target. They went in at dawn.
It was supposed to be clean.
It never was.
They breached the compound in under thirty seconds. Too easy. That should have been the warning.
The bomb went off behind them.
Fire. Screams. Shrapnel.
Her team scattered. Comms dead.
She fought her way through smoke and debris, blood in her mouth, ears ringing. She found civilians first women, children hiding where the target was supposed to be.
Human shields.She hesitated.
That was her first mistake.
The second was trusting the intel.
The third was believing she could save everyone.By the time extraction arrived, half her unit was gone.
And the blood on her hands
Some of it wasn't the enemy's.
Naya dropped the knife into the sink, breath suddenly shallow.
She braced herself on the counter, eyes shut.
The kitchen smelled like onions and oil and something warm.
When she got home that night weeks after the mission, after the debriefings that felt like interrogations she couldn't sleep. She wandered into the base kitchen at 2 a.m., hands still trembling, heart still racing.
She found flour.
Water.
Salt.
Her mother's voice came back to her then, clear as memory.
If you can't fix what's broken, feed what's still alive.So Ana cooked.
She kneaded dough until her arms burned. Chopped vegetables until her thoughts quieted. Watched heat transform raw things into something safe.
No blood.No screams.Just creation.perfection
That was the night she realized she didn't want to be Ash anymore.
The military didn't know what to do with soldiers who refused to be weapons.
So they let her go quietly.
She became Naya Cross. Private security. Controlled,Detached,Useful.
A soft footstep pulled her back to the present.
"You're bleeding," Kairo said gently.
She looked down. A shallow cut across her finger.She hadn't felt it.
He took her hand without thinking, guiding it under the tap. His touch was warm, grounding.
"You don't have to tell me," he said. "But you don't have to bleed alone either."
Her throat tightened.
He held her gaze.
"Cooking " she said, gesturing to the food, the kitchen, the quiet. "It keeps me human."
Kairo wrapped a cloth around her finger, careful, reverent.
"Then stay human," he said softly. "I'll protect that."For the first time in years, Ana let herself lean into someone else's strength.
Just a little.Outside, the sea kept moving.
Inside, a soldier laid down her weapon
and chose the knife that fed instead.