“You did it to keep me breathing, Lucas. I can’t hate you for that. But I can’t just… pretend the last six years didn’t happen. I buried you. I mourned you. I learned how to live in a world without you.”
Lucas nodded slowly, his eyes shining with unshed tears. “I know. I’m not asking you to take me back. I don’t deserve that. I just… I needed to see you alive. One last time before I disappear into the debriefing rooms.”
He reached into his pocket. He pulled out a small, velvet pouch.
“They gave me my personal effects back from the evidence locker,” he said. He tipped the pouch into my good hand.
Two rings slid out. My silver wedding band, and his heavier tungsten one.
“I kept them,” Lucas whispered. “Through all of it. They were the only things that reminded me I was human.”
I looked at the rings sitting in my palm. They were scratched, battered, survivor’s rings. Just like us.
“Keep them safe for me, Em,” he said.
Before I could answer, he turned and walked down the sterile white hallway, his limp slightly pronounced, disappearing around the corner, escorted by two federal agents.
I stood alone in the hallway, holding the heavy weight of the past in my hand, my shoulder burning, wondering if anything could ever truly be rebuilt from these ashes.
Chapter 6 (Epilogue): What Remains
Six months later.
The smell of charcoal and sizzling meat drifted over the small backyard of my modest house in San Diego. It wasn’t much—a patch of stubborn grass, a leaning wooden fence, and a view of the neighbor’s roof—but it was quiet. It was mine.
“Flipping them too early, Ryan!” Commander Hayes shouted from a lawn chair, a cold beer resting on his knee. He was in civilian clothes, looking suspiciously relaxed for a man who had spent the last half-year dismantling a shadow government.
Ryan leaned heavily on a black, carbon-fiber cane, manipulating the grill tongs with his free hand. He wore board shorts and a t-shirt. The golden Trident was gone, replaced by a jagged, purple scar that ran down his hip, visible when the wind caught his shirt.
