“How did you do that?” the attending demanded, not accusing, just stunned. Elena swallowed, and for the first time since kneeling her hands began to shake. “Those weren’t my words,” she said quietly. “They belonged to someone else.”
When the medic who had ridden in with Adrian heard that, he went pale in a way that had nothing to do with blood loss. The phrase Elena had used was not common knowledge, not something you pick up from a documentary or a casual conversation.
It was a recall command used only within a specific K-9 unit overseas, classified enough that it lived in the narrow space between training field and battlefield. The man who had coined it—Captain Mateo Alvarez—had been listed as killed in action eight years earlier in Helmand Province.
This was a name etched into a memorial wall and into Elena Marquez’s wedding band. The operating room doors sealed with a hiss that felt like a verdict, and Titan sat on the cold tile outside, posture rigid, eyes fixed on the red light that announced “IN SURGERY” as if it were a target he needed to hold.
Elena retreated to a supply alcove where the fluorescent light flickered just enough to make her vision swim, her fingers gripping the edge of a metal cart until her knuckles whitened. She had not planned to say the phrase, had not even thought about it in years in any deliberate way.
Muscle memory of grief is a strange archivist, and sometimes the body reaches for what the mind has tried to bury. She had heard Mateo whisper those words in his sleep after his first deployment with K-9 teams, had asked him once what they meant.
He had only smiled in that sideways way he had when something was both heavy and sacred, telling her it was a way to tell a dog the fight was over, that the human had it from here. She had never known the exact context, had never pressed him.
Then there had been the knock at the door, the folded flag, the official phrases that turn a life into a paragraph, and she had stopped asking questions because questions, she learned, often come back empty-handed.
Now a man lay on a surgical table because Mateo had once run toward gunfire instead of away from it, and Titan—who had been a younger, leaner version of himself back then—had responded to Elena as if she were part of an old map he still carried in his bones.
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