Page 80 of Igniting Her

Ellie closed the door behind her and planted herself between Cassie and the exit.

“Ridge.” Cassie stopped three feet away.

“No.” The refusal held no humor. Ellie kept her body between Cassie and the door.

“You are off duty.” Cassie reached for authority and heard how little rank existed between them.

“So are you.”

Mo’s final words returned with enough precision to expose the arrangement. Cassie looked once toward the door he had used.

“He spoke to you.”

“He told me what you wouldn’t.”

Cassie understood what Mo had done. He had broken a silence the whole crew had protected for twelve years, not to turn Jules into station gossip but to keep a living woman from carrying the wrong wound. He had looked at the two forms of damage and chosen the one that might still be repaired.

The understanding took the clean edge off Cassie’s anger. It did not remove it.

Anger rose first. It was easier than fear and wore the shape of authority even without a shift beneath it. “Jules was not his story to tell.”

“No. She was yours.” Ellie’s grip tightened around the paper. “You had twelve years and every chance I gave you.”

The empty bay made each word audible twice. Cassie set down her bag. “Move away from the door.”

Ellie held her ground. “You don’t get to bury me before I’m dead.” The sentence entered Cassie’s chest without resistance.

Ellie stood with the same straight-backed stillness she had carried into the office after Mirador Crest. Then, she had accepted every fact Cassie gave her and let the transfer land without using pain as an argument. Now the pain was present in her face, stripped of the old smile that made other people comfortable.

“I disobeyed a direct order,” Ellie said. “You were right about the building. You were right to withdraw, right to document what I did, and right to remove me from your command once you knew you couldn’t be impartial. I am not here to ask you to call any of that something else.”

Cassie had prepared for accusation. Accuracy was harder to defend against.

“Then why are you here?”

“Because you didn’t stop at my chain of command.” Ellie stepped farther into the bay. “You ended everything before the operational review had even begun. You moved me while the fire was still burning. You made a decision about my place in your life when I still had soot on my face, and you called it saving us.”

Cassie’s hand went cold around the strap of her bag.

“You don’t know what I called it.”

“Don’t I?” Ellie looked toward the Calloway plaque. “Off shift only. Your house. Nothing at the station. No questions about the past. It ends the second the job touches it.”

Each rule returned in Cassie’s own voice.

“Those weren’t boundaries you made with me,” Ellie said. “They were orders you had been giving yourself since Jules died.”

“The boundaries were necessary.”

Some were: secrecy, separation at work, protection from a reporting conflict. The rest had tried to define feeling out of existence. They had failed when Ellie left her mug in the locker, slept past the permitted hour, and told the truth on the back steps. Cassie kept enforcing them because choice frightened her more than control.

“Some were. The secrecy was. The separation at work was. Pretending none of it meant anything wasn’t.” Ellie did not raise her voice. “You wore grief like a uniform and expected me to mistake it for discipline.”

Cassie looked at the polished floor between them. In the reflection, Ellie was only a dark shape, broken by bands of morning light.

“Mo told you part of a history he did not live from inside,” she said.

“Then correct him.”