Chapter 7
SEVEN
The blinds cut thin ribbons of light from the outside alley across the dark bedroom. Claire lay against him, her cheek to his chest, the warmth of his skin and the steady beat beneath it keeping her centered. “You never stop watching, do you?”
Reid’s chest lifted with a slow breath. “No, I can’t.”
She tilted her head enough to see him in the dim light. “Started in the Navy?”
“SEALs.” His voice carried no boast, only fact. “But it started before that. My dad died when I was young. My mom… she drowned herself in a bottle. By the time I was old enough to know what was happening, she was already gone in every way that mattered.”
Her hand slid across his chest, fingers brushing lightly, inviting him to continue.
“My uncle Tuck stepped in. He’s the one who raised me and my sister, Samantha. He was a PJ—Air Force pararescue. Hard man, but good. He’s the reason I’m still standing. Four years ago, my mom finally drank herself into the grave. Tuck was the one who kept us steady when it could’ve broken us.”
His throat worked, then his mouth curved in the faintest ghost of a smile.
“Now he runs the whole medical side at Chase—clinical facility director. When I got out of the Teams, I did some private contractor work. I guess he had enough of me being stupid. He told me there was a door open at Chase Security. Said all I had to do was walk through it. So, I did.”
Claire’s chest tightened at the simplicity of it, the burden hidden inside those words.
She drew a breath. “I went the other way. MIT at fifteen, out at seventeen. Straight into the NSA. Thought if I was smart enough, valuable enough, I could… matter. Project Emberline taught me different.”
Reid’s hand traced slow lines along her back, steady, patient.
“I flagged it,” she said, voice low. “Told them what it was going to be. No one listened. When it ended, civilians, including four children, were dead. And they handed me the files. Told me to clean it up. Make it… neat.” Her laugh was thin, sharp.
“The NDA, the debrief. I still wake up at night thinking about the way they made me sanitize it. Make blood sound like protocol.”
His arm tightened around her. He didn’t offer platitudes.
He just listened. The room was quiet but not empty.
The hum of the radiator and the faint buzz of the city outside filled the spaces between their words.
Claire lay tucked against Reid, the sheet pulled loosely around her, his hand steady at the curve of her hip.
She drew a slow breath. “Sometimes Emberline doesn’t stay in the past. Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night, and I’m back in that room.
The language, the briefings, the way they told me to sign…
it plays over like a tape I can’t erase.
I dream I’m writing the words down again, making the blood vanish on paper.
And every time I sign the NDA in the dream, it feels like I’m erasing myself too. ”
Reid’s arm tightened around her, his thumb tracing calm arcs against her skin. He didn’t tell her to stop. Didn’t tell her to forget.
“You’re not erased,” he said quietly. “Not here. Not now.”
“That’s why I left,” she whispered. “And why I know Ian won’t leave me alone. I keep wondering what he’s going to do.”
Reid’s jaw flexed. “You seem to know him more than as a guest at the gala.”
Her eyes burned as she stared at the ceiling.
“I do. The first real person I ever met in my mother’s orbit was Ian.
Fundraiser, years ago. I was twenty-three.
He found me hiding in a corner and stood with me like he had all the time in the world.
Told me he knew my dad.” Her breath hitched.
“He knew about a sketch I drew for him once. And the nickname he gave me—Firefly. He wasn’t bluffing.
My dad died in an IED explosion in Afghanistan, 2005. And Ian… he just… he knew.”
Reid’s thumb swept along her jaw, urging her to meet his eyes. “He made himself real, when you were still bleeding from the loss.”
Claire’s throat tightened, a hot sting behind her eyes. “Yes. And I hate that part of me still listens for his voice.”
“Then don’t,” Reid said softly. His hand cradled her cheek. “Listen to mine instead.”
Her throat closed, a sharp ache in her chest. “You make it sound like it’s that simple.”
“It isn’t,” he said, the honesty in his tone steadying her.
“Chase doesn’t pretend scars vanish. I think that’s what makes Chase different from other private contractors.
That philosophy also came from my uncle, and Pete Walter, his rescue partner and the president of Chase Medical.
They don’t polish them out like they never happened.
They track them. They treat them. We adapt around them.
That’s what survival is. It’s carrying the burden and still moving forward. ”
She turned to look at him, his face shadowed in the dim glow from the blinds. “And what if they’re too deep?”
His gaze didn’t waver. “Then we carry them together. That’s what I learned in the Teams. And what Tuck drilled into me every day after I came home. Alone, you don’t last. But with someone in your corner? Even the worst scars don’t stop you.”
Her breath shuddered, the knot inside her loosening another inch. “I don’t know if I know how to let someone carry it with me.”
“You don’t have to know tonight.” Reid’s hand slid up, cupping her cheek, his thumb brushing the faint dampness still at the corner of her eye. “You just have to let me be here.”
For the first time in years, she felt the words settle, not as a warning, but as a promise.
She pressed closer, her forehead against his shoulder, whispering into the quiet, “Stay until I fall asleep.”
“I will.” This time his lips brushed the top of her hair as he said it.
And Claire believed him. Even as her eyelids grew heavy, and she fell asleep.
Reid lay still, one arm wrapped around her, feeling her soft breaths against his chest. The sheet was warm where her skin pressed his, cooler where it lay across his own shoulder.
She’d finally gone under. Her muscles were slack, and her breaths evened into the rhythm of sleep. But for him, sleep was far off.
The gala replayed in his mind in flashes: the chandeliers, the swarm of power-hungry eyes, her mother’s sharp-edged smile.
The three intruders, the rooftop takedown, and the look on Claire’s face when he had her contained.
The conference with Ian and his admissions had him unsettled.
Was Lucien Vos involved? Was Claire an innocent bystander?
His memories flowed back to Claire standing straighter than she felt, eyes hard, words sharper still, until she was alone on that balcony, her bare feet curled in the lounge chair, holding herself quiet against the night.
He remembered the look of his jacket on her shoulders, the way she hadn’t shrugged it off.
A small detail, but to him, it mattered.
Now here she was, in his arms, softer than he thought she’d ever let herself be.
Her words came back, each one cutting: I’m not okay. That was the crack. She opened up to him. She’d given him her trust, and it had taken everything in him not to close the distance then and there, not to promise her things he wasn’t sure he could give.
Her story was still echoing through him—MIT at seventeen, NSA before most kids finished college, Emberline.
He knew what it meant to flag an op and be ignored.
He knew the kind of burden that carried, the corrosive guilt.
But to be told to sanitize the wreckage, to write away the blood like it had never been.
Christ. No wonder the debrief haunted her.
She shifted against him, murmuring something in her sleep, the word gone before he could catch it. His hand smoothed down her back without thought, grounding her, the way Tuck had done for him when the night terrors clawed at his own chest.
He thought of Tuck now. His uncle’s voice, hard-edged but steady: All you’ve got to do is walk through the door, Reid.
The rest, you learn on your feet. Chase was his door.
And tonight was her first step through hers.
He’d seen rookies stumble. He’d steadied more than a few.
But Claire wasn’t like them. She wasn’t just green.
She was burned, scarred, and still standing.
That kind of resilience couldn’t be trained.
And Ian. Reid’s jaw tightened, the thought of him sliding into Claire’s life when she was still just a kid, weaving himself into the empty space her father left.
The detail about the sketch, the nickname—Firefly.
That landed harder than he’d let her see.
Ian didn’t bluff. Which meant she knew he’d known her father.
Ian was there when her father died. And he helped keep her mother’s secrets.
His shadow over her went deeper than she realized.
Reid’s hand stilled against her side, holding her just a fraction tighter. He’d spent years carrying the heaviness of people lost. He wasn’t about to add her name to that list. Not if he had anything to say about it.
She murmured again, something softer this time, and her fingers curled unconsciously against his chest, like she was holding him in place.
He stared at the ceiling, feeling the edges of exhaustion but unwilling to let them close in.
His job had always been to keep watch, to stay awake when others couldn’t.
But tonight was different. Tonight, it wasn’t duty that kept him awake. It was her.
Reid bent his head and brushed the barest kiss across her hairline. “You’re safe,” he whispered, words he wasn’t sure she’d hear.
Still, he said them anyway. Because, for the first time in a long time, he meant them.