Chapter Fourteen Briar #2
I lean back against the wall, scan the pipes overhead for spiders that might attack at any moment. “Define breach.”
“You’re not priority anymore. Not until this is cleaned up. You’ve bought yourself six months, maybe seven, before they reroute the bloodhounds.”
The words punch a hole in my chest, then let in something cold and sharp and dangerous. Relief. I hate it, but I can’t fight it.
“Any idea who’s on point when they get back to me?” I ask.
She hesitates, then rattles off four names. Two I know, one I trained, one I thought was dead. “They’re already prepping the new protocol. If you stay in Switzerland, avoid the city. Zurich is compromised.”
I nod, even though she can’t see me. “And travel?”
“Stick to ground. No commercial air. The satellites are on hair-trigger right now.”
“Anything else?”
Another pause. “Landon’s flagged as secondary. If you ditch him, you might make it out alive. If you don’t…”
“I’m not ditching him.”
“I figured. Brooks says you’re getting soft.”
“Brooks is a sadist who likes watching me sweat.”
She snorts. “He likes watching everyone sweat, even himself.”
I let the silence hang. There’s something else she wants to say, but she’s waiting for me to dig for it.
I oblige. “Why are you calling me, Eve?”
This time, her laugh is softer. Almost sad. “Consider it payment for Westpoint. For not excommunicating me after I killed my dad. Some debts can’t be settled with money.”
I remember that night—her soul covered in blood, the calm in her voice as she called in her own crime. I covered for her, rewrote the file, buried the body deep in the system.
“I thought you’d forgotten,” I say.
“I never forget a debt, cousin. You should know that.”
Despite the fact her father didn’t raise her, and favored Vivienne, her half-sister, Eve was more of a Harrington than either of them ever were.
She drops the act. “Don’t waste your time with hope. Six months is a death sentence or a gift, depending on how you play it. They’ll come, eventually. They always do.”
I stare at the wall, at the thin silver crack running down the paint. “Thanks for the call.”
“Don’t thank me. Survive. Call me if you need help. Colt and I will figure something out.”
She hangs up.
I stand in the dark, the weight of the phone an anchor in my hand.
Six months. Maybe seven.
That’s more time than anyone ever gave me.
I slide the phone back into its hiding place, then sit on the cold tile until the pins and needles in my legs go away.
When I come out, Landon is still on the couch, a book open in his hands. He doesn’t look up. “You get the boiler sorted?”
I nod. “Just a loose wire.”
He hums, then sets the book down. “Food’s gonna burn if you don’t get back to it.”
I return to the kitchen, finish up the plates, and bring them to the living room. He sits cross-legged on the couch, takes the plate, and digs in without waiting for me to sit.
We eat in comfortable silence. After a while, he glances up, catches my eye.
“Are you okay?”
I want to lie, but he’s too good at reading me now.
“I’m fine,” I say. “Just a weird day.”
He nods, then shoves another forkful of potatoes into his mouth. “Let me know when you want to talk.”
He doesn’t push.
After dinner, I clean up, stacking the dishes in the dishwasher, making sure the knives are all in their place. Landon disappears upstairs.
I finish up, then walk to the window. The storm has started, thick flakes coming down in a slow-motion avalanche. The world is turning white again, erasing every scar and mark and footprint.
I look at my reflection in the glass. I see the man I used to be—the enforcer, the weapon, the cold, hard thing that survived when everyone else died. But there’s something else there now. A shadow of softness, maybe. A possibility.
Six months. Six months to figure out a plan to keep us safe.
I close my eyes, breathe in the cold that seeps through the window.
Upstairs, the steam is a humid wall that hits me halfway down the corridor.
The bathroom is slick with condensation, and the shower runs full blast, fogging the mirrors and glass.
I hesitate in the doorway, watching Landon through the clouded pane.
His silhouette is blurred—a smudge of lines, hair hanging wet across his forehead, arms braced against the tile while water hammers his back.
For a moment, he looks fragile, as though the heat could melt him into the drain.
I step out of my sweats, leave them in a pile by the door, and pull the glass open.
The tiles are cold under my feet, but the water is volcanic, instantly numbing the skin to everything except the contrast. Landon doesn’t turn or flinch when I step inside.
He just shifts to give me space, head bowed, breath fogging in the thick air.
I reach around him and grab the soap, lathering it between my hands.
He’s covered in goosebumps, the backs of his arms mapped with a constellation of freckles.
I work the soap over his shoulders, his neck, then down his back.
The muscles are corded, tight. I use my thumbs to knead out the knots, tracing the line of his spine with the flat of my hands.
He lets out a sound, almost a sigh.
“You ready to talk about it?” he says, voice muffled by the roar of the water.
“No,” I say, but then I do. I start with the call.
I tell him about Eve, about the six months, about the Eastern breach.
I don’t tell him about how my hands shook after, or the way relief and dread twisted together in my gut, but I suspect he knows anyway.
He always knows the things I’m not brave enough to say.
He turns, slides his back down the wall until he’s crouched at my feet. He rests his forehead against my leg, arms wrapping around my calves. I brush the wet hair off his neck. The water sluices down his spine, hot enough to make my own skin sting.
“It’s a lot,” he says, like he’s tasting the shape of the words. “What will you do with it?”
“Burn it for time,” I say. “Stack every day like a brick and build a wall between us and the world. I’ll make us hard to find.”
He listens to every word, then tilts his head so his cheek presses into my thigh. The smile he gives me is small, wry—a private joke with himself. It irritates me, how serene he looks after learning the world is still on fire.
I crouch, force him to meet my eyes. “What?”
His hand finds my wrist, thumb drawing a lazy circle over the bone. “It’s just… six months is a lot longer than I thought we’d get.”
I bark a laugh, sharp with disbelief. “Landon. Six months is a death sentence.”
He shrugs. “Not to me.” The smile widens. “It’s a whole lifetime.”
He’s a fool, but for a second I let myself believe it. In the steam, he looks alive, beautiful in a way that’s almost perverse with hope.
Pulling him up, I kiss him, hard. The taste is salt and wet and something sweet. He yields under my hands, then bites my lip, just enough to remind me who I am. I press him to the wall, hips pinning his. He wraps his arms around my neck, clinging like he can keep me anchored to this reality.
I rub my nose along his jaw and whisper, “You’re a light in the dark, you know that?”
He laughs into my mouth, the sound shaking us both. “You make it sound like I’m a fucking flashlight.”
“You are,” I say, “and I never learned what to do with one as bright as you.”
He pulls me closer, hands slipping down my back down my ribs, fingers digging in like he’s trying to memorize the shape of me. The water steams off our skin, fogging up the glass and making the world outside the shower a muted blur.
We stand like that until the hot water runs thin and the pipes start to groan.
He’s the first one to move, swatting my ass as he sidesteps out of the stall, grabbing a towel on the way.
He towels off his hair, then wraps the bulk of it around his waist, not bothering to hide the way he watches me as I step out behind him.
He looks at me like I’m the only man alive. I can’t hold the gaze for long.
We move to the bedroom, dripping wet and dampening the hardwood floor with every step.
I toss him a sweatshirt from the top drawer—Brooks’s, too big even for me—and he pulls it on, the hem hitting him mid-thigh.
He walks over to the little bar in the corner and pours us each a glass of wine, red for him, some ridiculous single malt for me.
He hands me my drink, then flops onto the bed, propped up against the headboard. He grabs the remote, flicks on the TV, and scrolls until he finds something with no news, no violence, no reminder of the world we left behind.
A cooking competition, the kind where people scream at each other about custard and soufflés. For a while, the only noise is the TV and the click of the glass as it hits my teeth.
He’s close, not touching but not far. Our hands rest within a handspan, like we’re remembering how to be alone but not lonely. There’s a gentle inertia to it. A space where neither of us has to be anything except what we are.
I finish my drink and set it on the table, then roll over until his hip is flush against mine. He hits pause, turns to me with that defiant, stubborn smile.
“You know what I like about you?” he says.
I shake my head.
“You never apologize for who you are,” he says, and there’s such brutal honesty in it, I almost flinch. “You don’t care if you’re a weapon, or if you don’t know what you want, or if the world hates you. You just… exist.”
I want to argue, but I can’t. I don’t exist to be liked. I exist to be functional.
He’s not finished. “Most people are terrified of being seen. But you? You’re terrified of not being used.”
He’s not wrong. I let that sit, see if it lodges somewhere I can deal with later.
Landon tosses the remote onto the bed, turns so he’s straddling my lap, his thighs bracketing mine. He’s not coy about what he wants. He never has been.
He studies my face for a long time, then presses his palm to my chest, just above my heart. “Briar, there’s something I want you to understand.”
“And what’s that?”
“If we only have six months, or six years, or sixty years, I’d choose you, every time. Even if the only outcome was death.”
If I wasn’t such a hardened bastard, I might tear up.
Instead I nip at his jaw and hold him tight.
Out of all the people that could have walked into that ball, I’ve never been more grateful that it was him.