Chapter 18 #2
Daphne stops mid-sentence about soil acidity.
The lemon in her hand catches the light as she turns from the tree.
She looks at me. Really looks, the way she has since that first day when she didn't flinch.
The lemon drops, hits the grass with a soft thud.
She crosses the small space between us, takes my face in her hands, and kisses me.
Brief and full, her mouth on mine like she's sealing something. When she pulls back, her forehead rests against mine. She doesn't say it back. Instead: "Gunner. You impossible man."
From the house, Adrian calls out: "I'm giving you two another minute before I start charging rent on this showing."
We walk back inside, the ghost of that dropped lemon behind us.
Adrian drops us at La Sirena's loading dock as the afternoon light goes gold. The Cadillac purrs away, Cuban radio fading down the alley. We climb the back stairs quiet, the bubble shifted. I've said the word, she hasn't.
In the apartment, late afternoon sun slants through the south window. Daphne crosses to the kitchen counter, hops up onto it, legs swinging like a kid. But her face is all woman when she speaks.
"Just how rich are you?" she asks.
"Huh?" I ask dumbly.
"You live like a pauper here, apart from the absurdly expensive oak desk. But all this formica, the two-burner stove, the bedroll, the moldy shower curtain."
"It isn't moldy."
"But then you randomly buy me a motorbike. And a Galia Lahav gown. I mean nobody actually owns Galia Lahav gowns."
"The bathroom curtain isn't moldy," I say.
"But the places we just looked at were… wow. That penthouse apartment in Brickell must cost a bomb. Millions. And maybe some more millions on top of that. I mean, I knew the Delgados were wealthy but you're just the security guy, aren't you?"
I smile at 'just the security guy'. If she only knew.
"They pay well," I say with a shrug.
"In any case, I don't want to move." Her voice carries that certainty again. "This is where you fell in love with me. I'm not leaving it. We could find ways to make this work better."
I wish she would put me out of my misery and tell me she loves me too, but it is what it is.
Standing between her legs at the counter, my hands find her hips. The positions familiar now. Her above me for once, looking down. Time to give her what I've been holding back.
"The day I took you," I start, my voice flat. "I made a misreading. Thought your father was doing reconnaissance for Hallstein. The man I've been building a case against for nine years. Thought the painting was cover."
She doesn't interrupt. Her hand finds mine on her hip.
"I've known for weeks Nicolas was innocent." I force the words out. "Your father was just a painter who found an open gate. The kidnapping was wrong."
She goes very still. "When did you know?"
"Day fourteen."
"You've kept me here two weeks past knowing."
"Yes."
"That's all kinds of fucked up."
"Yes."
She studies my face, and I let her see the truth. That I would keep her another fourteen days, another fourteen years.
Then I give her the last secret. My real name.
"Brian." Just the name, no setup. "Brian Porter. That's who I was before the discharge, before the Delgados, before I became the monster everyone crosses streets to avoid."
She says it once. "Brian." Testing the syllables like she tested that lemon, learning the weight of them.
Then: "You're Gunner. The man who gave me his shirt, who tends secret gardens, who just told me he loves me by a lemon tree. Brian was someone else's ghost. But I like knowing his name."
She's given me back both versions of myself. The man I was and the man I've become. The gift of it makes my throat tight.
"Are you ready to tell me about your discharge? I know you left the Army, and I know that man Hallstein had something to do with it. And you were accused of something. But what am I missing?" She runs a finger through my hair. "I want to know everything about you."
I've never said this out loud before. I've hinted at parts of it, to Jorge, to Marisol, to Logan, but I've never said the full story.
For the first time, I want to.
I look her straight in the eyes, meeting her gaze.
"Helmand Province. 2017." The dates come out clean, like a report. Everything else won't.
I keep my hands where they are, on her hips, because if I move them I'll start moving around the room, and I've spent nine years pacing this story out alone. Tonight I stay still. Tonight I look at her.
"There was an officer. Hallstein. He outranked me by a lot, and he had a habit nobody talked about. He'd go out to the villages on his own. Said it was relationship-building. Hearts and minds." My jaw works. "Local women started disappearing. Then they'd turn up. What was left of them."
Daphne goes very still. She doesn't pull her hand back from mine. She doesn't do the thing people do when a story gets too big for the room — the flinch, the softening of the face into pity. She just keeps her eyes on me.
"Six." The number sits between us. "Six that I could account for.
There were probably more. I only ever got two of their names.
Fereshta Sahar and Nazaneen Karimi." I make myself say them, because they deserve to be said out loud in a kitchen by a man who's still breathing.
"The rest I couldn't even hold onto. That's the part that—" I stop.
Reset. "A man should at least be able to keep their names. "
"You found out what he was doing to them," she says. Quiet. Not a question.
"I found the evidence. Took me three months. I had photographs, I had timelines, I had a witness." The witness who recanted under pressure three days later, but I don't put that on Daphne yet. "I did everything you're supposed to do. I went up the chain. I reported him."
"And."
"And he was a colonel with thirty years and friends at the Pentagon, and I was a sergeant from nowhere with a temper in my file.
" The old fury moves through me, familiar as a scar.
"He got ahead of it. Turned it around inside a week.
By the time the investigation opened, I wasn't the man who found six dead women.
I was the unstable enlisted man with a grudge against a decorated officer.
The violence I'd reported became violence they pinned on me. "
Her thumb moves once against the back of my hand. The only motion in the room.
"They gave me a dishonorable discharge. Unprofessional conduct.
" I let the words land flat, the way they landed on me.
"He kept his record clean. Kept his pension.
Walked out and built a company and started getting his picture taken at award dinners.
And the file on him closed. Just—closed. Like the women never happened."
This is the part I've never said. Not to Jorge. Not to Marisol. Not to Logan. I look at her while I say it.
"I keep a list. In my head. Of everything I had and didn't use right.
The witness I should've protected better.
The report I should've taken outside the chain.
The night I confronted him to his face instead of going around him, because confronting him is what gave him the warning he needed.
" My voice doesn't break. I won't let it.
But it goes lower. "Six women, and the thing I'm best at in the world is making people disappear, and I couldn't keep a single one of them alive.
I had the truth in my hands and he took it from me because I wasn't the right kind of man to be believed. "
"Gunner—"
"That's the discharge." I cut over her, gentle, because I need to finish before I lose the nerve.
"That's what Hallstein is. That's the file in the drawer.
Nine years I've been building the thing that ends him, because the official version of that war says I'm a liar and a rapist and a thug and he's a hero, and I am the only person left who knows it's backwards. "
I turn my right forearm so the tattoo faces up between us. Saint Michael. The sword.
"I had this done three weeks after they threw me out. Warrior of justice." A breath. "I got it because I couldn't be a soldier anymore and I needed something on me that said I knew which one of us was the monster. Even if I was the only one who'd ever read it that way."
Daphne is quiet for a long moment. Her hand comes up off mine and finds the tattoo, two fingers laid over the armored figure, the way she touched it the first time.
"You weren't too late for me," she says.
It's not absolution. She's too honest for that, and I'd know if she were lying.
It's just true. She's the one I got out.
The one I took for the wrong reason and kept for a worse one and somehow, somewhere in nine years of being the dragon, she's the one still standing in the room with her fingers on the sword.
I don't have words for what that does to me. So I don't reach for any.
We kiss slowly on the counter, unhurried and domestic, like we have time. My hand slides up her thigh, and she shifts on the counter, opening for me. My cock hardens instantly. She's not wearing anything under this shirt. The discovery makes me groan against her mouth.
"Woman," I growl, and everything in me wants to take her here. "I need to be inside you again. Here. In our home."
She pulls back just enough to look at me, her eyes dark with promise. The way she's looking at me, like I'm something she's decided to keep, makes my chest tight.
"Our home," she repeats, and grinds against me once, deliberate, making me curse. "Then we better survive whatever's coming, Gunner."
Her hand slides down between us, palming my cock through my jeans. The touch is electric, makes me buck against her palm.
"Because I have plans for that bed." Her voice drops to a whisper that shoots straight through me. "Plans that involve you not holding back anymore. Plans that involve finding out exactly how much this body of yours can give me before we both break."
She squeezes me through the denim, and I scoop her up, toss her onto the bed, and follow her down with a growl.