Chapter 21 #2
"Stop doing that." Her voice cracks on it, not from tears but from something harder. "Stop using that voice on me like I'm one of your men. Like I'm something to be managed." She steps forward, close enough that I can see the pulse in her throat. "You're scared. Say it. Say that's what this is."
The heat drains out of me. I'm empty, scraped out by the morning and the fight and the truth.
"Say it," she repeats, each syllable coming from deeper down, until her eyes are wet and her hands are shaking and I finally see the cost I'm asking her to pay.
I stare at the wall behind her, a patch of white that's been half-painted for months.
"I'm scared," I say, flat as the drywall. "Happy?"
She snorts, and the sound is almost a relief. "No. I'm not happy." She wipes under her eye with her thumb, annoyed with herself. "You start talking about fear like it's some dirty secret, like nobody else on earth ever felt it."
I try to smile. "I've had a lot of practice hiding it."
She closes the distance, wraps cold hands around my forearm, the one with scar tissue. "I'm not leaving you here to fight alone. I'm not." She waits for me to give ground, and when I don't, her fingers tighten to claws. "If you're scared, fine. But do not send me away."
I pull my arm free, harder than I mean to, and she backs up a step, glaring. "You're safer in Pristine."
She laughs. "Bullshit."
"No, you're safer there. Not safe, never safe. But if they find you here, they'll use you. You've read the whole file. You know what he does to leverage a weakness."
Her eyes widen. She's silent for a count of four. "I'm not afraid for me," she says finally. "I'm afraid for you."
I want to slam my fist through the wall. Instead I pace the length of the kitchen, from the battered fridge to the tiny breakfast table and back. The whole place still smells like toast and coffee and her shampoo, and it makes me want to claw out of my own skin.
She talks into my silence, filling it with the logic she thinks I haven't considered. "If I leave, you'll have to cover twice as much ground yourself. You'll be distracted. You'll waste time worrying about what you can't see. You're better with a second set of eyes, even if those eyes are mine."
I almost laugh, because she's right, but that's exactly the problem.
"I'm not discussing this," I say, and this time it comes out with the old edge. The one that's gotten me through a thousand firefights, the one that makes men run for cover before I pull the trigger.
She stands there, arms crossed. "You think I'm scared of that voice? Get real. You're not my father. I'm not sixteen. And you're not the only one in this apartment with something to lose."
The anger blazes up fast, hot, but behind it's something less clean.
"You think I'm enjoying this?" I say, not even sure who I'm talking to.
"You think this is some macho, big-dick thing?
I've seen what happens to people who matter to men like Hallstein.
" My voice is hoarse. "If I have to break your arm to get you out, I will. "
Her eyes stay on mine, steady and unblinking. The silence is a physical thing, a wall between us. She turns away first, moves to the window, arms crossed, looking down at Calle Ocho. Twenty seconds of her back to me.
"I hate this."
"I know."
"I'm not baggage."
"No."
Another silence. She turns back around, and her jaw is set, but something behind it has shifted. "I'll go. But not because I'm afraid for myself. I'm leaving because you're afraid for me."
"Yes."
She turns toward the bedroom. I watch her pack in efficient silence.
Her duffel on the bed plus a second one of mine.
Every item she folds is another piece of evidence that I let her too close.
From the closet: the jeans and t-shirts she brought from Pristine, clothes that now smell like my detergent.
A few things I've bought her since, pajamas she never wears, some new sundresses, a leotard for dancing, leggings and t-shirts.
From the dresser: underwear, socks, the small jewelry from her original bag.
She leaves the gold gown hanging in the closet.
The dress that made every man in La Sirena want her.
The helmet sits on the floor where she dropped it days ago.
The riding jacket stays draped over the desk chair.
The acrylic paints her father uses, still on the kitchen counter where I put them. She doesn't pack those either.
Every piece she leaves behind is a promise she'll return. She's leaving pieces of herself here because she knows what I refuse to admit. That she belongs to me. Going back as who she was, not who she's become. The woman I've turned her into stays here, waiting.
Halfway through packing, she pauses with an armful of clothes.
Her eyes go to the wall above the bed. The painting.
Her father's watercolor of my garden, the streak still visible in the leftmost bloom.
She stares at it for three seconds, her face doing something I read as goodbye to the room. Then back to the duffel.
While she's in the closet for the last load, I move to the desk. Open the operational logbook. Find the Day 27 page. The day she kissed me back. Tear it out along the perforation. Fold it once, twice. Small enough to hide.
I cross to the bed, lift the leotard she's placed on top.
There's an inner pocket in the bodice. I slip the folded page inside, replace the leotard.
Nine seconds total. She doesn't see. The logbook page hidden where she might find it, or might not.
Evidence of what I've done, what I am, tucked against the fabric that will touch her skin.
She finishes packing. Ten minutes of neither of us speaking. The apartment holds our silence like it's something physical. It already feels like a ghost lives here.
At the door, duffels at her feet, we face each other. Three feet between us that might as well be three miles.
"Stay alive," she says.
The dry register that cuts deepest. Not "I love you." She's never said it, won't say it as a goodbye. Just the hardest thing she could ask of me.
"Daphne."
Just her name. I won't say the words either. Won't make this a goodbye. The others will have questions about her leaving. Adrian will give me that knowing look. Marisol will probably say she saw this coming. Let them.
She kisses me then. Hard, brief, maybe four seconds of her mouth pressing everything we're not saying against mine.
She kisses me like she's branding me, like she knows I'll taste her on my mouth for days, like she's marking me as hers even as I send her away.
Then she breaks it, picks up her duffels, walks through the door.
I stand in the doorway watching her descend with Logan's men. The GPS tracker in their car will show me every mile she travels away from me. The car door closes. The engine starts. I move to the window, watch the black SUV turn onto Calle Ocho, head north, disappear around the second corner.
Gone.
My chest feels like someone reached in and tore something out by the root. Watching the one good thing you've ever had walk away.
The apartment is the same but different. Her side of the bed unmade where she didn't have time to fix it. The closet half-empty. The helmet on the floor like an accusation. The apartment echoes wrong without her breathing in it.
I cross to the bed. Above it, the painting of my garden. Bougainvillea spilling across the stone bench I've sat on every morning for nine years. The streak through the leftmost bloom from where the old man spilled water that morning I found him. I can't look at it now. Not with her gone.
I lift the painting off the two small nails, the paper buckling slightly in my hands. Carry it to the desk, open the drawer where I keep batteries and spare supplies. Lay the painting face-down in the drawer, on top of everything. Close the drawer.
The verdict settles back into my chest, familiar as my own pulse. I'm the man who destroys what he touches. The troubled veteran the papers write about. The monster parents pull their children away from.
For two weeks I let myself believe I could be something else. That the bubble could hold. That loving her could change what I am. That I could be the kind of man who brings home croissants.
But the paper told the truth. The verdict was always there, waiting. When Tuesday comes and Hallstein goes down, I'll be exactly who they said I was. The unstable soldier with the grudge. And she'll be safe in Pristine with her father and his roses, nowhere near me when I detonate.