Chapter Ten
The First Time She Goes to Him
She was in the car and halfway to Gutleutviertel before she'd fully admitted to herself where she was going.
It was nearly nine, three days since the men had come to the studio, three days of Colt's usual vigil resuming outside her window as though nothing had happened, three days of Senna watching him from the glass and noticing, each night, a stiffness in the way he moved that hadn't been there before.
She'd told herself, the first night, that it was simply the cold getting to him, that any man sitting on frozen pavement for hours would move a little slower by the end of it.
The second night she'd noticed him favor his left side climbing back onto the bike, a small, careful economy of motion that had nothing to do with cold.
Tonight she'd watched him lower himself to the curb with a wince he clearly tried to hide, and something in her had simply stood up, grabbed her coat, and gone downstairs without consulting the part of her brain that usually vetoed impulsive decisions.
She hadn't called ahead. She hadn't planned what she'd say.
She'd simply driven, hands tight on the wheel, replaying the stiffness in his shoulders and refusing to let herself turn back even as the city changed around her, glass towers giving way to freight yards, the industrial hush of Gutleutviertel closing in around the car like a held breath.
The clubhouse yard was quieter than her last visit, fewer men milling near the entrance, the whole compound settling into its late evening rhythm.
She found Colt near the back, alone, leaning against a stack of crates with the same careful stillness he always carried, and it was only when she got close enough that she saw it clearly in the floodlight: a deep bruise blooming along one cheekbone, another visible above his collar where his jacket had shifted.
"What happened to your face."
"It's nothing." He straightened too quickly, a flinch he couldn't fully suppress betraying the lie.
"Colt." She crossed the remaining distance, close enough now to see the split at the corner of his lip, only half healed. "Don't tell me it's nothing when I can see it isn't."
He was quiet for a long moment, jaw tight.
"Rein wanted to know exactly how I'd handled the message to you.
I told him I'd made it clear you weren't a target, that if anyone touched your business or came near you again, I'd consider it a declaration against me personally, not just a warning.
He didn't love hearing an ultimatum from someone he still considers his to command.
He made his opinion known privately, after the others had gone.
" A muscle worked in his jaw. "It's the price of the conversation. I knew it going in."
"You let him beat you and then you didn't tell me."
"What was I supposed to say? That I bled a little so the men who threatened your studio wouldn't come back? That's not something I wanted you carrying."
"You don't get to decide what I carry, Colt.
" Her voice shook, and she hated that it did, hated how much the sight of him standing there, bruised and stubbornly unbothered, was undoing every careful wall she'd rebuilt over the last three days.
"You did that because of me, and you were going to let me find out from a bruise you didn't explain, the same way I found out about Katja from a phone I wasn't supposed to check. "
"That's not the same thing."
"It's the same pattern. You decide what I'm strong enough to know and you decide alone.
" She was close enough now to see the exhaustion under the bruising, the particular hollowness of a man who'd absorbed more than one kind of damage that week.
"I don't want a husband who protects me by disappearing into a version of himself I never get to see. "
He didn't answer right away. When he did, his voice had dropped, rough. "I don't know how to be any other way in this place. It's the only language anyone here has ever spoken to me. I'm trying. I don't know if trying is enough."
Something in the admission, the raw uncertainty of it, undid the last of her resolve to keep her distance.
She reached up, without deciding to, and touched the bruise along his cheekbone, her fingers light, careful, the first voluntary contact she'd initiated since the confession three weeks earlier.
He went completely still under her hand, breath catching, his eyes on her face like he was afraid that looking away would make her stop.
"This isn't forgiveness," she said quietly, her hand still against his jaw.
"I know." His voice was barely above a whisper. "I'm not going to pretend it is."
They stood like that for a long moment, the yard's floodlights harsh and unromantic around them, the distant sound of an engine somewhere across the compound the only thing breaking the silence, and Senna felt something in her chest crack open that she'd spent three weeks bracing shut.
"Colt." A voice, low and urgent, cutting through the moment.
Senna turned to find a broad-shouldered man approaching fast, dark eyes flicking between the two of them with obvious alarm.
"You need to get her out of here. Rein's watching from the office window.
He sees this, sees you touching soft with her out in the open where the whole yard can see it, it's going to look like exactly the kind of weakness he's already accusing you of. "
Colt stepped back immediately, putting distance between himself and Senna with a speed that felt less like rejection and more like protection, his expression shuttering closed. "Ledger's right. You need to go."
"Is that what this is," Senna said, feeling the old fear rear up fast, "you performing distance the second someone's watching?"
"No." His voice was fierce, quiet. "It's me making sure Rein has one less reason to make your life harder than it already is. There's a difference, even if it doesn't feel like one right now."
She let Ledger walk her back toward the gate, aware of Colt's eyes on her the entire way, aware of the surveillance Sabine had warned her about made suddenly, uncomfortably real. At her car, Ledger paused, glancing back toward the depot before speaking.
"For what it's worth," he said, "I've known Colt eight years.
I've never seen him let anyone touch him like that in this yard.
Not once. Whatever's happening between you two, it's not nothing to him.
" He opened her car door for her, an old-fashioned courtesy that felt strange in the industrial dark. "Get home safe."
Senna drove back to Sachsenhausen with her hand still faintly warm from where it had rested against Colt's jaw, replaying the moment on a loop she couldn't turn off, and told herself, pulling into her own street at last, that nothing had changed.
She knew, even as she thought it, that it was no longer true.
She sat in the parked car outside the studio for a long while, engine ticking as it cooled, watching her own breath fog the windshield, and made herself examine the feeling directly instead of filing it away the way she usually did.
It wasn't only tenderness, though there was plenty of that, unwelcome and undeniable.
It was recognition, sharper and more unsettling: she had spent three years married to a man who kept the hardest parts of himself locked away from her out of some misguided instinct to protect her, and she had let him, had built her half of the marriage on the same instinct in reverse, keeping her own oldest wounds locked just as tightly out of his reach.
Watching him stand in that yard, bruised and unwilling to explain it, she had seen, for the first time, exactly how much of their three years together had been two people loving each other from behind separate glass, each one certain the barrier was protection rather than distance.
She went upstairs eventually, made tea she didn't drink, and sat by the window a long while before bed, watching the empty curb where he wasn't, for once, sitting, since he'd stayed behind at the clubhouse that night. The absence unsettled her more than his presence ever had.