Chapter 37 AVERY #2
She doesn't want comfort. Doesn't want to be understood. She doesn't want catharsis or closure or any of the things that might make her grief bearable.
She wants balance.
And somehow I ache for her, as much as I fear her right now.
Empathy rises in me before I can stop it.
Before I can calculate whether it's wise, whether it will help or hurt, or whether offering genuine feeling to this woman will create an opening or close one.
It's simply who I am, how I'm built. The part of me that looked at Nick Baine and saw past his armor to the wounded boy underneath.
The part of me that still believes connection is possible even in the darkest places.
"I'm sorry, Nadiyah. I can't imagine what that was like for you.
" Emotion clogs my throat, not for myself in this moment but for the broken woman in front of me.
Whatever else is happening here, her pain is real.
I hold her steady gaze. "Losing someone you loved that way.
Losing the father of your child. The life you'd built together. "
She doesn't blink, doesn't give me any indication that anything I'm saying matters. Maybe it doesn't. Maybe it can't. But I have to try to reach her somehow. It may be my only hope.
"I've lost people too. Not the same way, but I know what it feels like when grief takes over everything. When it becomes the lens you see the whole world through, and nothing else seems right, or real, anymore."
She takes a slow breath. The rigid set of her jaw eases by a fraction. Something moves within her hollow gaze.
I see it happen—a flicker, barely there, like light catching water beneath ice.
Recognition. The acknowledgment that I'm not dismissing her, not treating her pain as madness or manipulation.
For one suspended moment, something in her expression shifts toward something almost human. Almost reachable.
My heart lifts. There. That's the crack. That's where the wall isn't solid.
But even as hope sparks in my chest, I watch it die. Nadiyah's face smooths back into that terrible calm. Whatever door cracked open has closed again, and the click of it shutting feels like something breaking inside me.
I tried to reach her. I meant every word I said. And it isn't enough.
"Understanding doesn't bring him back." Her voice is flat.
Final. "Sympathy doesn't restore what was taken.
Your kindness—" She shakes her head, and there's something almost like regret in the gesture.
As if she wishes things could be different.
As if she's sorry that my compassion can't change what has to happen. "It changes nothing. It heals nothing."
The last soft path closes.
I feel it like my own grief—not metaphor, but actual loss.
The ache of reaching for someone and finding only air.
I survived my childhood by learning to read people.
I still navigate my world now by looking for the humanity in even the most broken among us, and by believing that understanding can build bridges across impossible distances.
But Nadiyah doesn't want a bridge. She doesn't want to be understood.
She wants equivalence.
And the shape of what I am in this equation begins to clarify, even as everything in me fights against the knowledge.
If connection won't help me reach her, maybe consequence will. Maybe the reality of what she's risking—exposure, capture, the loss of her son—will penetrate where compassion couldn't.
"People saw us leave the rec center together, Nadiyah.
The staff knows I was with you." I hold her gaze, refuse to let mine waver even though the fear is climbing my throat like something with claws.
"And I sent a text to Nick before we left your apartment.
He knows something is wrong. He'll come for me. "
She blinks, mouth pursing around the edges.
"Whatever you're planning won't work. Nick will find me. He's probably already on the way here."
I can't be certain my text reached him, let alone that the fragmented message I sent will make any sense to him. But he'll figure it out.
And when Nick knows something is wrong—when he knows I'm in danger—he becomes a force of nature. He'll tear this city apart. He'll call in every resource, every connection, every favor he's ever been owed. He'll come for me because that's who he is. Because I'm his wife.
I hold my breath, waiting for fear to register across Nadiyah's face. For the mention of Nick's wrath to rattle her resolve, make her reconsider. Better yet, to make her wonder if she can actually finish this before he arrives.
Instead, what I see in her expression turns my blood to ice in my veins.
Something in her face eases. It's the closest thing to relief I've seen in her since this nightmare confrontation began.
"That's good." The word is soft. Almost grateful. "He should be here for this."
Oh, God. The ground drops out from under me as I realize the depth of my mistake just now.
Nick's arrival isn't the thing that stops this.
It's the thing that completes it.
Whatever balance means to her, whatever answering wrongs requires to her, it demands an audience. It demands that Nick witness. That he watch whatever she's planning unfold and be powerless to stop it, the way he did nothing on that rooftop in Dubai when Omar made his choice.
Nick will think he's coming to save me. But he's walking into a trap. One I've led him to with my cry for help.
The wind gusts harder, colder, yet I can't feel it anymore. I can't feel anything except the freefall sensation of everything I believed turning inside out.
Nadiyah takes a step closer. Not threatening, but almost intimate, the way you'd move toward someone you're about to share a secret with. The gun stays level between us, but there's something different in her posture now. She's not holding me at bay anymore. She's confiding.
"I thought about killing him, you know. At first, that's all I wanted. To watch him die the way Omar did. To make him feel that terror—that helplessness—in his final seconds."
She pauses. Her gaze goes distant, as if caught in memory, maybe. Recalling the fantasy she built and then set aside.
"But then I realized..." Her head tilts slightly, considering. "Death would end his pain. It would be over. Dominic Baine would be gone, and whatever he felt in those last moments would be finished."
Her gaze locks onto mine with terrible intensity.
"Losing you—losing the woman he loves—that is a wound that never closes. Every day. Every night. For the rest of his life, he will wake up and remember what was taken from him. What he couldn't protect."
Her lips curve into something that might once have been a smile. Before. When she was still the woman who loved Omar, and not yet the one grief remade.
"That is what balance looks like, Avery. That is what he owes."
The words slice into me. I’ve had it all wrong. The world I thought I understood five seconds ago—where I was a hostage, where I was leverage, where my survival might possibly be bargained for—that world is gone now.
Because it never existed. It was a story I told myself because the truth was too enormous to see.
I am not a hostage.
I am not a bargaining chip.
I am not leverage to be traded for cooperation or money or remorse.
I am the wound Nadiyah wants to deliver to Nick.
The one that never heals. The loss that will hollow him out from the inside—slowly, relentlessly, completely—until there's nothing left but grief and guilt and the memory of what he couldn't save.
She's been studying us. Watching us at the atelier. Learning the shape of what we are to each other—the way he looks at me, the way I lean into his touch, the way our bodies gravitate toward each other whenever we’re together.
She saw what we have, and she found the softest place to drive the blade.
The place where a blade would inflict the most damage on him.
Me.
I think about the distance to the rooftop door. Fifteen feet, maybe twenty. About whether I could reach it before Nadiyah pulled the trigger, and what the odds are that I'd make it even if I ran.
I think about my child.
The tiny life growing inside me—seven weeks, barely the size of a peanut—that Nadiyah has no idea exists.
The heartbeat I can feel in every fiber of my being, rapid and strong.
Nick's face when he looked at the ultrasound image, the way his whole body went still with wonder.
This child who will never meet my mom, its grandmother, whose sacrifice gave me a chance at survival.
This innocent child who deserves to be born. To grow. To know how fiercely they were wanted before they even existed.
The urge to tell Nadiyah nearly overwhelms me. I'm pregnant. There's a baby. Please.
Surely a mother will recoil at the thought of killing another mother's child. Surely that shared experience of carrying life inside your body will break through where everything else has failed.
But I force the words back down.
If I'm wrong, it could make everything worse. She might decide the baby is just another piece of Nick's future that needs to be erased. Another way to carve the wound deeper.
I can't risk it. Not yet. Not until I know there's a better chance of it helping than hurting.
My child deserves more than a gamble. My child deserves me thinking clearly, waiting for the right moment, finding the angle that actually works instead of throwing out my last piece of hope in a panic.
So I hold the secret inside me where it's safe, and I wait.
Nick will come. I know this with a certainty that goes deeper than thought, deeper than hope. He will find me because that's who he is. Because I have seen what this man does when someone he loves is in danger. Nothing in this world has ever been strong enough to stop him.
And when he arrives, all we need to do is find our way through this nightmare together. Somehow.
God, please, let us find our way through to the other side of this.
Nadiyah gestures with the gun. "Move back now. Slowly."
My body goes rigid. I glance over my shoulder, where the rooftop ledge is maybe ten feet behind me. Beyond it, nothing. Empty air and a six-story plunge, where cars pass and pedestrians walk and the world continues without any idea what's happening up here.
I take a step backward. Then another. The gravel crunches under my shoes, each small stone announcing my movement. The wind gusts harder, slicing through my clothes, pulling tears from my eyes.
Nadiyah stands motionless, the weapon level and steady on me.
"Now we wait."