Chapter 40 NICK #2
My arms close around her, fierce, desperate, crushing her against my chest like I can fold her inside me and keep her there forever.
"Ah, God." My voice is rougher than I've ever heard it as I hold her close. "Avery."
The solidity of her body against mine. Warm. Real. Alive.
I press my face into the curve of her neck and hold there, breathing her in like oxygen, like the first breath after drowning. Her hands grip me so hard I can feel her knuckles pressing into my spine.
Her heartbeat hammers against my chest. Or maybe that's mine. I can't separate them anymore, can't find the line between her body and my own.
I don't want to.
I don't ever want to find that line again.
"I've got you." The words come out wrecked, barely recognizable as my own voice. "I've got you, angel. You're safe. You're both safe."
Her whole body shudders against mine. A sob escapes her, relief and terror and exhaustion tangled together. I hold her tighter. My hand spreads across her lower back, pressing her closer. My other hand cradles the back of her head, my fingers threading through her hair.
She's alive.
Our baby is alive.
Everything I am, everything I have, is standing in the circle of my arms.
For one suspended moment, there is nothing else. No rooftop. No wind. No grieving woman behind us. Just Avery's body against mine and the sound of her breathing and the steady, living drum of her heartbeat against my chest.
Then I hear it.
The soft rasp of metal on gravel.
I look up, still holding Avery. Nadiyah has set the gun down at her feet. A deliberate action—not dropping it, but gently laying it aside. Like she's done with it.
Then she steps backward.
Once.
Twice.
Nadiyah's face isn't contorted with rage anymore. It's filled with something worse: horror. At herself. At what she almost did. At what she's become.
"I can't go to prison." Her voice breaks. "You’re right, Avery. I can’t do that to Sami. Years of seeing me behind bars. Growing up with that shame. I can't make him carry that."
Her dark eyes move to me. "I wanted you to feel what I felt.
" She's sobbing now, the words barely intelligible.
"I wanted you to understand what you took from me.
And now—" Her voice cracks completely. "Now my son has seen me do something terrible.
My mother sees what I've become. I've shamed myself.
Shamed Omar's memory. Everything I did, I did for him, and this is what I've become. "
Inside me, rage is finally breaking loose from the place I've been holding it down.
This woman pointed a gun at my pregnant wife.
Dragged her to the edge of a building. She nearly murdered the two people who matter more to me than my own life.
Every nerve in my body wants to let that fury have its voice, to tell her exactly what she almost cost me and what I'd do to anyone who tried it again.
But Nadiyah isn't looking at me anymore. Not at Avery either. She's looking at her son, and the devastation on her face is something I recognize. She wears the defeated expression of someone staring at the wreckage they've made and knowing they can't take any of it back.
I force my anger down. Lock it behind my teeth. Because letting it loose right now won't help anything. And it won't stop what I can already see building behind Nadiyah's eyes.
"It's over, Nadiyah." My voice is steady. Barely. "You made the right choice. That's what matters."
She chokes on another sob. Her final words are barely audible. "I just want the pain to stop now."
She pivots away from us. Starts moving swiftly toward the ledge. In an instant, she steps up onto the low parapet wall at the roof's edge.
Ah, fuck. She's going to jump. "No—"
Behind me, Sami wails. A single, sharp cry of recognition.
Nadiyah’s mother screams her name.
In a flash of memory, Dubai detonates inside my skull. Omar Al-Hassan on the roof of his hotel. The sickening forward tilt of a man's body choosing gravity over life. The sound I couldn't stop, the fall I couldn't prevent. The death that put every one of us on this rooftop today.
I can't let it happen again. This time, I have to change the ending.
I'm hardly aware of myself moving, running for the ledge. Gravel scatters under my feet. Nadiyah is already turning forward, her weight shifting toward the fall, her arms loose at her sides.
I lunge for her. My right hand shoots out, closing around her wrist. Bone and tendon feel fragile in my grasp, the scars on my arm and hand stretching, burning. All of her weight pulls against the ruined hand that hasn't had full strength since I was eighteen years old.
But I hold fast.
The old fractures, the nerve damage, the tissue that never healed right—all of it blazes white-hot as I clamp down and refuse to let her go. I yank with everything I have, my feet scrambling for purchase on loose gravel.
Nadiyah jerks backward, away from the fall.
We crash onto the rooftop together. My back hits the gravel hard. Sharp stones bite into my back, grinding into my shoulder blade, my hip. Nadiyah lands against me, the impact driving the air from my lungs, her body limp with shock.
Then small footsteps pound across the gravel, and Sami throws himself onto his mother. His arms wrap around her neck, his face buried against her chest, crying violently. "Maman, Maman, Maman—"
Nadiyah's arms come up slowly, as if she's not sure she's allowed to hold him. Then something breaks in her and she's clutching him, pulling him close, her body curling around his small frame. They both weep uncontrollably.
Her mother is there now too. Dropping to her knees, she wraps her arms around both of them, sobbing, praying. Her words are too rushed for me to understand, but the tone is unmistakable. Relief. Pain. Love.
It’s over. Everyone is safe.
"Nick!" Avery stumbles to my side, reaching for me as I push myself up from the rooftop. Every muscle protests. Every muscle screams. My back is scraped raw, my right hand throbbing with a deep, bone-level ache, adrenaline still flooding my system with nowhere left to go. None of it matters.
The only thing I need is Avery. And she's right here with me. Safe. Unharmed.
I pull her close, not the desperate collision from before, but something quieter. Exhausted. So fucking grateful to feel her in my embrace.
Her hand finds mine, threads our fingers together. My other hand settles on her abdomen, gentle, reverent. I have my family. Everything I need is right here, in my arms.
She looks up at me, her eyes red-rimmed, her cheeks still wet with tears. My own face is wet too. I'm not sure either of us are capable of words right now. I caress her face, then bend to kiss her, just to confirm to myself that I'm not dreaming. She's real, and we've survived this. Together.
Commotion draws my attention to the open stairwell door, where the sounds of boots pounding and tactical gear jangling echo out. Gabe and his team pour onto the roof with weapons drawn and voices sharp with urgency.
He takes in the scene in a single sweep. Nadiyah on the ground with her son and mother. The gun lying forgotten on the gravel a few yards away. Avery and me on our feet, holding each other.
He approaches, his expression shifting from combat-ready to something quieter as he reads the situation. "You okay?"
I nod. My voice, when it comes, sounds like it's been dragged over the same gravel I just landed on. "Yeah. We're both all right."
His gaze moves to Avery. She’s pale, spent, running on nothing but adrenaline and whatever reserves she had left to burn. "We should get you checked out. The baby too, just in case. There's an ambulance already waiting down below."
She nods, and I wrap my arm around her and guide her toward the stairs. Gabe falls into step beside us, one hand resting briefly on my shoulder, the only acknowledgment he gives to what just happened, and the only one I need.
I pause to glance behind us one last time, where members of Gabe's team are attending to Nadiyah and her family and securing her abandoned weapon.
The stairwell swallows us, concrete walls closing in after the open sky, the sudden absence of wind making the silence louder. Avery leans into me as we descend, her weight settling against my side like her body has finally stopped holding itself up.
My legs feel like they belong to someone else. Each step sends a dull shock through my scraped back, my aching hand, the places where gravel is still embedded in skin. The adrenaline is receding now, pulling back like a tide, and what it leaves behind is raw.
Avery's hand tightens in mine.
I press my lips to her temple. Her pulse beats against my lips, steady, real, alive.
"Let's get out of here, angel."