Chapter 14 #2
“You can colonize that corner,” she says, pointing to a wide, gleaming partner desk she’s cleared along the side wall.
“Laptop, notes, whatever serial-killer string board you need. Guest room’s made up if you want a real bed, but I know you—you’ll end up drooling on that couch between rabbit holes. ”
She’s not wrong.
Bran stands just inside the doorway, too big and too dark for this pretty room with its horse paintings and scented candle that smells like vanilla and oak.
His shoulder nearly brushes the frame, forearms crossed over his chest, taking everything in with that slow, tactical scan that makes my skin go hot and prickly.
“You’re enabling her,” he tells Cotton.
“Obviously,” she says. “Somebody has to.”
I set my bag down on “my” side of the partner desk and start unloading—laptop, external drive, my favorite mechanical pencil and pens sorted by color and nib width. Everything has a place. Everything slides into it like a little click in my brain.
Bran doesn’t move from the doorway. He’s not just looming; he’s radiating. I can feel him at my back, a solid line of heat even from across the room.
“You don’t have to stand there like Secret Service,” I tell him, glancing over my shoulder. “There’s an entire couch with your name on it. Or, you know, this very nice chair right here.”
I nudge the leather swivel chair beside me with my foot. It rolls an inch on the rug and then stops, obedient, unlike some people.
“I’m good,” he says.
“That’s what she said.” The words are automatic, reflex, born of countless hours in Gunner and Brodie and other men’s presence.
Cotton chokes. A very faint flush of pink traces Bran’s cheekbones, but he just looks at me, that steady, unimpressed stare that should be infuriating and is instead…grounding. Like he’s an anchor and I’m a balloon someone finally tied down.
“All right,” Cotton says, clapping her hands once. “I’m going to go start bread for dinner and pretend I don’t hear you two flirting like teenagers. Holler if you need me. Or if he starts brooding too loud.”
“That’s not a thing,” Bran mutters.
“It is when you do it,” she fires back, already heading out. Her perfume—something soft and expensive—lingers in the doorway after she’s gone.
The room feels smaller without her. More private. The kind of quiet that makes every little sound—keyboard, breath, heartbeat—feel amplified.
I open my laptop, fingers hovering over the keys.
The Nightjar icon sits in the dock, glowing faintly. The SmartLittleBird chat is minimized. There’s a tiny red dot—one unread message.
My chest tightens.
Bran’s eyes flick to the screen, then to me. He’s still at the doorway, but now his focus is narrowed, like a spotlight.
“Not yet,” he says.
“I know,” I say, even though my fingers itch to click.
He finally pushes off the frame and comes into the room fully, the air shifting around him.
Instead of taking the couch, he circles to the empty leather chair beside me and lowers himself into it, knee bumping mine as he settles.
The contact is brief but electric, a low-grade current running straight up my spine.
“Start with what you can control,” he says. “You said you had other data to organize. Old cases. Maps. We do that first.”
“We?” I echo.
He leans in, forearms braced on his thighs, close enough that I can see the darker stubble along his jaw and the tiny scar at his temple. I catch a whiff of him—soap, clean sweat, the faint ghost of smoke like he’s lived through more fires than he talks about.
“Yeah,” he says. “You talk. I listen. I’m not letting you spiral alone.”
For a second, I just stare at him.
It would be easier if he were an asshole. If he were all orders and no softness, all muscle and no care. If I could tuck him into the “dangerous but uncomplicated” file and move on.
But he’s…this. Big and blunt and terrifying when he wants to be, then quietly offering to sit beside me while I unravel someone else’s darkness on a screen.
That’s dangerous.
“Okay,” I say. My voice does a stupid little wobble I hope he doesn’t notice. “Fine. We can start with the maybes list.”
I pull up the spreadsheet again, the one with missing persons and unsolved cases. The glow from the screen washes over both of us. He rolls his chair closer so we can see, the arm of it brushing mine. His thigh presses warm and solid against my leg under the edge of the desk.
I talk. He asks questions. Occasionally he reaches past me to scroll, his knuckles grazing my wrist, the side of my hand, my forearm.
Every touch is accidental. None of them feel like it.
Heat pools low in my stomach, inconvenient and loud. I keep my mouth running faster to cover it, rattling off dates and locations and pattern anomalies like I’m not cataloguing every inch of skin he brushes.
We work through two counties’ worth of data before my brain starts to blur around the edges. The words on the screen swim. My focus slips sideways to the minimized chat window.
I don’t even realize I’ve clicked it until the messages pop open.
Two new lines.
rude, little bird. i missed you.
did you like my present?
The room tilts.
The cursor blinks like a heartbeat. My own breath stutters, sharp in my ears. Present. Is he talking about the woman?
Bran’s hand is on mine before I can type—big, calloused, covering my fingers on the trackpad. His palm is warm. He doesn’t squeeze, just…settles there. Holding me in place.
“Hey,” he says quietly. “Look at me.”
It takes effort to drag my gaze away from the screen, like peeling Velcro.
When I finally do, his eyes are right there, steady and annoyingly gentle. There’s nothing soft about the rest of him—hard jaw, hard shoulders, hard lines—but his eyes are a different story entirely.
“He’s one man behind a machine somewhere,” Bran says. “You’re not standing in front of him. You’re not on a cliff. You’re in a room, on a damn fancy horse farm, with a lock on the door and people who would happily break his bones if he tried to take one more step toward you.”
I swallow. His thumb has slid, almost unconsciously, to the inside of my wrist. My pulse hammers against it like it’s trying to prove a point. We both pretend we don’t notice.
“I hate that he gets to talk to me like that,” I say. “Like I’m this…project he’s proud of.”
“He’s trying to rewrite what you were,” Bran says.
“You were the person who shined a spotlight on the graves he and his brother left behind. You were the one who helped get his name out of a file and into a courtroom, even if he wasn’t the one sitting in it.
He hates that. So he’s trying to make himself the one who made you important, instead of the other way around. ”
My throat tightens. The room feels too warm. Or maybe that’s just him, all six-foot-whatever of Irish furnace pressed along my side.
“He doesn’t get to define you,” Bran says quietly.
Emotion claws at my chest in an ugly, unfamiliar way.
“Nobody’s ever said that to me before,” I blurt, which is stupid and way too honest and absolutely not something I meant to let out. “I don’t even know who the hell I am, really.”
I want to snatch the words back and shove them somewhere private.
Bran just holds my gaze. His thumb strokes once, barely there, over the thrum of my pulse.
“They should have,” he says. “You’re whoever you want to be. You’re brave and you’re scared, and you’re perfect and you’re flawed, and you…you fucking shine, Tink.”
Oh my god. Every insecurity I’ve ever had collapses in on itself under the weight of his approval, and something inside me stretches and preens and purrs with utter contentment.
We sit there like that, eyes locked, his hand still covering mine on the desk.
Somewhere down the hall, a radio plays soft country music under the sound of Cotton singing off-key in the kitchen.
The heater ticks. A horse whinnies faintly outside, like the rest of the estate is reminding us the world still exists.
For a second, there’s nothing else. No Henry. No mountain. No Falls.
Just this.
“I—”
My laptop pings again, interrupting what I might have confessed. The bubble of almost-softness pops.
“Text Brady,” Bran says, voice tightening. “Screenshots. Then we’re done with him for today. I mean it.”
“And if I argue?” I ask.
He squeezes my hand—just once, just enough that I feel it everywhere. It shouldn’t feel like anything. It does.
“Then we argue,” he says. “But right now, I’m asking, not ordering.”
It shouldn’t make a difference.
It does.
“Okay,” I say, exhaling. “Okay.”
I take screenshots. I send them to Brady with a bare-bones summary: contacted again, no response yet, we’re at Cotton’s.
Then, for the first time since this started, I hit the little X in the corner of the chat window and close it.
Bran finally lets go of my hand. The absence is immediate and loud, like someone yanked a plug.
“All right,” he says, pushing back from the desk. “Now we take a break.”
“Where are we going?” I ask.
“The living room,” he says. “Cotton promised cookies. You’re going to eat something shaped like a snowman and pretend for five minutes that the only thing you have to worry about is whether you get frosting on your shirt.”
“That’s…very specific,” I say.
“I have nieces,” he says.
Of course he does. So this man likes donuts, has nieces, and knows how to talk me down off a mental ledge without making me feel stupid.
Tremendous.
“Fine,” I say, standing. My legs wobble a little; I’ve been folded into this chair for too long. He notices before I do, stepping in close, one big hand settling at the small of my back—light, barely there, just enough to steady.
It feels like more.
“Tallulah?” he says as we reach the door.
“Yeah?”
“You close that window again before you open it,” he says. “You get to choose when he’s allowed in your head. Not the other way around.”
I swallow hard.
“Okay,” I say.
And for the first time all day, with his hand warm against my spine and the smell of cookies drifting down the hall, I almost believe it.