15. Eve
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Eve
The parking garage is too quiet.
I notice it the second I step out of my car, my heels striking the concrete and the sound coming back at me off the pillars, doubled, wrong.
Dean’s building has good security up top, cameras and key cards and a doorman who learned my name this week and walks me to the elevator like it’s his personal mission.
But the underground level has always felt exposed.
Too many columns. Too many pools of shadow between the buzzing lights.
Too many places a person could stand and wait and not be seen until they wanted to be.
I shake it off. Kiara’s on the run. The police have a warrant out. She’d have to be out of her mind to come here, to the one place everyone knows to look for me.
But that’s the thing about a woman with nothing left to lose. Out of her mind is exactly where she lives now.
Footsteps behind me, fast and deliberate, closing the distance.
I turn.
Kiara steps out from behind a pillar, there where a second ago there was no one. Her hair hangs lank and unwashed. She’s in a wrinkled designer blouse, slept in, maybe, hollows carved dark under her eyes, her face twisted into something past rage and all the way into unhinged.
In her hand, a crowbar.
“You BITCH.”
She swings before I can think, and I throw myself backward, and the crowbar caves in my car door with a crunch of metal that rings through the whole garage and bounces back off every wall at once.
“You ruined EVERYTHING.” Another swing, wild, close enough that I feel the air move past my cheek. “You couldn’t just let him go. You couldn’t disappear like you were supposed to. You had to burn it all down on top of us.”
“Kiara, put it down.” I’m backing up, hands raised, watching the crowbar and not her eyes. “The police are looking for you right now. This isn’t going to.”
“He chose ME.” She swings again, and my heel catches a crack in the concrete and I stumble, and she’s closing in. “We were supposed to be a family. We were supposed to have everything, and you took it, you took all of it.”
My back hits a pillar. Cold concrete, nowhere left to go. My pulse is so loud it drowns out the buzzing lights, drowns out everything but her ragged breathing and the scrape of her shoes on the floor and the small animal part of my brain screaming at me to run with nowhere to run to.
“The police know everything,” I say, and somehow my voice comes out level, which is a miracle I’ll examine later if there’s a later.
“They have Jake Reiner. He named you. They have the warrant. They have the storage footage. It’s already over, Kiara.
Hurting me doesn’t undo any of it. It just adds a body to the list.”
“I DON’T CARE.” Her pupils are blown wide, the eyes of a woman who has stopped doing math on consequences entirely. “If I’m going down, you’re coming with me. That’s the only thing left that I get to decide.”
She lifts the crowbar over her head.
My hand is already in my pocket. A thousand safety seminars, a thousand walks to a car alone in the dark, a thousand small fears that finally, horribly, turned out to be practice.
My thumb finds the emergency button on the side of my phone and presses and holds without my having to look down.
The phone buzzes once against my palm, a small confirmation, the cavalry called.
Now I just have to stay alive until it comes.
“Why?” I say it loud, because talking is stalling and stalling is staying alive. “Help me understand it. Simon was never worth this. He was never worth a parking ticket, let alone a prison sentence. Why throw everything away for him?”
“You don’t understand anything.” Her laugh comes out broken in half. “Simon was my way out. My meal ticket. My whole retirement plan, all wrapped up in one weak, vain man who’d believe anything I told him. And you exposed every bit of it. You lit the match and you stood there and watched it burn.”
“The baby isn’t even his.”
She freezes. The crowbar dips toward the floor, just slightly, her whole body stuttering.
“How do you.”
“I guessed weeks ago. You’re four months along, and you took a trip four months ago.
Miami. To visit family, Simon said. He griped for two weeks about covering your desk.
” My voice goes cold and certain, the certainty of a woman who has nothing left to lose either.
“Except you weren’t with family in Miami, were you. You were with someone.”
“Marco.” The name comes out of her raw, scraped, a wound she didn’t mean to open. “His name was Marco.”
“And he left you.”
“He found out about Simon and he walked.” Her face caves in, the rage collapsing all at once into something small and pathetic and almost, almost human.
“Said he couldn’t be with a woman who’d cheat.
The hypocrite knew the whole time I had a boyfriend, he just didn’t care until it was his pride on the line.
” Tears cut clean tracks down her dirty face.
“I had nothing left. No job, I’d quit to be available for Simon whenever he snapped his fingers.
No savings, I spent it all looking like the woman he was supposed to want.
Simon was supposed to take care of me. Of us.
Of the baby. It was the only plan I had left. ”
“A baby that isn’t his.”
“He doesn’t know that.” The crowbar comes back up, the grief hardening straight back into fury, faster this time. “And he never will, because you are not going to be alive to do the math out loud for him.”
Tires screaming.
Dean’s car comes around the ramp with the headlights blazing and the engine wide open, and he’s out of it before it’s fully stopped moving, the door hanging open behind him, and he hits Kiara with three years of held-back rage and a week of watching me flinch at sounds in the dark, all of it behind him at once.
They go down hard against the concrete. The crowbar skitters away under a parked car. She thrashes and shrieks and claws, but he has fifty pounds on her and a lifetime of being underestimated fueling his grip, and he pins her and does not let go.
Sirens, getting louder, coming down the ramp.
“You called them,” he says, strained with effort, and there’s pride buried in it. “Good girl. Smart.”
“Emergency button. It was in my pocket the whole time.” My own voice sounds far away. “I kept her talking.”
“You kept her talking.” He looks up at me for one second, fierce. “You kept yourself alive. Remember that. You did that.”
The squad cars flood in a minute later, three of them, lights painting the concrete red and blue, shouted commands echoing off every surface.
They pull Dean off her and cuff her with practiced, bored efficiency while she screams the entire time, threats, Simon’s name, that this isn’t over, that Simon will get her out.
“This isn’t over. Simon will get me out, Simon will fix it, Simon.”
The squad car door slams and cuts her off mid-name.
Simon isn’t getting anyone out. Simon is out on bail with a monitor blinking on his ankle, waiting to stand trial, learning at last what it costs to be a Valentine when the money stops covering it.
And Kiara is going wherever women go when they swing a crowbar at someone in a parking garage in front of three squad cars’ worth of witnesses.
And for the first time in weeks, standing in the flashing light with my ruined car behind me, I can breathe all the way down.
Dean pulls me into him and holds on so tight I can feel his heart slamming against my cheek. His whole body is shaking, adrenaline or relief or terror, all three.
“It’s over,” he says into my hair, over and over, like he’s the one who needs to hear it. “It’s over. She can’t touch you. It’s over.”
By the time the police are done with our statements and we make it up to the loft, the adrenaline has nowhere left to go, and it turns into something else, the way fear does when the danger passes and your body hasn’t gotten the memo yet.
My hands won’t stop shaking. Dean’s pacing, jaw tight, opening and closing his fists, running too hot to sit down.
“She had a crowbar,” he says, to the window, low. “She was swinging a crowbar at your head, Eve. And I was two floors up reading takeout menus like an idiot. I almost didn’t hear the alert. I almost didn’t come down.”
“You came down.”
“Thirty more seconds.”
“You came down, Dean.”
He turns and looks at me, and whatever’s been clawing around behind his eyes since the garage finally breaks loose.
He crosses the room in three steps and his hands come up to my face, then my throat, then my hair, checking, like he has to confirm with his own hands that every part of me is still attached and warm and here, and then he’s kissing me, desperate, both of us shaking into it, the fear pouring straight into wanting because that’s where fear goes when you’ve just come this close to losing someone.
“I need to feel you,” he says against my mouth, not asking, telling, his forehead pressed hard to mine. “I need to know you’re real and you’re here and she didn’t. Tell me yes. Tell me right now.”
“Yes.” I’m already dragging his shirt up over his head. “I’m right here. I’m not going anywhere. Yes, Dean, yes.”
It’s not slow and it’s not careful and it’s nothing like tender.
It’s two people who came a crowbar’s swing from never doing this again, frantic and grasping, his hands everywhere at once, mine fisted in his hair like I can anchor us both to the floor.
When he gets us to the bed it’s a tangle of limbs with no patience left in either of us, and when he finally pushes into me we both make a sound like coming up for air after too long under.
“Still here,” he says against my throat, over and over, with every roll of his hips, like a man saying a prayer he doesn’t trust yet. “Still here. Still mine. Still here.”
“Still yours,” I gasp back, and I mean it down past the bone, down to wherever the fear was living a minute ago. “Always. Still here.”
After, we’re a heap of slowing breath and tangled limbs, his hand splayed flat over my heart again, the way he does now, like he can’t fully trust it to keep beating without his hand there to feel it.
“Is it really over?” I ask the ceiling.
“Almost.” He props himself up, brushes the hair off my face, and the certainty in his eyes steals what’s left of my breath.
“Simon’s trial starts next week. He’s the last of it.
And then.” His thumb traces my cheekbone, slow.
“Then we stop surviving, Eve. Then we start living. I’ve forgotten how. We can learn it together.”