Chapter 15
FIFTEEN
DAEMON
Thursday night, helping Nadia pack up after the Roundtable dinner, I realized I was completely screwed.
Not the fun type of screwed either. The terrifying, life-altering, no-going-back sort.
She was laughing with one of her staff, stacking containers of leftovers. Her hair was escaping its bun, her navy jumpsuit was spotted with sauce, and she looked exhausted.
She also looked triumphant and entirely confident, as if she'd just won a battle.
Watching Samantha Morrison and Justin Walters squirm through dinner had been beautiful. Watching Nadia serve them with a cold, professional smile had been even better.
And watching her now, riding the high of victory, I felt it hit me like a freight train.
I was in love with her.
Not falling. Not halfway there. Completely, irrevocably in love with Nadia Becker.
The realization should have felt good. Should have been the type of thing worth celebrating.
Instead, terror crawled up my spine and settled in my chest.
Because the last time I'd loved someone this much, I'd failed her. My mom had died alone in a hospital while I was locked up, unable to even say goodbye. I'd made promises I couldn't keep, fought battles I couldn't win, and lost the only person who'd ever believed in me.
What if I failed Nadia, too?
"Daemon?" She appeared beside me, concern in her eyes. "You okay? You've been staring at that same box for five minutes."
"Yeah. Tired is all." I forced a smile. "It's been a long week."
"Tell me about it." She stretched, wincing. "But we won. They know we're not backing down."
"You won," I corrected. "That was all you."
"No." She caught my hand. "That was us. Together."
The word should have warmed me. Instead, fear tightened my gut.
Together meant she was counting on me. Trusting me. Expecting me to be there when things got hard. She squeezed my hand again before letting go.
I watched her work the room for another ten minutes. The calm authority of it, the way she moved from person to person without losing the thread. Her staff orbited her the way people orbit someone they trust as their center of gravity.
By the time the last crate was stacked, it was past eleven. Her team headed out, and we carried the last load to her van in the quiet parking lot, our breath visible in the November air.
She leaned against the van when we were done, tipped her head back, and looked at the sky.
"We actually did it," she said.
"You did it."
"Don't start." She turned her head to look at me, still smiling, the wide, unguarded version she didn't use often. "We did it. You and I and the entire town of Coogan's Break, and I'm not in the mood to be modest about it."
I leaned against the van beside her. Our shoulders were touching. "Then don't be."
"They had to sit there all night." She laughed, quiet and satisfied. "Samantha Morrison in her hundred-dollar-an-ounce perfume, eating my food and knowing exactly what that meant."
"She knew before the appetizers were cleared."
"I know." She let out a long breath. "I've been holding my breath since the health violation rumors started. Since I found out what they were actually doing. Tonight was the first time I actually believed we might be okay."
The parking lot was empty. The venue lights had gone to their overnight setting, and the only real light came from the streetlamps at the lot's edge, casting everything in amber that made Coogan's Break look like a film set after hours.
She turned to face me, and I turned to face her.
"Come here," I said.
She closed the distance without hesitation, which was new. She'd always moved toward me with a certain deliberateness before, as if she were making a considered decision rather than following an instinct.
Tonight she came, and I got my arms around her, and she pressed her face against my neck, and we stayed like that for a heartbeat, her breathing slowing, both of us letting the night decompress around us.
Then she pulled back enough to look at me and kissed me in the parking lot with her hands inside my jacket and no apparent concern for who might see.
The adrenaline of the evening was still in it, that much was obvious.
But underneath was something slower and more deliberate, the camaraderie of two people who'd come through something together and were still on the right side of it.
When she pulled back, her forehead rested against mine.
"Your place," she said.
"Yeah."
We drove separately, and she beat me there, which told me she hadn't second-guessed herself at any point on the way. I found her leaning against the apartment door in the dark, keys in hand, her jumpsuit still carrying the faint smell of the evening's kitchen.
I got the door open, and she came in without waiting to be asked and kicked her clogs off on Sofia's mat, and it was such an ordinary thing, so completely without ceremony, that it hit me somewhere I hadn't expected.
This is what it would look like. Every night. This.
She turned to face me from the middle of the room, and in the pink light of the lamp she looked triumphant and tired and more certain of herself than anyone I'd ever known.
Later, lying in the dark with the ceramic cats on their shelf and the needlepoint sampler above the headboard and Nadia's hand flat on my chest, I listened to her breathing and waited for it to even out into sleep. It didn't.
"Daemon."
"Mm."
"I want to say something, and I need you to let me get all the way through it."
I went still. She must have felt it, because her hand pressed flat against my sternum, steady, the way she'd steady a tray.
"A while back, you told me that being terrified means you're doing something that matters." Her voice was low and even in the dark. The voice she used when the information was important and she didn't want anyone to panic.
"I've thought about that more than I've admitted. Because I've been terrified for weeks now, and tonight I stood in a parking lot with you and worked out exactly why."
The lamp was off. The streetlight through the curtains gave the room its edges and nothing else. I could feel my own heartbeat under her palm, the way I had that first night. Unnecessary information for both of us.
"We made a deal," she said. "We say things when we know them. So here it is." Her hand didn't move. "I'm in love with you." The room held it. "I'm not asking for it back," she said, before I could do whatever I'd been about to do. I never found out what that was.
"That's not why I'm saying it. I'm saying it because I know it, and the deal was that knowing it means saying it. So now you know too."
I had the words. They came up the way they always came up, fast and certain, and met the wall the way they always met it. This time I pushed. I got as far as opening my mouth. I got as far as her name. "Nadia, I—"
The wall held. I lay there with the sentence right there, complete and true, and I couldn't carry it across the last three inches. The harder I pushed, the louder the old arithmetic ran underneath it.
My mother had believed every promise I made her, and I'd made my biggest ones out loud. Saying the words was how you got someone to lean their weight on you. Saying the words was the part that came right before the failing.
"I'm not going anywhere," I said. Four words. The same four. They had never sounded smaller.
She was quiet. Her thumb moved once against my ribs, the small motion I knew now, the one that meant she was filing something away.
"I know," she said.
Not for now. She didn't say for now this time, and I lay there understanding exactly what that meant. She'd stopped marking the arrangement as temporary because she'd just made her side of it permanent. The only side still open was mine.
She settled against me, her cheek finding the spot on my shoulder that apparently belonged to her now. When she spoke again, her voice had already gone soft at the edges.
"Terrified together, Daemon. That part hasn't changed."
Her breathing evened out. Slow. Trusting. A woman sleeping soundly in the bed of a man she loved out loud.
I stared at the ceiling. She had put the whole thing on the table. No conditions, nothing held back to soften the landing if I dropped it. And I had matched it with four words and a wall.
The fear arrived then, the way it always arrived, while something else had my attention.
The last time someone had loved me like that, entirely, out loud, I had failed her from a locked room two hundred miles away. Nadia's hand was warm on my chest, and all I could think was that she had just handed me something my track record said I would break.