Chapter 9
The truss rod needed a quarter turn.
Jessica sat on the garage floor with Raven's guitar across her lap—the cheap Yamaha acoustic he'd bought three months ago when he decided guitar lessons were a good cover for whatever he'd really been doing every Wednesday at four o'clock.
The action was too high, the intonation was off at the twelfth fret, and the strings were so dead they sounded like rubber bands stretched across a shoebox.
She'd told him she was going to fix it. He'd said it wasn't worth the trouble. She'd taken it anyway.
The truss rod wrench from her case fit the hex nut at the base of the neck.
She turned it slowly—a quarter turn clockwise, tightening the rod to pull the neck straighter and drop the action to something playable.
Too much and the strings would buzz. Too little and pressing a barre chord would feel like arm wrestling.
She sighted down the neck, checking the relief against the overhead lights. Better. The slight bow that had been making the upper frets a nightmare was flattening out.
"You carry a truss rod wrench in your guitar case?" Raven was sitting on a shop stool three feet away, watching her hands the way he'd watched them during lessons—focused, intent, cataloging every movement.
"I carry everything in my guitar case. Wrenches, spare strings, wire cutters, a screwdriver set, contact spray." She loosened the strings and pulled them off, coiling each one and dropping it into the trash bin by the workbench. "A guitar's a machine. Machines need maintenance."
"Most people just take it to a shop."
"Most people don't play for a living." She ran the microfiber cloth down the fretboard, cleaning grime from the rosewood. "My first setup cost eighty dollars I didn't have. Church music director saw me crying about it in the parking lot and spent two Saturdays teaching me to do it myself."
"The one who taught you everything."
"Pastor David." She smiled at the fretboard. "Played gospel piano like God owed him a favor, but he knew guitars too. Strings, setups, basic repairs. Said a musician who can't maintain her own instrument is a soldier who can't clean her own weapon."
"He wasn't wrong."
"He wasn't wrong about much." She opened the new string pack and pulled out the low E, feeding it through the bridge pin and up to the tuning peg. "He died when I was sixteen. Heart attack during Wednesday night choir practice. Went down in the middle of 'Amazing Grace,' second verse."
Raven was quiet. She appreciated that—the silence instead of the automatic I'm sorry that people threw at grief like a bandage over a wound that had already scarred.
"After that, I taught myself. Dive bars, open mics, anywhere that would let a teenager with a guitar sit in a corner and play.
" She wound the string, three wraps above the hole, tension building with each turn of the peg.
"Read every setup guide I could find. Practiced on cheap guitars from pawn shops until I could do a full setup in twenty minutes. "
"How long does it take now?"
"Depends on the guitar." She tuned the low E by ear, adjusting until the pitch settled. "This one needs more work than most. The nut slots are cut too high and the saddle needs to come down a sixteenth of an inch. But strings and a truss rod adjustment will make it playable."
She worked through the remaining five strings—A, D, G, B, high E—winding each one with the same precision, tuning by ear, stretching the string and retuning until it held pitch. Raven watched without speaking, and she let the quiet sit between them, filled with the small sounds of her work.
The last string settled into tune. She played a chord—open G, letting it ring. The guitar sounded like a different instrument. Not great—a two-hundred-dollar Yamaha was never going to sound great—but honest. Clean. The kind of tone that rewarded the player for trying.
"Tell me about the village."
The words came out before she'd planned them. She'd been thinking about it since the chapel—since he'd told her he was going to wait, until Slade was dead and she was free. He'd offered her time and space and the chance to choose without pressure.
But she didn't want time. She wanted truth.
Raven's expression didn't change. But something behind his eyes shifted—a door opening that he usually kept locked.
"Afghanistan. 2017." His voice was flat, controlled.
The voice of a man reporting facts he'd rather forget.
"I designed an influence campaign to turn a village against an insurgent cell that was using it as a staging area.
Leaflets, radio broadcasts, face-to-face meetings with village elders.
Classic hearts-and-minds, except I was better at it than most."
"It worked."
"Too well. The village turned. Publicly rejected the insurgents, refused to provide shelter or supplies. Made a stand based on the narrative I'd built for them—that the coalition would protect them if they sided with us."
He stopped. She waited.
"The insurgents came back three weeks later.
Killed forty-seven people. Men, women, children.
Burned the village to the foundations." His hands were still on his knees, perfectly controlled.
"I'd given them the courage to resist and the belief that we'd keep them safe.
We didn't. I was reassigned before the ashes cooled. "
"And that's what you carry."
"That's what I carry."
Jessica set the guitar aside, leaning it carefully against the workbench. She turned to face him fully, reading what she could see—the tension in his jaw, the stillness of his hands, the way he held himself like a man bracing for a verdict.
"Influence without a conscience is just noise," she said. "That's what you're afraid of. That everything you do is manipulation, even when it doesn't feel like it."
"Yes."
"So when you told me you were going to wait—until Slade was dead, until I was free, until I could choose you without pressure—was that real? Or was that the best play to make me want you more?"
The question landed in the garage like a grenade.
Raven looked at her for a long time. She could see him thinking—not calculating, not strategizing, but genuinely searching for an answer he could trust.
"I don't know," he said. "That's the honest answer. I don't always know where the operator ends and the man begins."
"I do."
She stood up from the floor and closed the distance between them. Raven didn't move from the stool—just watched her approach with those dark eyes that read people for a living but couldn't seem to read this.
"The operator would have kissed me in the chapel," she said.
"Would have used the moment, the adrenaline, the gratitude.
Would have closed the deal when my defenses were down.
" She stopped in front of him, close enough to feel the heat coming off his skin in the humid garage air.
"The man walked away. The man said wait.
The man gave me a choice he didn't have to give. "
"Jessica—"
"I'm not finished." She put her hands on his shoulders, feeling the tension locked in the muscle there. "The operator is good at what he does. But the man is the one I've been writing songs about for three days. And I'm done waiting for you to figure out which one you are."
His hands came up—slow, careful, like he was handling something that might break.
They settled on her hips, fingers pressing through the thin cotton of her shirt, and she felt the tremor in them.
This man who'd killed five people in a warehouse without hesitation, whose hands were steady enough to snap a neck in the dark—those hands were shaking against her skin.
"You're sure," he said. Not a question. A last exit ramp he was offering because the operator in him needed to know she wasn't being influenced.
"I'm sure."
"Because once I stop waiting, I'm not going to start again."
"Good."
She kissed him.
His mouth was warm, cautious for exactly one second before something broke behind the restraint.
His hands tightened on her hips and pulled her forward, off balance, into the space between his knees where her body pressed against his chest. The kiss went from careful to consuming in the span of a heartbeat—his hand sliding up her spine, fingers spreading across her back, holding her against him like she might disappear if he loosened his grip.
She could feel the moment the operator shut off.
Could feel it in the way his breathing changed, the way his hands stopped calculating angles and just held her, the way the kiss turned from something controlled into something desperate.
He kissed her like a man who'd been starving and didn't know it until food was in front of him.
"Victor," she said against his mouth, and the sound of his real name did something to him that violence never had. He pulled back just enough to look at her, and the eyes that read people for weaknesses were stripped bare—no assessment, no strategy, just want so raw it made her chest ache.
"Say it again."
"Victor."
He stood from the stool, lifting her with him, her feet leaving the ground as his arms wrapped around her and his mouth found hers again.
She locked her legs around his waist and felt the garage disappear—the oil smell, the fluorescent lights, the chrome and concrete—all of it gone except the heat of his body and the pressure of his hands and the sound he made against her throat when she pulled his head back by the hair and kissed the hinge of his jaw.
They didn't make it to the chapel.
His room was closer—down the hall from the garage, a door he opened one-handed while she was still wrapped around him, still kissing the scar below his ear that she'd never noticed until her mouth was close enough to find it.
The door closed behind them. He set her down, and for a moment they just stood there, breathing hard, foreheads touching, his hands cradling her face like she was something precious and dangerous in equal measure.