Chapter 9 #2
Sutton pulled her knees up on the couch, wrapping her arms around them. A defensive posture. “I’m handling it.”
“Remarkably well, it seems.” Vivi paused. “What concerns me is what happens when the immediate crisis passes. Adrenaline is an extraordinary fuel, but it burns hot and fast, and when it’s gone, the things it was holding back come flooding in.”
Vivi was laying groundwork—establishing that the crisis would end and the aftermath would need tending. Planting the idea now so it would be familiar later.
“Speaking of the crisis passing,” Vivi said, “I spoke to St. Patrick’s about Dom.”
Sutton’s arms tightened around her knees. Her chin lifted.
“His doctor believes he’s turned a corner. He’s been going in and out of consciousness since you left, but he knows his name and understands where he is.” Vivi smiled—genuine, warm. “Both are very good signs.”
Sutton’s face crumpled. Not into tears—into relief. She pressed her forehead against her knees, shoulders curving inward as she made a sound that was more exhale than sob. Sebastian watched the tension leave her body in a visible wave, fear releasing all at once.
He fought not to put his arm around her like he’d done in the SUV.
Vivi gave her a moment, then said gently, “Sebastian, would you get Sutton something to drink? I think she could use some water or maybe a soda. We need to keep her hydrated.”
Vivi Montgomery didn’t need him to fetch beverages.
She needed him out of the room so Sutton could say the things she wouldn’t say with him listening.
It was a standard therapeutic technique—remove the variable that was suppressing disclosure—and the fact that he was the variable stung more than his split lip.
But Sutton needed this. He could see the cracks in the armor she’d been holding together through sheer will. If his absence gave her space to let something out, then his absence was what he’d give her.
“Water, Coke?” he asked her.
She looked up. “Just water.”
He pulled the door closed behind him. Stood in the hallway for a count of three, then walked to the kitchen.
There, he took his time filling a glass with ice water from the fridge.
He found a Coke in the back for himself.
Then he stood at the counter for five minutes, staring at the condensation forming on the glass, listening to the compound’s quiet hum, and pretending he wasn’t thinking about what Sutton was telling Vivi that she couldn’t tell him.
When he returned, he knocked before entering, but came to a full stop.
Sutton was crying—real crying, the kind that reddened the nose and swelled the eyes. A tissue was balled in her fist. Vivi sat in her chair, her expression one of compassion.
“What the hell did you do?” The words left his mouth before his brain caught up.
Vivi’s gaze lifted to his, unperturbed. She’d weathered worse from better-armored men. She quirked a brow.
Sutton waved a hand. “I’m all right.” Her voice was thick, clogged. She wiped her face with the tissue. “She brought up some things I hadn’t considered about Penn.” She drew a shaky breath. “About how I’ve been carrying him. About what it’s cost me.”
Sebastian set the water and the Coke on the side table. His hands were steady. The rest of him was not.
Sutton stood. “I’m going to wash my face. I’m sure I look like a disaster.”
He moved toward the door. “I’ll walk you—”
“The bathroom is twelve feet down the hall, Lynx.” She put a hand on his chest. Brief, warm, her fingers pressing against the cotton of his shirt. “I can manage twelve feet. I’ll be right back.”
She slipped past him. The door closed behind her. Her footsteps receded down the corridor. Sebastian stood with his back to Vivi, wanting to go after her.
Vivi said nothing. Slowly, he turned. Her expression now was the one he’d been avoiding—patient, perceptive, absolutely certain of what she was seeing.
The silence stretched.
“Garrett briefed me an hour ago,” Vivi said, “on the press situation. The hospital incident is going to hit the news cycle by morning. An unexplained shooting, an FBI extraction, and you.” At his frown, she added, “Someone in the hospital leaked a photograph of you in the corridor. Apparently, your fans are everywhere.”
Sebastian closed his eyes. “Not funny.”
“They don’t have Sutton’s name yet,” Vivi continued. “But when they do, it’s going to accelerate everything. The fan sites have already speculated that the mystery woman leaving the hospital with you is Ginger’s replacement. Their word, not mine.”
His stomach roiled.
“Claire’s team is working on containment—tight lids, no public statements, no official acknowledgments. But the ecosystem out there has its own gravity. The more you resist, the harder it pulls.”
He rubbed his eyes. The exhaustion sat behind them like sand. “You’re not going to tell me to hold a press conference or anything else inane, are you?”
“You know the options better than I do.” Vivi folded her hands on her desk.
“I’m telling you because the next few weeks are going to pile pressure on top of whatever is happening between you and Sutton.
And I’m not willing to let you walk out of here pretending the thing in the middle of the room isn’t there. ”
He looked up. She was still watching him with that patient, perceptive expression. That was when he cracked. Not because she was pushing. Because she wasn’t. “I know what you’re going to say,” he said.
“Do you?” The faintest curve at the corner of her mouth appeared. “I’d love to hear it.”
He rubbed a hand over his jaw. Stubble rasped against his palm. He was always clean-shaven, yet he’d barely showered in the past three days. The split lip throbbed. His ribs ached when he breathed too deeply.
None of it mattered. None of it had mattered since the moment the gun had risen toward Sutton and his world had narrowed to a single, screaming imperative: not her.
“I can’t separate it.” The words came out rough, dragged from a place he’d kept locked all these years. “The job. The—” He stopped, started again. “When that gun came up today, it wasn’t my training that kicked in.” He met Vivi’s eyes. “It was raw, animalistic rage. If that bullet had hit her—”
He couldn’t finish the sentence. The thirty-second rule had nothing for this.
There was no sealing it, no filing it away for later processing in the dark.
It was too big. It filled every room he walked into.
It was in the smell of her shampoo on his jacket, the phantom warmth of her head on his shoulder, the lynx she’d traced on his forearm with her finger.
Vivi didn’t rush to fill the silence. She sat with his unfinished sentence and gave it the room it needed. Then she said, “Sometimes the feelings are the information, Sebastian.”
He narrowed his eyes at her. “What the hell does that mean?”
“It means you’ve spent years treating your emotions as obstacles—things to manage, contain, override.
You built a system and denied that you needed therapy.
” She tilted her head. “Your system has kept you functional. It’s also kept you isolated and disconnected.
Now, you care about someone you don’t want to, and it’s eating you up. ”
Direct hit. He didn’t flinch, but it was close.
“What you felt today—the fear, the urgency, the rage that separates professional from personal—that isn’t a malfunction.
It’s data. It’s telling you something about what matters to you.
Trying to shut it down is like turning off the warning lights on a car’s dashboard because you don’t want to deal with what they’re indicating. ”
“Warning lights exist because something’s wrong.”
“Or because something’s changing.” Vivi picked up her tea and sipped. “Not every alarm is a crisis. Some of them are your system telling you that the old operating parameters no longer apply.”
He grabbed the Coke, downed half of it. It stung his lip, but he welcomed the pain.
The ground he’d built his current life on was shifting beneath his feet, making room for something he hadn’t planned for.
Something that had brown eyes and ink on her forearms and a laugh he’d heard exactly twice and couldn’t stop thinking about.
Footsteps in the hallway. Sutton was coming back.
Sebastian straightened and pulled the mask into place. He met Vivi’s eyes one more time. “This stays between us.”
Vivi’s expression was the closest thing to gentle he’d ever seen. “If you’d come for the required sessions, you’d know it always does.”
The door opened. Sutton walked in, face washed, eyes still red but steadier. She glanced at Sebastian and then at Vivi. “You two were talking about me, weren’t you?”
“Absolutely not,” Vivi said.
“We were discussing the Costco couch,” Sebastian added.
Sutton narrowed her eyes at both of them. Then she crossed the room and took the Coke from his hands. She took a long drink and sighed with an exhausted surrender.
The sound machine sat silent. None of them said anything. It was the quietest Sebastian’s mind had been in six years.
“Are we good?” Sutton said, almost hesitantly.
“Yes,” he answered automatically, steering her toward the door.
He glanced back to see Vivi smiling. “My door’s always open,” she said, then winked, “and blank notebooks are always available.”