Chapter 29
twenty-nine
Evie
"What's a clean site versus a processing site?"
The question leaves my mouth while I'm still pouring, my back to the doorway, and I keep my voice in the casual register of someone who just remembered something mildly interesting rather than someone who's been turning the phrase over since she heard Cole say it six hours ago.
My fingers find the vanilla creamer and twist off the cap.
"Different functions." Remy's voice comes from the doorway, lower than usual, rough at the edges because the drive home used whatever he had left.
"Clean site is intake. Medical screening, documentation, sorting.
Processing is where they get moved to buyers.
Different locations, different security profiles, different.
.." A pause. "Different level of evidence. "
I turn.
He's in the doorframe, shoulder against the wood in the exact spot where he stood the night he told me about my father, and the parallel would be poetic if he looked anything like the man who delivered that confession.
He doesn't.
That Remy had been controlled, every word placed.
This one has his sleeves shoved past his elbows and shadows carved beneath his eyes and his hair pushed back by hands that have run through it too many times, and his body is doing the thing it does when the performance fuel runs dry, which is nothing.
Just standing. Just existing in a space without managing how he fills it.
Heat drops through my stomach and goes low, a slow liquid pull deep in my pelvis that has nothing to do with memory and everything to do with him right now, unguarded, too tired to arrange himself into someone easier to look at. My pulse ticks up against my throat.
"So the facility today was a clean site that doubled as holding.
" I reach up and pull a second mug from the cabinet, setting it beside mine.
"That's why the layout didn't match your blueprints.
The restricted corridor wasn't on the original plans because it was added after the building passed inspection. "
His eyes track the second mug. His expression changes.
Old routine. My hands knew before I did.
I add creamer to both, the spoon clinking twice against ceramic, and set his mug on the counter closest to the doorframe where he won't have to cross the whole kitchen to reach it.
Remy pushes off the doorframe and walks past the threshold.
I don't go to the far stool.
The thought surfaces and dissolves in the same breath because my legs are already carrying me past it, past the spot where I sat for eight days with the full length of the island between us, past Darcy's stool with the wobbly leg she never let Remy fix because she said it "had personality.
" I open the fridge and crouch into the cold light, scanning shelves that still look like mine because he never rearranged what I organized.
"Omelets." I pull out eggs, cheese, the bunch of green onions Darcy would've turned into a TikTok garnish. "Unless you ate without me, in which case you can sit there and watch."
"I didn't eat."
I set the eggs on the counter and he's already moving, rising from his lean against the island and crossing to the cabinet where the skillet lives. I hold still like when something lands on you that you don't want to startle away.
The cast iron meets the burner with a clank.
"Other burner." I'm slicing green onions, the knife moving in quick even strokes against the board. "And hand me the bowl, the glass one."
He reaches past me for the oil and his forearm crosses the space above my collarbone, close enough that the heat lifting off his skin presses against mine without contact.
My body responds before my brain catalogs the reason, a slow bloom that locks into the narrow band of taut air between his arm and my throat.
I crack eggs into the glass bowl. He sets the oil beside the stove.
When he opens the cabinet above the sink for the pepper grinder, he opens the right one.
First try. No hesitation, no scanning, no correction.
I moved the pepper grinder two weeks ago when I reorganized the spice shelf during one of the eight silent days, and he opens the correct cabinet like he's been watching where things land.
"You noticed I moved it."
"You put the everyday spices at eye level and the baking stuff on the top shelf." He sets the grinder beside my cutting board. "It's a better system."
Something warm and inconvenient moves through my chest.
The cream. He set out the cream every morning.
Even during the worst of it, even when I was sleeping in the guest room and he was sleeping wherever guilt takes a person at three AM, the cream appeared on the counter before I came downstairs.
Something load-bearing, like the beams under a house, invisible until something gives.
I whisk the eggs harder than they need. "Gruyère or cheddar."
"Your call."
"Gruyère, then." I slide the bowl toward the stove and he's already there, tilting oil into the heated pan, and the sizzle fills the kitchen with something that sounds like a house where people live.
His knuckles brush my hip when he reaches behind me for the spatula, a graze so brief it could be accidental if either of us believed in accidents anymore, and I don't move away and he doesn't apologize and the omelet starts to set at the edges while neither of us mentions the warmth his hand left on the curve of my waist.
I scatter green onions across the setting eggs and lean my hip against the counter. "Does Jax always narrate everything he's doing while he's doing it?"
Remy's hand pauses over the spatula.
"Because I'm sitting there with my headset on, cross-referencing wire transfers, and this man is giving me a play-by-play of his own footsteps, like a sportscaster who accidentally wandered into a building full of armed guards."
Remy's mouth moves. The corner pulls and the tension around his eyes loosens for half a second.
"He processes out loud." Remy folds the omelet with a clean flick of the spatula, and the motion is economical enough to make me wonder how many things those hands do with that exact efficiency. "It keeps him focused. If he goes quiet, that's when you worry."
"So the constant commentary is a feature."
"Four years of fieldwork and he hasn't gotten anyone killed yet."
"Yet. That's reassuring."
He slides the omelet onto a plate and pushes it toward me, already cracking more eggs into the bowl for a second one. He made mine first, and I pick up a fork before the feeling can take a name.
"Kade, though." I cut into the omelet and the gruyère stretches in a long pull.
"I've been in rooms with press secretaries who've coached their voices for twenty years, and none of them sound like that.
He never changed pitch. Not when the layout was wrong, not when the restricted corridor showed up, not when the gunshot came through. "
I chew, swallow, and the food is good enough that my body remembers it hasn't eaten since the granola bar Angelina handed me at noon.
"My father's cardiologist has that voice. He could tell you your arteries are ninety percent blocked and you'd feel like you were being told the specials at a nice restaurant."
My thighs press together under the counter. I take another bite so my mouth has a reason to be occupied.
Remy watches me from the stove, and the exhaustion in his face sharpens into attention.
"You noticed the right things today." He says it evenly, without inflection, confirming coordinates or verifying a dosage.
I know the difference. I grew up drowning in the other kind.
The omelet goes cold on my plate while I push the last bite through a smear of gruyère with the edge of my fork.
"The boy." I set the fork down. "The fifteen-year-old. You changed your voice when you called him in."
Remy's hands still over his plate. The involuntary kind I've learned to recognize, where the body stops because the brain needs all available resources for something else.
"On comms, you were clinical with every other victim.
Stable, ambulatory, fractured radius, sedation levels.
Numbers and conditions." I fold my hands on the counter because they want to reach for him and that's not what this moment needs.
"But when you got to him, you said 'minor, fifteen, tracking.
' You dropped the medical language. You said tracking like it mattered that he was awake enough to see you. "
Remy pushes his plate two inches to the left. Picks up his coffee. Sets it back down without drinking.
"He was on the floor." His voice is quiet and stripped of the registers I've learned to read, neither Saint's flat efficiency nor the warm Louisiana that bleeds through when his walls thin.
"Not on a mattress. The others had mattresses, thin ones, but he was on concrete with a blanket that someone had folded under his head like a pillow.
And he watched me come through the door and he didn't flinch, Evangeline.
He tracked me, assessing for threat level, and he was fifteen and he'd already learned that. "
My throat closes.
The kitchen holds the sound of the refrigerator humming and the faint tick of the cooling burner and nothing else, and I let it hold those sounds without filling the space because some silences aren't empty.
Eighteen months ago I processed another wire transfer for Pacific Future Initiative.
I typed the routing number and confirmed the amount and filed the receipt in the Q3 donor folder and closed my laptop and went downstairs and poured myself a glass of wine and watched the sunset from the porch and never once asked where two hundred and fifty thousand dollars was going because my father told me it was handled and I believed him because believing him was easier than the alternative and that money bought the concrete that boy slept on.