Chapter 18 WREN
WREN
There’s a knock at my door and my stomach drops.
My phone is face-down on the couch beside me because I’ve been ignoring it for the last half hour, and every time it lights up I have to decide all over again not to answer.
Jace. Jace. Jace. Unknown number. Jace.
The knock comes again. Three quick raps. Then a fourth.
I get up.
The peephole, every time, Wren.
Bare feet on the wood. I press my eye to the glass.
It’s him.
Tyler.
Six-two, shoulders that used to fill out every shirt he owned, good-looking enough that it worked on me years longer than it should have.
Standing out in my hallway close enough that the distortion of the lens bends his nose.
Hands shoved into the pockets of his jeans like he’s waiting for me to open the door so he can come in and put his feet up.
I step back from the door fast.
Okay.
Okay. Think.
Locks. All three. Deadbolt, chain, the one Jace put in himself. I check each of them with my hand without taking my eyes off the door. All set. All holding.
Phone. I need my phone. I turn, cross to the couch, pick it up off the cushion.
“Wren.”
His voice comes through the door soft. Almost gentle. The door is a cheap interior door and it might as well be paper between us.
“Go home, Tyler.”
“Open up. We need to talk.”
“No we don’t.”
“You’ve been ignoring me.”
Something about the way he says it—low and reasonable, like I’ve been the unreasonable one, like this is a conversation we had scheduled—hits a switch in me I didn’t know I had.
“Tyler. Go home. Right now.”
“Just five minutes.”
“No.”
“Wren.” And here it is. The voice I remember. Softer. The I’m hurt you’re making this so hard voice. “I came all the way out here.”
“I didn’t ask you to.”
“Don’t be like this.”
A long pause. And then, quieter.
“I miss you.”
My stomach turns.
“Tyler, I’m calling the police.”
“You won’t.”
The calm in it is what does it. He says it the way you’d tell someone they’re not going to order the fish. You won’t. Because he knows me. Because he was with me for a long time and he thinks he still gets to know me.
And something in me that’s been quiet for a very long time wakes up.
“Watch me.”
I press the button on the side of my phone.
The screen stays black.
No.
I press it again. Harder. Like that’s going to do anything.
Nothing.
Half an hour of it lighting up on the couch with Jace on the screen and me ignoring every call, letting it drain itself to nothing.
Fine.
I can be angry about that later. Right now I need a plan.
Charger’s in the kitchen. Thirty seconds to plug it in, another minute before the phone even turns on.
Fire escape’s through the bedroom. Mrs. Alvarez is across the hall, but Tyler’s in the hallway, so that’s out.
Sasha lives twenty minutes away and her number’s trapped in the dead phone.
I walk—quiet, bare feet—toward the kitchen.
And then, from the hallway, a soft scrape.
Metal on metal.
I stop.
The handle.
He’s trying the handle.
It doesn’t move—it can’t, I locked all three, the locks are holding—but I watch it rotate a quarter inch under the weight of a hand and everything in me goes still.
“Tyler. Get your hand off the door.”
“Wren. Just let me in. Five minutes.”
“Get your hand off my door.”
The handle settles back into place.
For a second I think he’s going to leave. I wait for the sound of his footsteps moving away.
They don’t come.
Instead I hear him settle his weight against the frame. A slow lean. The wood creaks under him.
Then his voice again, harder now.
“Open the goddamn door, Wren. I just want to talk.”
My stomach drops.
There it is. The voice underneath the voice. The one I used to tell myself I was imagining.
He is not leaving.
Okay.
Okay. That’s fine. Let him lean on my door for an hour.
My phone will charge and I’ll call the police and he’ll still be standing out there when they show up and that will be the best possible outcome, because then it’s all on camera, and then it’s on paper, and then there’s a report and a record and something I can use.
I back into the kitchen. Quiet as I can. Plug the phone into the charger on the counter. Watch the dead screen.
Come on.
Come on.
Come on.
A faint pulse on the glass. The little battery icon blinking red.
That’s at least two minutes before it’ll power on.
I lean against the counter and fold my arms across myself because my hands are shaking and I don’t want to look at them.
I listen through the apartment—through the living room, down the hallway, into the corner of the kitchen where I’m pressed against the fridge—and I can hear him breathing on the other side of my door.
I can hear him.
I am not fine.
I am not fine but I am also not opening that door and I am not crying in my kitchen and I am not falling apart, because if I fall apart he has won, and Tyler Vaughn is not going to win anything else in my life ever again.
Two minutes. I can do two minutes.
Then—through the window, through the thin glass of my kitchen—a car on the block.
Tires on concrete. A door slamming.
The front door of my building slams open.
I push off the counter.
Footsteps in the stairwell. Coming up fast.
Tyler’s voice in the hallway, startled. “What the—”
And then a voice I would know in my sleep.
Low, rough, lethal—and god help me, relief hits so hard my knees almost give.
“Get the fuck off her door.”
Oh.
Oh, god.
I’m at the peephole before I’ve decided to move.
My eye to the glass.
Jace.
I don’t know the man on the other side of that glass.
Tyler has turned from the door. Not backing down.
“Who the fuck are you?”
Jace doesn’t answer. He keeps walking.
“I said—” Tyler’s hand comes up to Jace’s chest, a shove—“who the fuck are you?”
Jace doesn’t move.
Tyler’s shove lands on him and does nothing. He doesn’t rock back. He doesn’t adjust. His body absorbs it like it wasn’t there.
And then Jace is on him.
Fast. One hand at the front of Tyler’s hoodie, one at his throat, and he walks Tyler backward three full steps and pins him against the opposite wall of the hallway hard enough that I hear the drywall give.
Tyler makes a sound—not a shout, just a grunt punched out of him—and Tyler, who is my height plus six inches, Tyler who used to grab my wrist hard enough to leave marks, Tyler goes still against the wall like a dog on its back.
I can’t breathe.
Jace doesn’t raise his voice.
“If you come near her apartment again, I’ll know. If you come near her shop again, I’ll know. If I see you on this block I am not going to be this polite.”
Tyler tries something. “I don’t know what she told you, but—”
The hand at his throat tightens. Tyler’s mouth shuts.
“Walk.”
Jace lets go. Tyler stumbles a step, rights himself, and moves for the stairs fast, and Jace follows him down—close enough that Tyler doesn’t try to turn around.
The front door of the building opens and shuts.
A car engine somewhere on the block. Tires.
Then nothing.
I step back from the peephole.
Footsteps. Just one set now. Coming up slower.
A knock. Three. Soft.
“Wren. It’s me.”
I slide the chain. Undo the deadbolt. Leave the new lock for last because that was the one he put on himself, and there is something about turning that particular bolt for him that I don’t want to look at too closely.
I open the door.
He’s still breathing a little hard. Sleeves rolled to his forearms. That line between his eyebrows I’ve never seen on him before.
He doesn’t say anything.
He steps inside. Shuts the door behind him.
And then he turns and looks at me.
Just looks.
Standing in the middle of my living room in a white button-down with the sleeves rolled to his forearms, knuckles flexing once at his side, eyes locked on mine like he’s making sure I’m still here, still breathing, still in one piece—and everything that just happened in the hallway is sitting in the space between us, and he is not going to say a word about it until I do.
His chest moves once. A breath he was holding.
And that’s what does it.
I cross the room.
I don’t think about it. I walk across my living room on bare feet and I press myself into the front of his shirt and I let him catch me, and his arms come around me fast—not careful this time, not hesitant—and he holds me hard enough that I can feel his heart through his chest going about twice as fast as it should be.
I let myself be held. I feel the shaking in my hands start to move up into the rest of me and I know—I know—if I stay here for another ten seconds I am going to lose it completely, and I am not going to lose it completely.
Not tonight.
Not after I just watched the man holding me put Tyler through a wall.
I pull back.
He lets me. Immediately. His arms open the second I start to move and he steps back half a foot to give me air, and his eyes move over my face and I watch him clock it—watch him see me pulling it together—and something in his expression shifts.
Respect.
He knows what I’m doing.
He lets me do it.
“I was handling it,” I say.
His eyes move over my face.
“I know.”
“My phone died. I was about to charge it and call the police. I had a plan.”
“I know.”
“I don’t need you to—”
“Wren.” His voice is quiet. “Tell me what he said.”
“He said he missed me. He said we needed to talk. He said I’ve been ignoring him. He said I wouldn’t call the police.”
“Were you going to?”
“Yes.”
Something moves behind his eyes. Approval. Rage. Fear. I can’t tell.
I look down at my hands.
“There was a white rose in my shop this morning.”
Silence.
His whole body stills.
“What?”
“In a vase.” I swallow. “On the counter.”
His eyes stay on mine.
“I know it was him. I just don’t know how he got in.”
“The cameras should have caught that.”
I look away.
“Wren.”
“I turned the feed off this morning.”
His jaw flexes once. Hard.
“Why the fuck didn’t you tell me that?”
“Because I was angry at you.”
“Jesus Christ, Wren.”
Silence stretches between us.
“Pack a bag for tonight.”
His eyes hold mine.
“You’re coming home with me.”