Chapter 7 - Nico
Eighteen times. That’s how many times I’ve replayed throwing that man into the rocks. Not because the violence bothers me. I’ve done worse for less reason. It’s the satisfaction that disturbs me. The cold, perfect rightness I felt watching his blood mix with salt water.
He touched what’s mine.
The thought surfaces before I can stop it. I shove it down, hard. Marisol isn’t mine. She’s an asset. A mission. A disaster in designer clothing who makes up words and calls me Horse Man. Nothing more.
My body doesn’t believe the lie anymore.
I’ve been awake since four, running the scene on loop.
The way his hand slid down her arm. The red film that dropped over my vision.
The throw, not tactical, not measured, but savage.
Pure instinct overriding years of training.
And her face afterward. I’m trained to read micro-expressions, to track fear and arousal and everything between.
She was both. Terrified and turned on, and that combination is more dangerous than any threat I’m supposed to be protecting her from.
The coffee maker hisses as I pour my third cup.
Black, bitter, punishment for letting control slip.
Through the windows, Miami’s morning sun already burns angry gold, another day of heat that makes everything feel too close, too urgent.
Bass thumps from a boat passing on the bay, the sound vibrating through glass.
I check my Glock, standard morning routine. Chamber clear, magazine full. The weight of it reminds me why I’m here. Protection detail, not whatever this is becoming.
Movement from her room. Later than usual, past ten. She emerges differently today, wrapped in an oversized sweater despite the temperature, loose pants instead of her usual barely-there shorts. Her hair falls forward, hiding her face as she reaches for a mug.
“Morning,” I say.
She flinches. Actually flinches, like my voice is a physical touch she wasn’t prepared for. “Coffee first. Words later.”
But there’s no sunshine in it. No tactical banana jokes or elaborate complaints about my existence.
She pours coffee with hands that shake slightly, won’t meet my eyes for more than a heartbeat.
When she does glance my way, pink spreads across her cheeks and she looks away fast, like she’s been caught doing something she shouldn’t.
I notice she’s added sugar to her coffee. Three spoonfuls to my zero. Even our coffee is opposites.
“We need to address something,” I say after she’s had half her mug.
She tenses. “If this is about yesterday…”
“It’s about your safety. You need to learn how to defend yourself.”
She blinks, clearly not what she expected. “What?”
“Basic self-defense. Techniques from resistance training, the kind we use when someone might get grabbed during an extraction.” I keep my voice clinical. “If someone grabs you when I’m not there…”
“You’re literally always there. It’s kind of your whole thing. Lurking. Counting. Being unnecessarily large and intimidating.”
There it is. A flicker of the chaos I know. But muted, like she’s going through the motions.
“I can’t be everywhere. You need to know how to create distance, break a hold, buy time until…”
“Until you arrive to throw them into convenient rocks?” She tries for levity but misses. “I’m more of a scream-and-run type. Very effective. Highly underrated as a defense strategy.”
“And if you can’t run?”
She clutches the coffee mug tighter. “Then I use my other skills. Charm. Bribery. Exceptional luck in finding tactical bananas to save me.”
“None of those work against someone who wants to hurt you.” I let that sink in, watch her remember yesterday’s grabbing hand, the casual assumption of ownership. “That man yesterday. If I hadn’t been there…”
“Fine,” she cuts me off, setting the mug down hard. “Train me. Show me how to defend myself when my tactical banana isn’t around to grab people and make them regret existing.”
“We’ll start with basics. Go change into something you can move in.”
She disappears into her room. When she returns in leggings and a tank top, I have to look away. Count ceiling tiles. The leggings cling to every curve, the tank rides up when she stretches, and I need to remember this is training. Professional. Nothing else.
“First, stance.” I move behind her, and she goes rigid before I even touch her. “Feet wider.”
My hands find her hips to adjust her position. She’s warm through the thin fabric, and when my thumb grazes bare skin where her tank has ridden up, she inhales sharp. The contrast of my callused hands against her soft skin sends heat straight through me.
“Weight centered,” I say, trying to keep my voice steady. “Like this.”
I nudge her foot with mine, hands still on her hips. She’s trembling slightly. From the contact or the memory of yesterday, I can’t tell.
“I know how to stand,” she says, but her voice cracks.
“You’re standing like someone waiting for an Uber. Stand like someone ready to fight back.”
Another adjustment. My hands linger a second too long. She notices. Of course she notices. I catch a whiff of her lotion. Coconut and something floral. Jasmine, maybe.
“I don’t catch Ubers,” she sniffs, but she accepts the adjustment to her stance.
“Now,” I step back, putting necessary distance between us, “if someone grabs your wrist.”
I extend my hand. She stares at it like it might bite.
“It’s just training,” I say.
“Right. Training.” She offers her wrist.
I wrap my hand around it, firm but not painful. Her pulse races under my thumb, a hummingbird’s beat against my skin.
“Rotate toward my thumb and pull. That’s the weak point of the grip.” I demonstrate the motion slowly. “Try it.”
She yanks randomly, no technique. Still trapped.
“Rotate first. Then pull.”
She tries again. Fails. Her frustration is almost cute.
“Commit to it,” I tell her. “Fast. Decisive.”
This time she breaks free, and her whole face lights up. “I did it!”
“Again.”
Each successful break makes her grin wider, and something in my chest tightens at the sight. A distant siren wails somewhere in the city, reminding me there’s a whole world beyond this room where we’re touching under the pretense of training.
She tries, manages to slip free on the second attempt. We’re both breathing harder than the exercise warrants.
“Again,” I say, because I’m a masochist who can’t stop torturing himself with her proximity.
The third time, when she presses back against me before twisting free, I know it’s deliberate. The fourth time, when she takes an extra second before attempting escape, I almost call her on it. The fifth time, when her hands cover mine where they clasp at her, I stop breathing entirely.
“I think I’ve got it,” she says, still pressed against me.
I release her and step back. “Good. Water break.”
She drops onto the floor, cross-legged like a child, chugging water while I try to remember how to be professional.
Her hair is escaping its ponytail. There’s a flush across her chest that has nothing to do with exertion.
When she looks up at me, something unreadable in her honey eyes, my hands start to tremble slightly. Just a tremor, but noticeable.
“Yesterday wasn’t about him being dangerous,” she says suddenly. Not accusing. Just quiet. “Was it.”
I go still.
She watches my hands. The tremor I can’t quite hide. “You do that thing. The counting. The breathing. Like you’re holding something back.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“No?” She picks at the label on her water bottle, the tell she has when she’s nervous. “Every pull-up. Every five AM wake-up. The way you measure everything in numbers.” She pauses. “I’ve seen that before. Different version, but…”
She doesn’t finish. Doesn’t need to. We both know what she’s not saying—that she measures everything in drinks, in pills, in how fast she can drown out the silence.
“It’s not the same.”
“Isn’t it?”
The silence stretches. I can hear tropical birds outside, the hum of the AC, her uneven breathing. She’s not pushing. Just sitting there, water bottle in hand, giving me space to say nothing.
That’s worse, somehow. The patience. The understanding.
“The rocks,” I finally say. My voice sounds wrong. “Yesterday. That was…”
“Controlled.” She says it simply. “You chose the rocks instead of your hands. I noticed.”
My jaw locks. That familiar taste of copper floods my mouth, like I’m back in Afghanistan, like the dust never really cleared.
She draws her knees up to her chest, suddenly looking younger than twenty-six. “Gabriel used to get this look sometimes. Right before he did something terrible. Like he’d already decided, and the rest was just… going through the motions.”
I wait.
“You get a different look.” She tucks that escaped hair behind her ear. “Like you’re deciding not to. Every single time.”
The words land somewhere I don’t let people reach. She’s not comparing me to Gabriel. She’s pointing at the space between us—the choice I make that he doesn’t.
“I helped him hide something,” she says, quieter now. “That night. I don’t even know all of what it was, but I know it was bad. And I just…” She shrugs, the gesture too casual for what she’s saying. “Poured another drink. Looked the other way.”
I should say something. Offer comfort, or distance, or anything other than standing here like a statue.
Instead: “Why are you telling me this?”
She looks up. Those honey eyes, too knowing.
“Because you keep looking at me like I’m something you need to protect.” She stands, brushes off her leggings. “And I think you should know I’m not. Not really.”
The air between us shifts. She’s given me something—not forgiveness, not absolution, but recognition. And I’ve given her nothing back.
“We should continue training,” I say.
“Should we?”
But she backs up, gives me space to breathe. “What’s next in self-defense school? More grabbing? More pressing against each other and pretending it’s professional?”