Chapter 19 Bellamy
BELLAMY
Two and a half hours of recon, and my notebook has exactly two changes worth noting in it. Two. That’s how dead this street is.
The night air drifts through the cracked windows and the half-open sunroof, cool enough to keep me alert but not cold.
I can hear the faint hum of traffic from a bigger road somewhere behind us, but here—across from Highlight Entertainment’s alley—it’s quiet.
Too quiet to justify the amount of caffeine vibrating through my bloodstream.
Next to me, Cruz hasn’t moved. Not really. He shifted forward once to grab his drink from the cup holder, but otherwise he’s been in the same slouched, statuesque position the entire time. Legs stretched out, ankle crossed over his knee, hands loose against his stomach. Completely at ease.
I’m mid-scan of the storefronts when he finally speaks.
“When you said recon, I didn’t realize it came with stationery,” he murmurs.
I blink. “What?”
He nods toward the notebook in my lap. “The pen, the paper. Very official. Very serious. I’m impressed.”
“You don’t take notes?” I arch a brow.
He taps his temple. “Up here. Premium storage.”
I let out a snort before I can help it. “Right. And when your premium storage gets short-circuited because you get distracted, then what?”
He gives me a slow, lazy blink—equal parts challenge and amusement. “Distracted by what, exactly?”
“I don’t know.” I jot down another useless timestamp just to feel productive. “A dog. A twenty-four-hour taco truck. A pretty face.”
His grin blooms, sharp and bright in the low light. “Well, you’re not wrong. But I guess it depends on the face.”
I refuse to look at him for that one. He’s baiting me, and I’m not giving him the satisfaction. Not tonight.
Thin silence stretches over the truck again. It’s not comfortable or heavy—it’s just there. The only sounds are our steady breaths and the lo-fi playlist Cruz put on an hour ago. Soft percussion, mellow bass, nothing too intrusive.
He lasts maybe five minutes before breaking it.
“All right, I’m calling it. This is so boring.”
“We’re working,” I remind him.
“We’re sitting in a truck in the dark watching absolutely nothing happen,” he counters. “And you’re about three bad minutes away from stabbing that notebook out of spite. So let’s play a game.”
I exhale. “We’re not here to play games.”
“I personally think we can do both.” He shifts just enough to angle toward me, profile brushed by the streetlight glow. “Would you rather do recon with me or Gage?”
I turn my head slowly and give him the flattest look I own. “That’s a moot question. I’m already here with you.”
“So you are.” His eyes glint. “But that doesn’t mean it’s not answerable. C’mon, Bells. Play with me.”
God, he’s annoying.
And fuck, have I missed this. Him.
The thought hits and I shake it off fast.
A flicker of familiar mischief settles across my shoulders. It feels foreign now, rusty from disuse, but also good. Stupidly good.
I let a slow grin spread as I meet his eyes. “Neither. I’d take Rafe.”
He stares for a beat, then a sly half-grin hooks at the corner of his mouth as a low chuckle slips out. “Aw, c’mon, Bells. You know that’s not how you play.”
“That’s where you’re wrong, Cruzie,” I shoot back lightly. “That’s exactly how I play.”
Something shifts in the air. Barely there but present enough that my skin prickles.
“Haven’t heard that in a while.” His gaze roams across my face like he’s committing the details to memory.
Heat crawls up my neck, slow and certain, a steady tide I can't ignore. I didn’t mean to use the nickname. It just slipped out of some dusty drawer in my memory.
“Old habits.” I lift a shoulder.
He hums low. “You never could choose, could you?”
The question lands heavier than it should. Dense, deliberate—a weight that nearly presses the air out of the room. It hovers between us, thick as humidity after a summer thunderstorm, too charged to ignore, too pointed to brush off. I blink, startled by its gravity, as if I hadn’t seen it coming.
My pulse skips, and I try to swallow down the feeling, but it lingers, metallic and sharp at the back of my throat. The words themselves aren’t much, but the way they’re asked? Like they’re meant to pin me in place, to wring out something I hadn’t planned to give.
For a second, I wonder if things could shift back to normal, if I could just laugh it off. But the question clings, stubborn. Its echo is everywhere: in the stretch of silence, in the way my hands can’t keep still, in the faint, unsteady beat beneath my ribs.
Intentional. Absolutely. And now, impossible to ignore. I clear my throat and drag my gaze back to the windshield. “Next question.”
He grins because he knows exactly what he did. But he lets me redirect.
“Would you rather only eat pizza with pineapple on it for the rest of your life, or never eat pizza again?”
His head jerks back like I slapped him. “The fuck, Bellamy.”
A startled laugh bubbles up from my chest, light and unexpected, like the fizz at the top of a newly opened bottle. “You wanted a game.”
“That’s not a game, that’s psychological warfare.” He shakes his head. “Absolutely not. I guess I’d never eat pizza again.”
My brows rise toward my hair. “That’s commitment.”
“That’s self-respect. You don’t put fruit on pizza.”
My lips twitch with amusement. “It’s a topping, not a crime.”
“Tell that to God.”
I huff out another laugh, softer this time, and something in the truck uncoils. The tight vigilance eases, and the edges round out.
For the first time tonight, it feels less like recon and more like the beginnings of an old rhythm slipping back into place.
Cruz settles back again, stretching his legs, ankles crossing at the dashboard like this is his car. He goes still—the kind of stillness that has weight behind it. I used to think it meant he was relaxed. Now I know better.
Cruz Calloway is really good at pretending.
Another few minutes pass, quiet except for the soft thrum of the playlist and the scratch of my pen as I jot down a timestamp out of sheer stubbornness, even though nothing worth noting is happening.
Then, without looking at me, he says, “How long are we gonna pretend none of this is weird?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” My grip tightens around the pen as I very deliberately watch the street.
“Sure you do. C’mon, Bells. It’s me.” His voice is gentle, annoyingly so.
I feel the words imprint on my soul like they always used to, whether I wanted them to or not.
“You disappeared for six years,” he continues quietly. “Six years. And now you’re back, sitting in your truck with me, running jobs.” A pause. “That’s weird.”
I don't move. The pen freezes between my fingers, my breath caught somewhere in my throat. A warm flush creeps up my neck, and the thud beneath my collarbone becomes so loud I'm certain he can hear it in the quiet of the truck.
“What do you want from me, Cruz?” I murmur.
He finally turns his head, rolling it along the back of the headrest until he’s angled toward me. His eyes trace over my face, like he’s taking inventory. Cataloguing changes and comparing versions of me I wish he didn’t remember so well.
“You have more freckles now,” he says softly.
The observation knocks the air right out of me.
“Oh,” I manage. “Six years is a long time.”
“Too long,” he replies, without even a hint of hesitation.
The words are simple. Small even. But they hit me with the same quiet precision he always had. A clean arrow shot straight through the space I’ve been working very, very hard to fortify.
I don’t answer. I can’t.
He exhales, slow and low, the sound nearly lost in the haze of lo-fi percussion. “What else is different?”
“Everything.” It slips out before I can choose something safer. “Nothing.”
He lets the silence stretch, leaving space between us. He doesn't nudge, doesn't press for more. Just watches me, still and intent, like he's weighing every word I don't say.
“I was afraid of that.”
My breath lodges in my chest, and I force myself to look back out the windshield. To the empty sidewalk and the darkened storefronts and the little pool of light under a flickering streetlamp.
We haven’t really spoken or been this close in years. And yet somehow sitting here in the dark with him feels like muscle memory. Like a song I haven’t heard in forever but still know every beat of.
A man walks down the block, and I mark the time out of pure reflex, even though my brain is barely processing it.
Because Cruz is still watching me. And I can feel it.
My fingertips tingle against the steering wheel, and the hairs on my forearms rise beneath my jacket. Each breath between us seems to crackle with something invisible but unmistakable, like the moment before lightning strikes.
I swallow hard. So much time has passed, and still, I find myself slipping into old gravitational pulls, feeling that unmistakable tug toward the Calloways.
Everything is different now, but somehow it’s all exactly the same. The world shifts around me, the air charged and vibrating with change, but at the core—the very heart of it—it’s untouched, familiar, stubbornly unyielding. Nothing has changed, and yet everything has.
Headlights sweep across the alley two storefronts down.
My spine straightens instantly. Cruz doesn’t move, but I feel him sharpen beside me, all that languid posture tightening beneath the surface the way a cat coils before it pounces.
A white delivery van turns into the alley behind Honeybee Bakery. It’s not the music store, but it’s close enough to be a problem.
“That’s early,” I murmur, leaning forward.
“Or late,” Cruz adds.
We watch as the driver hops out, enters a four-digit code on the keypad by the rear door, and slips inside like he’s done it a thousand times.
I jot down the time. “Not a new guy. He didn’t fumble for the keycode or check a clipboard. So he must be somewhat of a regular.”
“Owner?” Cruz guesses.
“Or someone with keys.” I scan through all the previous recon notes Lola and I made. “Deliveries for Honeybee are normally between four and four-thirty in the morning. We’ve never seen a midnight delivery before.” I tap my pen against the page, my mind turning.
He tilts his head, studying the alley with that quiet precision of his. “So either it’s a monthly late delivery or something went wrong today.”
I nod, sinking my teeth into my cheek. “Right. Or the bakery has an unpredictable schedule.”
“Which is the last thing you want for a job next door.”
A tight exhale escapes me. “Our timeline has to change.”
The job only works if we have the lowest degree of discoverability possible. Beck has some kind of formula he designed that we use, and if our number is above twenty percent, then we reassess the job. This midnight surprise delivery means we need to reassess our timeframe.
Cruz nods, tapping his thumb once against his thigh. “So our window shrinks. We can’t be anywhere near that alley before one.”
“Or after three-thirty,” I finish.
He glances sideways at me, lips curving. “Look at us. A well-oiled machine.”
I roll my eyes, but it’s weak, because he’s not wrong. The deduction happened fast and clean, like we’ve been doing this together for years instead of for the first time in forever.
The driver leaves the bakery ten minutes later, locks up, and pulls away without so much as glancing in our direction.
I write down every detail.
Cruz watches me for a long moment. “Gonna need more night recon. We can’t assume this is a fluke, we need to be as certain as we can.”
“I know.” A sigh slips out before I can catch it. “We’ll have to come back tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow,” he echoes, smiling faintly. “Good. I was hoping you’d say that.”
I don’t ask why. I’m not sure I want to know.
The notebook feels warm in my hands. The truck hums softly around us. The night air presses in cool and salty through the cracked windows, and for a quick, dangerous second, I let myself breathe.
Cruz shifts, stretching his arms behind his head. “We make a good team, Bells.”
His easy certainty lands like a stone skipped across still water—ripples spreading outward from the point of impact. I shouldn't feel this thaw, this quiet surrender in muscles I've kept tensed for years. But damn him, I do.
“Don’t get used to it.” My voice isn’t half as sharp as I want it to be.
His grin is slow. Knowing and unbearably Cruz. “Too late.”
I snap my gaze to the alley, squinting at the brick wall, the dumpster, the fire escape.
My fingers grip the pen too tightly. I count the windows on the building across the street—one, two, three—anything to anchor myself to the job instead of the way his smile just pulled at something buried deep in my chest.
Because it’s stupid—so stupid—but for the first time since we agreed to partner with the Calloways, the idea of sitting in a car with one of them all night doesn’t feel like a punishment.
And that might be the most dangerous discovery of the night.