Chapter 8 #3
"Off the case. Out of the city." I was already building the logistics in my head. Safe house locations. Transport routes. Cover stories. "I'll arrange secure transport. Somewhere Reeves can't reach. I'll finish this alone."
"No."
The word was quiet and it stopped me like a wall.
"Lindsey..."
"I said no." She pushed herself up against the pillows, wincing, her face going white. "I'm not hiding while you do something stupid and get yourself killed."
"They tried to murder you."
"Yeah. I was there. I remember." Her voice cracked on the word 'remember' and she took a breath through her teeth, and I could see what the breathing cost her, could see the pain in her ribs spike with every inhale. "I'm not letting them win by making me disappear."
"This isn't about winning..."
"It's about those kids in the photographs, Will.
It's about your sister. It's about... " She gripped my hand, and her knuckles were white, and her eyes were wet, and she was angry and scared and in pain and she was not backing down.
"I crossed lines for this case. I made choices I can't undo.
I don't get to walk away because it got dangerous. "
"You could die!"
"So could you!" Her voice rose, then broke.
She closed her eyes, breathing hard. When she opened them, tears were tracking down her face, but her eyes were determined, and the tears and the stubbornness existed simultaneously in a way that made me understand, for the first time, that she wasn't being reckless.
She was being brave. There was a difference, and I hadn't seen it until now.
"So could you," she said again, quieter. "And you've been doing this alone for seven years. Seven years. And I can't..."
She didn't finish. Her hand was shaking in mine. Or mine was shaking in hers. I couldn't tell anymore.
I looked at her. Bandages, bruises, determination burning beneath exhaustion.
This woman. This impossible, stubborn, infuriating woman who followed the money and found the truth and refused to be managed and made me laugh about lo mein and called me out when I was wrong and was right now sitting in a hospital bed with broken ribs, telling me she wasn't going anywhere.
I'd tried this before. With Nicole. I'd tried to control everything, manage every variable, engineer safety through sheer force of will. It hadn't worked. She'd moved to Portland and stopped answering my calls for two years. The people you try to lock away don't stay. They just leave.
"Together," I said finally. "But you follow security protocols. Armed detail, check-ins, no solo movements. Can you live with that?"
"Yes."
"If something changes, if the threat escalates, we reassess. Both of us. Together."
"Agreed."
"One deviation. One risk you take without..."
"Will." She tugged my hand, hard enough that I had to lean forward. "I agreed. I'm agreeing. Stop negotiating and just... be here. Okay? Just be here for a minute."
The request was so simple. So small. Just be here. Not fix it, not solve it, not build a perimeter around it. Just exist in the same room, holding her hand, while the monitors beeped and the hallway sounds drifted through the door.
It was the hardest thing anyone had ever asked me to do.
I sat back in the chair. I held her hand. I stopped talking.
After a while, Bates appeared in the doorway. He took in the scene, the blood on my clothes, Lindsey in the hospital bed, our joined hands, and had the decency not to comment on any of it.
"Forensics on the car," he said. "Rear brake lines were cut. Clean job, recent, probably done last night. Lucky it was amateur work. Professionals would've hit the front lines." He stepped inside, closing the door. "They've escalated. She's not a nuisance to them anymore. She's a target."
"I know."
"We need to accelerate the timeline. Mendez. The surveillance window. Sooner is better."
I looked at Lindsey. She looked at me. Neither of us said what we were both thinking, which was that "sooner" meant more risk, less preparation, higher stakes.
"Do it," Lindsey said. Not to Bates. To me.
"Are you sure?"
"They wanted me out of the game. This is me staying in."
Bates looked between us again. Whatever he saw in our faces made him nod once.
"I'll make the arrangements. You two stay put tonight. I'll have a team on the door within the hour."
He left. The door closed. The room was quiet again.
"Stay?" she asked softly, her eyes already drifting, exhaustion finally winning the fight she'd been putting up. "Until I fall asleep. You don't have to stay all night. Just..."
"I'm not going anywhere."
"Okay." Her voice was fading. "Good. Because neither am I." A pause. Then, barely audible: "You really ripped the door off."
"Go to sleep, Lindsey."
"It was impressive. I want you to know... I noticed."
She was asleep before I could respond.
I watched her breathe. Each rise and fall of her chest registered in my body like a physical thing, like her breathing was keeping time for both of us. The monitors beeped. The IV dripped. The hallway hummed with the ordinary business of a hospital at night.
My phone buzzed. I pulled it out with my free hand, the one that wasn't holding hers, because I was not letting go of the one that was holding hers.
A text from Bates:
Timeline? How fast can you move on Mendez?
I looked at Lindsey's sleeping face. The bruises darkening on her cheek. The bandage on her temple. The way her fingers, even in sleep, hadn't released mine.
They'd tried to take her out. And they'd failed. And now she was lying in a hospital bed with broken ribs, and she was still in, and she was still here, and she was still holding my hand.
As fast as necessary, I typed back.
They wanted to scare us off. It didn't work.
His response came quickly:
You sure she's up for this?
I looked at her again. At her face that was slightly focused even in her sleep.
At the woman who'd told me "so could you" like it was the most obvious thing in the world, like the possibility of my death scared her as much as her own, like we were in this together and together meant both directions.
I'm sure.
I typed.
She's the strongest person I've ever met.
I hit send before I could second-guess the words, and then I stared at them on the screen for a long time, because they were true, and I hadn't meant to say them, and the fact that they'd come out so easily should have told me something.
It did tell me something. I just wasn't ready to hear it yet.
So I put the phone down, and I held her hand, and I watched her breathe, and I ran scenarios in my head about Mendez and surveillance windows and security protocols, because that was what I knew how to do.
The other thing, the thing about how the sound of her breathing in a hospital room was the only thing holding me together, I put that in the same locked room as everything else I wasn't ready for.
It was getting crowded in there.