Chapter Fourteen
Blast lay still for a full minute.
Might have been a personal record.
Morning light came through the blinds in pale stripes, falling across the bed where Becca slept with her face pressed into his shoulder and her curls spread across the pillow like something a Renaissance painter would've killed to capture.
There were flower petals caught in her hair—pink ones, small, from the peonies she'd been arranging in the common room before everything went sideways last night.
Petals in her hair and soot still under her fingernails.
That was Becca. Beauty and ash, all tangled up together.
He watched her breathe. Counted the inhales. Noted the way her lips parted slightly on each exhale, the way her hand curled against his chest like she was holding onto him even in sleep.
Stillness should have been unbearable. It always was—the quiet pressing in, the space where noise should be filling up with ghosts and guilt and the sound of a twenty-year-old kid from Iowa humming Keith Urban while the desert heat cooked everything alive.
But this morning, the silence held something different.
It held her.
Becca stirred. A slow shift, her body pressing closer before her eyes opened, and the sleepy confusion that crossed her face gave way to recognition. Then warmth. Then something softer that made his chest do something structurally unsound.
"You're watching me," she murmured.
"You had petals in your hair. It was distracting."
"Mmm." She stretched against him, arching her back, and the movement did things to him that had nothing to do with sentiment. "How long have you been awake?"
"Minute or two."
"And you didn't move?"
"I was comfortable."
Her smile said she knew exactly how unprecedented that was. She shifted onto her elbow, the sheet pooling at her waist, and her free hand found the burn scars on his neck.
He tensed. Automatic. Years of flinching from that contact—the stares, the questions, the pity that always followed. People looked at the scars and saw damage. Saw something broken.
Becca's fingers traced the ridged skin like she was reading braille. Slow. Deliberate. The same focused attention she gave her arrangements—feeling for texture, for shape, for the story hidden in the surface.
"Does it still hurt?" she asked.
"No. Just sensitive." He swallowed. "Most people don't want to touch them."
"Most people don't know what they're looking at." Her fingers traveled down, following the scar tissue to where it disappeared under the sheet. "These aren't damage. They're proof."
"Proof of what?"
"That you survived something that should have killed you." She pressed her lips to the worst of it—the mottled patch below his jaw where the skin had grafted wrong and left a permanent ridge. "That's not ugly. That's remarkable."
Something cracked behind his sternum. A clean break, the kind that hurt in a way he didn't want to stop.
Her hand moved to his left hand—the missing finger, the worst scarring, the hand that had been three inches from the blast when the secondary timer kicked in and rewrote the rest of his life.
She laced her fingers through his, filling the gap where the ring finger should have been like she'd been designed to fit there.
"Tell me about him," she said.
She didn't specify. Didn't need to.
"Danny Morrison." The name came easier this time. Still heavy, still sharp-edged, but the weight of it was different with her hand in his. "PFC. Twenty years old. Manchester, Iowa."
"You told me some of this. In the garage."
"I told you the facts. I didn't tell you—" He paused. Tried to find words for something he'd spent six years burying under noise. "He had this laugh. Big and dumb and way too loud for a guy his size. Like a golden retriever learned to talk."
Becca's mouth curved against his shoulder.
"His mom sent care packages every two weeks.
Cookies, mostly. Snickerdoodles. He shared them with the whole unit because keeping them to himself never even occurred to him.
" Blast stared at the ceiling. "He wrote letters home.
Actual letters, on paper, because his mom didn't trust email.
Said it wasn't real if you couldn't hold it in your hand. "
"He sounds sweet."
"He was good. Not sweet—good. There's a difference." Blast's jaw worked. "Sweet is easy. Good is a choice. Danny chose it every day, even in a place that made choosing it hard."
"And the humming?"
"Keith Urban. Every damn day. Same three songs on rotation while we worked." His voice cracked at the edges, and he let it. "I used to yell at him to shut up. Told him if he hummed 'Somebody Like You' one more time, I'd detonate something just to drown him out."
"Did he stop?"
"Never. Not once." Blast's scarred hand shook in hers. Just the faintest tremor. "He hummed right up until the moment the secondary timer engaged. I heard it—over the click of the mechanism, over the sound of my own hands on the wires. He was humming."
Becca held his hand tighter.
"And then he wasn't."
The silence stretched between them. Not empty—not the terrible vacuum that usually rushed in when the noise stopped. This silence had texture. Weight. The warmth of Becca's body against his, the steady rhythm of her breathing, the pressure of her fingers laced through his.
"I positioned him," Blast said quietly. "Told him exactly where to stand. Three feet to my left, clear sightline to the device. Standard observation position for a trainee."
"You were teaching him."
"I was supposed to keep him alive." His voice dropped. "That was the job. Not just defusing the bomb—keeping the kid alive long enough to learn how to defuse his own. And I put him right there. Right in the blast radius."
"You put him where protocol said to put him."
"Protocol got him killed."
"A bomb got him killed." Becca lifted her head, making him look at her. Her eyes were fierce—not pitying, not gentle, but fierce in a way that left no room for the guilt he'd been carrying. "A bomb with a hidden timer that nobody could have predicted. Not you. Not anyone."
"I should have—"
"Should have what? Been psychic? Seen through metal?" She cupped his face with both hands, her thumbs tracing his jaw. "You were the best at what you did. Danny was there because he was learning from the best. And the bomb went off because bombs go off. That's what they do."
"I know that."
"You know it here." She tapped his temple. "You don't know it here." Her hand moved to his chest, pressing flat over his heart. "This is where the guilt lives. And it's been eating you alive for six years."
His breathing hitched. The words were too accurate, too close to the thing he'd spent six years running from. The thing he drowned with noise and manic energy and the constant forward motion of a man who couldn't afford to stop.
"The Wolves helped," he said. "Gave me somewhere to point it all. The energy, the skills, the part of my brain that thinks in blast patterns. Better to use it for the brotherhood than let it eat me alive in some VA waiting room."
"But it's not enough."
"It was. Until you."
She went still. "What do you mean?"
"I mean—" He sat up, pulling her with him, needing to be face-to-face for this.
"I mean you're the first person who's ever made the silence feel like something other than a funeral.
You're the first person who touched these scars and didn't flinch.
You climbed into a burning building to save someone else's family, and when you came out, you looked at me like I was the one who needed saving. "
"You were."
"Yeah." His voice was rough. "I was."
She kissed him. Not urgent this time—not the desperate collision of last night. Soft. Steady. The kind of kiss that said I'm here and I see you and you don't have to run anymore.
When she pulled back, her eyes were wet but her voice was rock-solid.
"I know something about building a life where you don't fit," she said. "About earning your place in a world that wasn't made for you."
"Pilsen."
"Pilsen." She shifted, pulling her knees up, wrapping her arms around them. "I walked into that neighborhood with nothing. No connections, no family ties, no history. Just savings from ten years of hotel work and a dream that sounded crazy to everyone who heard it."
"A flower shop on the South Side."
"A white girl from the suburbs opening a flower shop in a Mexican neighborhood." Her laugh was quiet, self-aware. "Everyone told me I'd fail. My old boss. My landlord. Even the real estate agent who showed me the space—she kept suggesting locations in Lincoln Park instead."
"But you did it anyway."
"I did it anyway. Because when I walked that block for the first time—the murals, the music, the way the light hit the buildings in the afternoon—I felt something I'd never felt before."
"What?"
"Home." The word came out like a confession. "I'd never had one. Not really. Grew up in apartments that changed every two years. Mom worked three jobs and still couldn't keep us in the same school district. When she died, I was seventeen with no family, no roots, no place that felt like mine."
Blast's hand found hers again. She held on.
"So I built one. Four years of six a.m. starts and midnight closes.
Learning names, learning stories, learning whose anniversary was coming up and whose mother was in the hospital and whose daughter needed quincea?era flowers that would make her feel like a princess.
" Her voice thickened. "Mrs. Orozco brings me carnations every week because her husband gave her carnations on their first date.
She's been doing it for fifty-three years, and she trusts me to make them perfect. "
"That matters."
"It's everything." She looked at him with an intensity that matched his own. "That's why I didn't run when the fires started. Not because I'm brave. Because leaving that neighborhood would mean losing the only family I've ever had."
"You are brave."
"I'm stubborn. There's a difference."
"Is there?" His mouth curved. "Because from where I'm sitting, the woman who climbed a fire escape into smoke to save a stranger's baby is pretty definitively brave."
"The man who defused bombs for a living doesn't get to lecture me about risk assessment."
"Fair point."
They sat in the morning light, hands tangled together, and the silence between them felt like a room they'd built together.
Walls made of shared damage. Roof made of mutual stubbornness.
Foundation made of the simple, absurd fact that a man who loved explosions and a woman who loved flowers had somehow recognized each other across a counter full of daisies.
"I'm not going anywhere," he said. "Whatever happens with Frank, whatever comes next—I'm here. With you."
"I know."
"You know?"
Her smile was the one he'd been chasing since the first time he walked into her shop—warm, knowing, lit from somewhere deep inside.
"I figured that out the fourth time you came in for flowers you didn't need."
Blast laughed. Surprised, genuine—the sound punched out of him before he could shape it.
"Four bouquets. That's what gave me away?"
"Nobody buys that many daisies unless they're building a shrine or falling for someone." She traced his knuckles with her fingertip. "You didn't strike me as the shrine type."
"Definitely not."
"So that left one option."
He pulled her against his chest and held her there. Her heartbeat synced with his, and the compound settled around them—distant sounds of brothers waking, bikes firing, the machinery of a life that would demand his attention soon enough.
But not yet.
For right now, he was still. And the stillness didn't feel like a countdown to disaster. It felt like the space between notes in a song—necessary, intentional, the silence that made the music mean something.
He thought about Danny. About the humming that had driven him crazy and the cookies that had tasted like someone's mother loved them and the big, dumb laugh that had filled every room it entered.
Danny would've liked Becca. Would've liked her stubbornness, her backbone, the way she walked into danger because someone needed help.
He would've liked that Blast had finally found someone who made the silence feel like home instead of a grave.
"Hey," Becca said against his chest.
"Yeah?"
"You're still not moving."
"I know."
"Personal best?"
He pressed a kiss to the top of her head, breathing in the scent of flowers and smoke and the woman who'd somehow taught a man built for destruction that some things were worth holding still for.
"Getting there," he said.