Chapter 25
Twenty-Five
JACE
The storm came in around two.
Before I was even fully awake, I recognized the familiar violence of a coastal storm that had built over open water and arrived ready to prove something.
I lay still for a moment with my eyes open in the dark, listening to the wind off the Atlantic buffeting the cottage, rain lashing sideways against the windows.
It was such a familiar sound from my childhood.
I’d always secretly loved the wildness of a good Atlantic squall.
The warm weight of Layla against my side shifted, going rigid. Her whole body locked up at once, her breath going shallow and fast. The sound of fear. Of panic.
Koa was already moving.
I felt him before I saw him. The mattress shifted, his weight traveling up from the foot of the bed with purpose, pressing his whole body along her other side.
He made a noise I’d never heard him make before: low and sustained, not distress but something more deliberate, a signal he’d been trained to send.
His head found her arm in the dark and stayed there.
She made a small, strangled sound. Like she was trying to keep quiet about something that was doing its level best to come out anyway, and she was fighting it, even in sleep, with the same iron discipline she brought to everything else.
The fact that she was fighting it, the obvious heroic effort of it, was the most devastating thing I’d heard in a long time.
I’d sat across tables from people who’d described terrible things in flat voices.
I’d read reports that would make most people’s hands shake.
None of it landed the way that small sound did, in the dark, with the storm raging outside and Koa pressed against her, working as hard as he knew how to work.
I turned onto my side slowly. Every movement deliberate, measured, no sudden sounds or contacts.
“Layla.” Just her name. Low, even, nothing in it but presence. “Hey.”
Nothing.
“Layla.” Again. I put my hand on her arm, barely touching, just enough to register. “You’re in the cottage. I’m right here.”
She came awake like a wire snapping. Her whole body convulsed with the sharp gasp of her inhale, one hand shooting out and connecting with my shoulder and stopping there when it found me instead of whatever her sleeping mind had sent it looking for.
She held herself there, hand on my shoulder, not gripping, just touching, her breath coming in jagged pulls.
“It’s me,” I said. “Jace. You’re okay.”
For a long moment, the only sounds were the rain hammering the roof and her breath coming too fast and shallow. I couldn’t see her face in the dark, but I sensed she hadn’t quite focused on anything actually in the room.
Then another gust slammed the windows hard enough to shake the glass in their frames, and her whole body flinched.
I had no clue what she’d been dreaming. What part of her was still immersed in.
I’d deliberately stopped myself from considering the possibilities of what she’d been through because I knew more of those horrors from my work than any one person had a right to.
I couldn’t let myself go down that rabbit hole when the perpetrator wasn’t here to kill.
Instead, I focused on her.
“You’re safe. I’ve got you.”
Layla made another sound, different from the first one, the kind of sound that happened when the adrenaline from the dream had nowhere left to go.
Koa pushed his head harder against her, and she dropped both hands into his fur and held on.
I watched her breathe through it, deliberate and controlled, pulling herself back together from the outside in.
Without asking, I closed the distance until I was against her, my chest to her back, my arm over her waist. She startled slightly at the contact but didn’t pull away.
“Okay?” I asked.
“Yeah.” The word scraped out rough and raw. “Sorry.”
“Don’t.”
“I don’t usually—” She stopped.
“It’s fine.” I pressed a soft kiss to her bare shoulder.
“It’s the storm.” She was quiet for a moment, Koa still under her hands, my arm across her waist. “The sound of it. I don’t always—it doesn’t always get me like this.”
“Being here has its hooks in you,” I said. “That’s not a character flaw.”
She exhaled, and something in her settled slightly. Not all the way, but enough. Outside, the wind found another gap in the window frame and made itself known with an eerie wail.
I lay still and quiet and let her have whatever time she needed. She didn’t need me filling the silence to prove I was here. I kept my arm where it was and listened to the rain and let my mind go where it was going to go despite my best efforts to keep it off that particular road.
Defensive wounds. The reflexes that lived below the level of thought.
A woman who had trained herself into something formidable, starting from a place of having had that taken from her.
I understood the taxonomy of it, knew more about it than most people did about such things, and the knowing sat in me like a coal, radiating a truth I was going to have to live with.
I’d spent time on the operational side of that world.
Time learning the architecture of it, following the money and the supply chains and the networks, handing the intelligence to people with the jurisdiction to act on it.
I’d been good at it. I’d believed in it. I still did, mostly. The work mattered.
But lying here in the dark with Layla’s breathing still not quite steady and the storm gusting outside, I understood something I hadn’t let myself sit with before.
The work was abstracted. The work was intelligence and analysis and handoffs and outcomes reported in documents.
The work was not this. The work was not a woman flinching at the sound of rain on a window because her body remembered something her mind was trying to leave behind.
I’d made a career of pointing at the darkness. I’d thought that was enough.
I tightened my arm across her waist by the smallest degree, barely perceptible, just pressure.
She was still here. Whatever had happened, whatever had been done to her in whatever order and in whatever way, she had survived it.
She’d come through it and built something out of the other side that was extraordinary and complicated and full of edges.
Then she’d gotten on a ferry and come to investigate a case that had to hit close to home.
She’d started asking questions about who had built the machinery that ground up people like her. Like the friend she’d lost.
That took more than courage. I didn’t have a word for what it took.
A certainty settled in me, sinking into my chest like an anchor finding the ocean floor.
Not a decision exactly—it was past the point of being a decision, more like the recognition of something already done, something that had been forming for days now without my conscious permission.
Whatever she was carrying, wherever this case led her, whatever came out on the other side of all of it, she wasn’t going to go through the worst of it by herself.
Not while I was here. Not while I was breathing.
Not ever, if I could help it.
I didn’t examine it. Didn’t prod at it to see how it held up to scrutiny or logic or any of the operational thinking I’d been trained to apply to complex situations.
I’d made decisions like this before, clean and quiet in the dark with no ceremony and no witnesses, and they tended to be the ones that stuck.
The ones that held when everything else fell apart.
Outside, the storm had begun to tire itself out.
There was still rain, but the fury was ebbing now, the violence draining away and becoming something steadier and less pointed.
Just weather instead of wrath. Layla’s breathing had gone deep and even, her hands finally still where they’d settled in Koa’s dense fur, his substantial weight warm and immovable against her side.
“You still awake?” I murmured into the darkness.
“Barely,” she rasped, her voice rough with exhaustion and something that might have been relief.
“Go back to sleep, sweetheart.”
A long pause stretched between us, filled with the drum of rain and Koa’s breathing and all the things neither of us was saying. “Thank you. For—” She didn’t finish the thought, the words trailing off into silence.
“Yeah,” I said quietly. “I know.”
She was asleep before the storm fully dissipated, her breathing shifting into the deeper rhythm of genuine rest. I lay awake a while longer, listening to the rain settle into something ordinary and unthreatening.
I looked at the dark ceiling of the cottage and let the decision I’d made sit where I’d put it, solid and unmoving in my chest.
It felt right. It felt like something I was going to keep.
Comfortable with that, I closed my eyes and let myself drift.