Chapter 7 #2
I drive to Suncrest, pick up Sadie Jo, and take both girls to Ellie's.
Wrenleigh is silent the whole drive—no jokes, no complaints, no arguments. Just silence. That scares me more than the crying.
Ellie takes one look at Wrenleigh's face and pulls her into a hug that lasts a long time.
Over Wrenleigh's shoulder, Ellie's eyes meet mine, and the question in them is clear: How bad?
I shake my head. I don't know yet.
I call Leah from Ellie's porch. She answers on the second ring.
"Leah, it's Coin. A girl from Wrenleigh's school just came into Ruby Memorial—possible OD. Her name is Haley Briggs. Wrenleigh's asking about her."
There's a pause. I hear the background noise of the ER—beeping, voices, the organized chaos that Leah lives inside twelve hours a day.
"I'll find out," she says. "Give me twenty minutes."
She calls back in fifteen.
Haley is alive.
Fentanyl-laced meth, same as all the others.
She's in the ICU, intubated, critical but stable.
The next twenty-four hours will tell.
I relay this to Wrenleigh. She nods. Doesn't speak.
She just goes inside Ellie's house and sits at the kitchen table and stares at her hands for a long time, and I let her, because sometimes the bravest thing you can do for your kid is let them sit with something terrible and not try to fix it.
But I want to fix it. God, I want to fix it.
I want to ride out with my brothers on Friday and burn that stash house to the ground and find every single person responsible for putting this poison in my daughter's school and make them answer for it in ways that would make the loan sharks look civilized.
Friday. Two days. I can hold it together for two more days.
Ellie arranges a sleepover.
That's what Ellie does—she reads the situation twelve steps ahead of everyone else and builds a safety net before you even know you need one.
The girls stay at her place. Wrenleigh and Sadie Jo in the guest room, Ellie down the hall, her shotgun in the closet and her phone on the nightstand.
She won’t let anyone get close to my girls.
I go home to an empty house.
The chairs are pushed in. The glass is washed. The cameras are running. The locks have been changed—Maddox came over while I was at Ellie's and installed deadbolts on every door, heavy-duty, the kind you'd need a battering ram to get through.
He didn't charge me. He didn't say much. He just did the work and left, because that's Maddox.
The house is quiet. The wrong kind of quiet—the kind Coin told Leah about on the porch.
The kind that presses against the walls and reminds you that you're alone.
I'm standing in the kitchen when the knock comes.
Soft. Two raps. I know that knock.
I open the door.
Leah's standing on my porch in jeans and a sweater—not scrubs, not coming from work.
Her hair is down for the first time I've seen, falling past her shoulders, lighter than Garrett's. Her eyes are red-rimmed.
"Haley?" I ask immediately.
"Stable. Still critical, but stable." She pauses. "I lost a patient tonight. Not Haley. Someone else. A man, forty-two, father of three. Same shit, different batch. He didn't make it."
She's not crying. Mercers don't cry.
But she's standing on my porch with her arms wrapped around herself, her eyes raw, and her whole body carrying something she came here to set down, and she chose my porch.
She chose me.
"Come inside," I say.
She comes inside. I close the door.
The house is dark except for the kitchen light and the glow from the porch, and she stands in my hallway looking smaller than I've ever seen her—this woman who holds people together for a living, who runs trauma bays and talks down overdose patients and never flinches, standing in my hallway with her arms crossed and her chin trembling.
"I'm sorry," she says. "I shouldn't have—it's late, and you've got enough going on, and I don't even know why I'm here—"
"Leah."
She stops.
"You don't have to explain why you're here."
Her chin stops trembling.
Her eyes find mine in the low light, and what I see in them is the same thing I've been carrying all day—exhaustion, fear, grief, and underneath all of it, the desperate need to be near someone who understands.
Someone who carries the same weight. Someone who won't ask you to explain why you're falling apart because they're falling apart too.
"Do you want coffee?" I ask.
She shakes her head.
"Tea?"
She shakes her head again.
"What do you need?"
She looks at me for a long time. Then she says, very quietly, "I need to not be strong for five minutes."
Something in my chest cracks wide open.
I cross the space between us. Two steps.
That's all it takes—two steps to close the distance I've been keeping since the night on the porch, two steps to reach her, two steps to do what I should have done when I had her hand in mine and her eyes on my mouth and the whole universe holding its breath between us.
I pull her into me.
She resists for about half a second—one last gasp of Mercer stubbornness—and then she breaks.
Not loudly. Not dramatically.
She just folds into my chest and her hands grab the front of my shirt and she holds on like I'm the only solid thing in a world that won't stop moving.
I hold her.
My arms around her back, my chin on top of her head, her body pressed against mine.
She's shaking.
Small tremors running through her—the same ones I saw in the break room at the hospital, the ones she only lets out when she thinks no one is watching.
I'm watching, and I'm not going anywhere.
"I've got you," I say. It comes out low and rough and I mean it with every cell in my body. "I've got you, Leah."
She tilts her head up.
Her eyes are wet but she's not crying—holding it right there at the edge, the way she always does, the way I always do.
Her face is inches from mine. Her hands are still gripping my shirt.
"Coin."
"Yeah."
"Stop thinking about my brother."
And then she kisses me.
Her mouth finds mine and everything I've been holding back.
Every locked box, every pushed-down feeling, every night I lay in the dark wanting something I told myself I couldn't have.
All of it breaks loose at once.
The kiss is soft for about two seconds, then it isn't.
I've been alone for ten years.
Ten years of no one's mouth on mine, no one's body against mine, no hands in my hair or breath on my skin or heartbeat against my chest.
A decade of burying every want, every need, every human part of me that wasn't "Dad" or "brother" or "Secretary"—and this woman just unlocked all of it with one kiss, and I am drowning.
My hand goes to the back of her neck.
Not rough—deliberate. The way I do everything.
I angle her head and deepen the kiss and she opens for me like she's been waiting for this, and the sound she makes—a small, broken exhale against my mouth—rewires something in my brain.
She tastes like coffee and something sweet and the faintest trace of whiskey, and I want to memorize every molecule of it.
I walk her backward. Not fast, not aggressive—guided.
My hands on her hips, her back finding the hallway wall, my body pressing against hers.
She's soft where I'm hard—curves fitting against angles, her hips under my hands full and warm and God, this woman.
This woman and her body and the way she arches into me like she's been starving for this too.
"Tell me to stop," I say against her mouth. Because I need to hear it—need to know she wants this, need to know I'm not taking something she isn't ready to give. "Tell me to stop and I will."
She grabs the collar of my shirt and pulls me closer. "Don't you dare stop."
I pick her up.
She wraps her legs around my waist and I carry her down the hallway to my bedroom.
Something in the back of my head tries to make this a bigger moment than it already is, and I tell it to shut the fuck up because Leah Mercer is in my arms and nothing else matters.
I lay her on the bed.
She looks up at me—hair fanned across my pillow, chest rising and falling, those eyes dark and wanting—and I have to stop for a second.
Just stop and look at her. Because she's in my bed and she's beautiful and I need to remember this.
Every detail. Every second.
"What?" she whispers.
"Nothing. Just... you. Here." I lean down and press my mouth to the scar above her eyebrow.
Trace the line of it with my lips, from the start of her brow up through her forehead, following the path of it like a road I've been wanting to travel since the first time I noticed it across a hospital room.
She makes a sound—not a moan, something quieter.
Something that lives in the place between relief and want.
Her fingers find the hem of my shirt and pull it up, and I help her—over my head, tossed somewhere I don't care about—and then her hands are on my chest and her palms are warm and slightly rough from years of washing and gloving and working, and the touch of them on my bare skin feels like being found after a decade of being lost.
"Your turn," I say, and my voice doesn't sound like mine anymore. It's lower. Rougher. The voice of a man who's been locked down for ten years and just got the key.
I pull her sweater over her head. She's wearing a bra underneath—simple, dark, nothing fancy—and I don't care because what's underneath that is her, and I'm done waiting.
I unhook it with one hand. She raises an eyebrow.
"Impressive."
"I have skills."
"Clearly."
The bra comes off and I look at her—really look, the way I've been wanting to for weeks.
She's curved in all the right places.
Full breasts, soft stomach, the kind of body that a lesser man might not appreciate, but that I want to worship with my mouth and hands and every minute of the rest of the night.
She starts to cross her arms. Instinct, maybe, or insecurity, and I catch her wrists.
"Don't," I say. "Don't you hide from me, Leah Mercer."
Her arms drop. Her eyes hold mine.
There's a vulnerability there that she doesn't show anyone—not patients, not Garrett, not the ER.
Just me. Right here. Right now.
I start at her throat.