Chapter 29
Kenzi
I hear Dozer's fight continue behind me as I reach the storage unit, every impact and scrape of boots against tile landing somewhere directly behind my sternum.
Every instinct in my body screams to turn around.
To check the wound I'd already seen bleeding on his side.
To make sure he's still standing. To make sure the promise he made me in the van isn't turning into the kind of promise people make because neither person wants to acknowledge how badly things can end.
I don't turn around. I keep moving. Because he told me to go. Because this is the part only I can do. And because trust isn't worth anything if it only works when it's convenient.
The realization is almost enough to make me laugh, except there's currently a man holding an incendiary device ten feet in front of me, so personal growth is going to have to wait.
Two new men rush the storage unit, I know Dozer must be incredibly busy or wounded to let them get to me.
I won’t think about the second option. One is holding what I can now confirm is a compact incendiary device, he turns first, surprise registering for exactly half a second before training takes over and his weapon starts coming up.
I throw myself sideways. The nearest evidence rack is heavy steel, bolted to the floor, and I hit it hard enough that my shoulder objects immediately and with considerable enthusiasm.
A shot cracks through the lab. Something hot passes close enough to my shoulder that I feel the displacement of air.
"Ruby, I'm in. Storage unit's compromised, they're trying to torch it—"
"Copy, pushing you a live feed now. Get me visual confirmation the second you have hands on anything salvageable."
Anything salvageable. God, I hate that phrase. I've spent my entire career salvaging what people leave behind. The inconvenient pieces nobody thought would survive long enough to contradict the story. I'm getting very tired of it.
I come up from behind the shelving with the small tactical baton I've started carrying since the motel attack, because apparently this week has expanded my professional skill set in directions no continuing-education seminar ever covered.
I am not Dozer.
That thought arrives with absolute clarity. I don't have his training. What I do have is nine years of education letting me know exactly where the human body is vulnerable. Turns out forensic anatomy has practical applications nobody mentioned in graduate school.
The baton catches the man's wrist. His grip opens. The incendiary device hits the floor and skitters away beneath the edge of a steel cabinet.
Good. One problem down. Approximately all the others remaining.
The second man comes at me directly. I don't think. Not much. Thinking is usually my thing. Thinking is practically a competitive sport for me. But somewhere in the last week I've learned there are moments when the body gets a vote before the brain finishes holding hearings.
I move. His hand catches my arm. I twist hard, feel his grip loosen, and drive the baton into the outside of his knee.
He buckles. I follow through. Not elegantly.
Not the way Dozer would. There's nothing cinematic about it.
Just adrenaline and fury and the very specific determination of a woman who has been shot at, chased, threatened, hacked, cornered, nearly burned out of a safe house, and forced to wear the same shirt for considerably longer than civilized society should tolerate.
Frankly, I'm out of patience.
He reaches for me again. I strike once more. He stays down. I stand over him for half a second, breathing hard, baton still raised, waiting to see if he plans on making another bad decision.
He doesn't.
"Smart," I tell him. Because apparently, I talk to unconscious criminals too. Good to know. I’ll add it to my increasingly growing list of objects, animals and people, dead or alive, that I speak with. Dead, alive, or unconscious… apparently, it doesn’t matter.
I don't look at either man again, because I don't have time.
The biological samples inside the storage unit are intact.
Miraculously. I get the reinforced case open and the entire world changes.
Everything outside the work goes quiet. The gunfire.
Dozer. The blood. The fear. Not gone. Compartmentalized. This is what I know how to do.
My hands move automatically; it’s my turn for muscle memory to click in.
I photograph, document, verify seal integrity, compare identifiers, timestamps, preservation conditions.
The same clinical sequence I've run hundreds of times, except I've never done it with armed men on the floor and a private security force somewhere outside the room actively trying to murder everyone involved.
There really should be hazard pay for this. I should broach that topic with Hunter. Extra pay for every time my life is in danger. In that case, I should make a handsome sum at the end of this job. Maybe enough to retire.
"Ruby, samples confirmed intact. Uploading verification now."
"Receiving. Kenzi, we need full authentication in the next ninety seconds. Cole's people are already trying to spin this as a break-in. We need the truth out there before that story sets."
Of course they are. Of course, the lie is already moving. That's the thing about lies told by powerful people, they don't have to be particularly good. They just have to get there first.
Not this time.
I work faster. Physical sample identifiers against my duplicates. Hospital records against contract numbers. Contract numbers against Cole's shell companies. Every piece locked to the next so tightly that pulling one loose only exposes three more beneath it.
My hands don't shake. Not yet. I’m sure it’ll come later. It seems like my body delays its reaction to trauma. I’m okay with that. It would be damn inconvenient to start trembling now.
Somewhere behind me, the sounds of fighting continues. Then stops.
Everything inside me stops with the silence.
No. I don't turn around. My entire body wants to. I keep working. Because silence doesn't mean anything until I have evidence telling me what it means. Because if I turn around now and see—
No.
Thirty-one years of thinking too much and this is the one thought I refuse to finish.
"Sixty seconds," Ruby says.
"I know."
"Kenzi—"
"I know, Ruby."
My fingers move faster. Forty-five. The digital package finishes assembling.
Thirty. Every dead patient in those hospital files seems to exist in the room with me.
People whose names I never learned because someone made sure nobody ever would.
Dozer, bleeding in a hallway because he believes this truth matters enough to stand between me and bullets while I deliver it.
Twenty seconds.
"Package built," I say. My voice sounds nothing like I feel. "Ruby, I'm pushing it live."
"Copy. On my mark, we go simultaneously. Three servers, redundant. Untouchable the second it's out."
My finger hovers over the key. This is it. All the people who decided truth was something they could own simply because they had enough money and power to decide which version everyone else got to hear.
"Mark it."
I hit the sequence. For one heartbeat, nothing happens.
Then the screen fills. Upload confirmed.
Second server. Confirmed. Third. Confirmed.
Files cascade outward faster than anyone can pull them back.
Medical records. Financial records. Authentication data.
Forensic verification. Everything time-stamped, duplicated, mirrored, released beyond any single person's ability to erase it.
The truth doesn't whisper its way out. It detonates. The digital explosion is large and loud and I am damn proud of it.
"It's live," Ruby says, and there's something dangerously close to triumph in her voice. "It's everywhere. Kenzi, this is done. There's no burying this now."
Done. The word should feel bigger. Instead, all I can hear is the silence behind me.
"Dozer."
No answer.
The bottom drops out of my stomach.
I am moving before I've finished the thought.
The laptop stays behind. Evidence secured.
Baton forgotten somewhere near the storage cabinet.
I run through the lab door and into the corridor, past bodies, shattered glass, blood that I refuse to identify because there are some moments when being a forensic specialist is the worst possible thing a person can be.
Every stain tells me something. Every pattern gives me information I don't want.
Then I see him.
He's on the floor near the lab entrance. Two more hostiles are down around him. For one horrible second, Dozer isn't moving. My brain does what it always does. Catalogues. I look at his position, at the blood volume loss, at his skin tone and at his lack of respiration…
No.
"Dozer." I'm on my knees beside him so hard they hit tile.
His eyes open and the change in his face nearly destroys me.
Relief.
He's lying on a museum floor with blood soaking through his shirt, and he's relieved because I'm okay.
"You're okay," he says. His voice is rough, barely there. I could kill him myself. "Evidence?"
I stare at him, blinking hard. Did he just ask me that?
"Live. All of it. Ruby confirmed." My hands are already moving, pressure against the wound, training taking over because panic is a luxury I absolutely cannot afford right now.
"Don't you dare ask me about the mission right now, you absolute maniac. You're bleeding out on a museum floor."
"Had to ask."
"You absolutely did not."
His mouth moves. The idiot is trying to smile.
"Dozer."
"I'm here."
"Good. Keep doing that. Keep staying here with me."
Blood wells hot against my hands. Too much. There’s too much damn blood. I know what that means. For years, knowing the body has been my advantage. I can look at damage and turn it into information. Right now, I would give anything to know less.
"You had one job," I tell him, and my voice cracks despite every effort to keep it steady. "You had one actual job, and it was not getting shot."
"Pretty sure there were other jobs."
"This is not the moment to discover conversational range." That does it. A breath leaves him that might actually be a laugh, weak and painful and the best sound I've ever heard. My eyes burn as I fight back tears. "Stay with me."
His hand moves across the floor. Slow. Searching. I catch it immediately. His fingers close around mine. Weak compared with the grip I'm used to, but there. I squeeze hard enough that under any other circumstances he'd complain. He doesn't.
"I said there's an after," he murmurs.
"And I told you I'm holding you to it."
"Bossy."
"Oh, you have no idea how bossy I'm about to become."
His thumb moves once over my knuckles. It wrecks me more thoroughly than the blood. Because it's him. Even now, even bleeding, even with every reason in the world to turn inward against the pain, he's trying to comfort me.
"You held the line," I whisper.
"You made the line matter."
My breath catches. There it is. The whole thing between us in five words. He holds the line. I make it matter. And somewhere along the way we stop being two people trying to survive the same mission and become something I no longer know how to separate.
“I love you,” he tells me and closes his eyes.
Oh no. Absolutely not. He’s not going to say I love you and then go unconscious before I can say it back. "Ghost!" I shout. "I need you now. Dozer's hit bad."
Footsteps answer. Ghost is there within seconds, dropping beside us, and then everything becomes motion. Hunter is there with medics. Police are everywhere. People are shouting commands. There are hands reaching for Dozer.
I don't want to move. I can’t move.
"Ma’am." One of the medics looks at me. "We need access."
"I know."
But Dozer is still holding my hand. Or I'm holding his. I'm not sure there's a difference anymore.
I bend closer before they move him, forehead nearly touching his. "Listen to me. You do not get to make me trust there's an after and then leave me to have it by myself. You don’t get to tell me you love me and not survive to hear me say it back.”
He doesn’t respond. Doesn’t open his eyes. My heart is breaking.
They move him. I go with them. Nobody tells me not to. Smart people. They wouldn’t like the outcome of trying.
The ambulance is controlled urgency with the medics working frantically around me. I stay near his head. My hand stays in his whenever the medics don't need it out of the way.
Outside, the world is discovering Senator Cole's secrets. I’m sure phones are ringing, newsrooms are exploding, senators are being briefed and federal agencies are probably having the worst morning of their institutional lives.
I hope Cole is under arrest. I hope he hasn’t fled the country already. He has the money to do just that.
I don't care. Not right now.
"We did it," I say quietly to Dozer and hope he can hear it. "You did it."
My throat closes. I lean down, press my forehead briefly against the back of his hand. "You'd better be right about this after."
"I don't say things—" I hear the words come weakly from him. He’s conscious and I just about weep from joy from hearing his voice.
"I know." I look at him. "You don't say things you don't believe."
His eyes hold mine. "Believe this too."
"What?"
His thumb brushes my hand once. "We're not done. I love you."
“I love you, too.”
The medic tells me they need room. I let go because loving someone, apparently, includes knowing when holding on is helping and when it's getting in the way of the people trying to keep him alive. But only physically. Everything else stays exactly where it is.
I sit back and watch them work. I realize what I have found. We’re two people who know exactly how much can be lost and choose, somehow, to reach for each other anyway.
The evidence is out and the truth is alive. So is he. For now, those are the only facts I need.
The rest comes after. And there is going to be an after.
He promised me.