4. Chapter 4
Chapter four
Declan
The lights are already gone when the second shot punches through the drywall.
I'm moving before the sound stops echoing. My hand finds her arm in the dark and I drag her low, behind the overturned table, body between her and the window.
She goes with me.
Not stumbling. Not fighting. With me. Like she read the move before I made it.
No time to think about that.
"Stay down." I press her shoulder to the floor and come up firing toward the muzzle flash at the far window. Two shots. Return fire chews through the plaster above us. I count the angles, count the guns. Three points of entry. South window, east corridor, the kitchen door behind us.
We're flanked.
"Declan." Her voice is flat. Even. "Guard's down. Two o'clock."
I look. She's right. Seamus is crumpled in the corridor doorway, radio on his belt.
She's already moving for it.
"Don't—"
She kills the signal before I finish the sentence. Not random button-pressing. She knows exactly what she's doing, cycling the frequency, cutting off whoever's coordinating outside.
The east corridor goes quiet.
Good girl.
I don't say it out loud. The fact that I'm thinking it at all is its own problem.
We move through the safehouse in thirty-second bursts, dark to dark, corner to corner.
I keep her behind my left shoulder. She stays there.
Doesn't crowd me, doesn't lag. When I stop, she stops.
When I go, she goes. Her breathing is steady in a way that takes training, or trauma, and I'm no longer sure there's a difference with her.
We're almost to the rear exit when the kitchen door kicks in.
I spin, take the first man in the throat, drive him back into the second. The third gets around me. He goes for her.
She drops. Actually drops, flat to the floor, and the shot meant for her face hits the door frame.
I put him down.
"Move." I grab her wrist and we're through the rear, into the service stairwell, and I'm running the numbers. Two men unaccounted for. One door between us and the car.
The shot catches me high on the left side.
The impact spins me into the wall. I stay upright. Just.
She's already there, hand on my arm, eyes scanning my face in the window's light. No scream. She doesn't lock up. Just a fast, measured read of how bad it is.
"Can you walk?"
"I'm walking."
"Can you drive?"
"Yes."
The drive takes eleven minutes. I count them.
The bedroom in the safe apartment is small, the window blacked out, and it smells like old wood and damp plaster. I've used it twice before, both times alone.
She pushes me onto the edge of the bed and strips off my jacket without asking. I let her. The bullet's gone through clean, in and out, above the ribs. Clean enough. It still hurts like hell.
She finds the first aid kit under the sink without being told where to look.
Her hands shake when she cuts away my shirt. Only slightly. Less than most people's. Less than mine would, if the positions were reversed.
She leans in to pack the wound. Close enough that I catch gunpowder and something underneath it. Soap, or skin, I can't tell. I put it somewhere I won't look at.
I watch her face while she works. No disgust. No panic. Her jaw is set and her eyes are focused and the only sign she's not completely fine is the line between her brows that won't quite smooth out.
I don't know what I expected. Something softer. Something easier to dismiss.
"You've done this before," I say.
"Hold still."
"That's not a no."
She doesn't answer. She tapes the dressing down with neat, even strips and then she sits back on her heels and looks at her hands.
They're steady now.
We're sitting close. Close enough that I can hear her breathe. The heat of the last hour is still in the air. Adrenaline burns down into something slower. Slower is more dangerous.
I can handle a gunfight. Threats, orders, men who need killing. I know what to do with all of that.
Her hands on me in the dark. That's different.
She's measuring me now. The way she looked at me in the safehouse. Reading something.
"What are you looking for?" My voice comes out lower than I intend.
"I'm not sure yet."
Nothing moves in the room except our breathing.
I press my forehead to hers.
It's not planned. I do it the way you reach for a wall when the ground moves. She doesn't pull back.
We breathe.
My hand comes up to the side of her face. Not holding. Just resting. I notice, with the detached precision of a man trained to notice everything, that my fingers aren't quite steady. I've been shot before. That's not what this is.
I pull back before she can register it.
My hand moves before I tell it to. Not to her jaw. To her wrist, where my blood has dried between her fingers. I turn her hand over slowly. She lets me. Her pulse is right there under my thumb, fast and not hiding it.
The hand at her wrist tightens. Just slightly. A question I haven't asked out loud.
My other hand comes up to the side of her throat. Not holding. Just resting.
She makes a sound. Small. Not quite a word. I feel it more than hear it.
I start to say something. One word, maybe two. I don't finish it. I don't know what I was going to say, which is its own answer.
Her free hand presses flat to my chest, over the bandage. Then she flattens it and pushes.
Gently. Deliberately.
"Don't." Her voice is low. Not angry. Careful. "Not like this."
I let go.
She sits back on the edge of the bed. Doesn't look at me. I look at the wall.
My pulse isn't what it should be. My hand still holds the shape of her wrist.
There's something underneath the adrenaline I don't have a name for. Not want, exactly. Or not just that. Something closer to something I don't have a word for. I stop the thought. Put it where I put things I can't afford.
It doesn't stay there.
She looks at her hands again. My blood is still on her fingers, dark and half-dried.
"They weren't there for you." Her voice is quiet. Certain. "That wasn't about the shipment or your syndicate politics." She pauses. "They were there for me."
I wait.
She lifts her eyes to mine. Something in them has shifted. The calculation is still there. But underneath it, something older.
Fear she's been carrying a long time.
"Someone told them I was there."
The words fall between us like a verdict.
I don't move for a moment. I should be running names, running the short list of people who knew. Instead I'm looking at my blood on her hands and I can't make myself stop.
That's not tactical. I don't examine it.
"How long have you known?" I ask.
She looks at my blood on her hands one more time.
"Since the first shot," she says. "I just didn't know if you already knew too."