Chapter 25 #2
I had been staying with Griz for the past week and the contrast between the two lives was not something I had to work to feel.
I just felt it. Waking up in the morning and taking Goldie out and coming back to a man who moved through his space with the kind of certainty that made everything around him feel settled.
He was rough in all the ways I had always needed somebody to be rough and soft in the specific places that mattered and he didn’t force either one.
It was just him. He loved me genuinely, always had.
And I felt it every day. This was where I belonged, wherever he was.
We would leave in the mornings separately, handle our days, and come back together at night.
We would sit on his back patio sometimes and just talk, about everything and nothing, the way two people talked when they were learning each other in real time and finding out that what they already knew was just the surface.
I knew that the life he lived was a risky one, but I respected his grind and his hustle. I wasn’t here to judge him.
He got me everything before I even asked for it.
The right coffee, my specific brand, the first morning I woke up there it was already on the counter.
Goldie’s food, her specific grain free formula, already in the cabinet.
I didn’t know how he knew and I didn’t ask because somehow that was more meaningful than the answer would have been.
The only thing that sat wrong was the feeling that somebody was watching me.
It had started a few days in. A feeling at the back of my neck when I left in the mornings.
A car that seemed to appear in my rearview one too many times on different routes.
I mentioned it to Griz once and he went quiet in a way that told me he was taking it seriously even if he didn’t say much about it out loud.
I started taking different routes every morning without being told to.
—
Closing day I let him go alone.
He hadn’t asked me to stay away, I just made the decision.
Brendon was going to be there and whatever was going to happen between them in that room, I didn’t need to be in the middle of it.
I knew that Brendon was still in the blind about us, but if I went today, then he will know.
I didn’t want that to mess up this day for a Grizzley.
He was so excited about this new house, and so was I.
It was our new beginning together. Did I feel bad that our new home was purchased through my ex fiancé? Of course not. Fuck him.
I had my own day to get through and I promised Griz I would come straight to the house when I got off so we could celebrate properly.
I pulled up at seven in the evening after I had finished a busy workday. I still have my class, on top of bonding three people out.
I sat in the driveway for a moment before I got out and just looked at the front of the house. It was beautiful. Not showy, not excessive, just right. The kind of house that looked like something a new life was supposed to happen inside of.
I got out and he must have been watching because the door opened before I reached the porch.
He stood in the doorway and looked at me and I looked back at him and my chest tightened. I had stopped trying to outrun it two weeks ago. I loved this man. That was the feeling. I was getting in my chest right now. I was proud of him, and I appreciated the effort that he was putting in for me.
I walked inside and my mouth fell open.
Marble floors running the length of the entryway, catching the evening light and throwing it back up at the ceiling.
Staircase wide enough for three people, sweeping up to the second floor like it had been designed specifically to make you feel like your life was about to mean something.
High ceilings that made the whole first floor feel like it had room to breathe.
I turned in a slow circle in the entryway taking it in.
Griz was behind me with a champagne bottle and something on his face that he didn’t usually let show this clearly.
“This is your house,” he said. “I picked it for you specifically. It’s big enough for our kids and for however many more dogs you decide to bring home.” He looked at me.
“This is where we build. For real.”
I laughed and felt my eyes get warm at the same time and before I could do anything else I crossed the space between us and jumped, he caught me the way I knew he would, arms around me solid, spinning me once while I laughed into his shoulder.
We were still standing there when the front door came open.
Not a knock. Not a ring. The door came open hard and fast and Brendon walked in and the man standing there was not the man I had lived with for three years. His eyes were red and swollen and past them something was burning that I had only seen once before, the night he showed me who he really was.
Griz set me down and stepped slightly forward. Not in front of me, just forward. A shift that was barely visible and meant everything.
“You want to tell me,” Brendon said, his voice shaking underneath the attempt to control it, “how a man I was doing business with was sleeping with my woman behind my back.”
“Ivy has been mine since we were ten years old,” Griz said. Simple. No apology.
Something broke completely in Brendon’s face. “This was a setup. The whole thing. You used the business to get close to her.”
“The business was real,” Griz said. “The houses are mine. I paid what they were worth. The deal is closed. I don’t owe you anything, just like you don’t owe me nothing.”
“The joke is on you,” Brendon said and his voice had gone somewhere beyond grief now, somewhere past reason. “I got your money and you’re not going to live long enough to enjoy any of this.”
His hand moved to his waist.
Griz was across the room before the sentence fully landed.
The collision was immediate and violent and the gun skidded across the marble floor and they went into the wall and then to the floor and I backed up against the staircase and watched Griz dismantle him.
There was no other word for it. Brendon could fight in the way that a man who had never really had to fight could fight, which was to say he couldn’t, not against this.
Griz hit him like he was ending something and it was over fast. Brendon laid there bloody.
Griz stood up breathing hard and looked at me. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know he was going to—”
My peripheral caught the movement.
Brendon on the floor. Arm extended. Fingers closing around the gun he had been sliding toward for the last thirty seconds while Griz was looking at me.
I didn’t think.
My hand was in my purse and then it wasn’t and the sound filled the entire house and then everything went very still.
Brendon’s arm dropped.
The gun stayed on the floor.
I stood there and my own gun was in my hand and I was looking at what I had just done and my legs stopped working correctly. I felt myself start to go down and Griz was there before I hit the floor, his arms around me, taking my weight.
The gun fell out of my hand and I heard it hit the marble somewhere below me.
“Hey.” His voice was right at my ear.
“Look at me. Look at me Ivy.”
I looked at him.
“You protected us,” he said. “You hear me? That’s all that happened in this room.”
I was shaking so hard I could feel my teeth.
Brendon was on the floor and I couldn’t tell from where I was and I couldn’t make myself look directly and I didn’t know what I was supposed to do with what was happening in my body right now, the adrenaline and the horror and underneath both of them something that might have been relief and I didn’t know what to do with that either.
Griz held me tighter and I grabbed his shirt with both hands and pressed my face into his chest and he stood there in the middle of that marble floor in the middle of that beautiful house and held me like he was never going to put me down.
“I got you,” he said. Low and steady. The way he said everything that mattered. “I got you bae.”
Outside the windows the neighborhood was still and quiet and had no idea what had just shifted inside this house.
I held onto him and let myself shake and somewhere in the back of my mind underneath all of it I knew one thing clearly.
He had told me he would protect me.
He had meant it.
And I was never going to have to question that again for as long as I lived.
—
Brendon didn’t die that night.
The bullet caught him in the shoulder and put him down and by the time the ambulance arrived Griz had already controlled the narrative.
Self defense. A man who forced his way into a private residence, made explicit death threats, drew a weapon, and got shot by the woman he had backed into a corner.
The responding officers took our statements, looked at the evidence, and the case was closed before it fully opened.
Brendon was treated and released four days later.
He never pressed charges. Pressing charges meant a courtroom and a courtroom meant the full story coming out and Brendon had spent his entire adult life building a reputation in this city that he wasn’t willing to sacrifice over something he couldn’t win.
For about two weeks after, I heard from him through lawyers only. Clean and professional the way he did everything. Assets were separated, my name was removed from the remaining joint accounts, and communication slowed to nothing.
Then it stopped altogether.
At first I assumed he had just moved on and I didn’t ask questions because I didn’t want answers that would complicate the peace I had finally found.
But then his assistant called my office looking for him.
Then his mother called my personal cell in a panic asking if I had heard anything.
Then I saw the missing persons report filed quietly, no press, no noise, just his name and his last known location and a date that was eleven days after closing.
Nobody had seen him.
I sat with that information for a long time without bringing it up to anyone.
One night I looked at Griz across the dinner table and he was already looking at me. His face was completely still and unbothered in the way it got when something had already been handled and didn’t require discussion.
I looked back down at my plate.
I never asked.
And he never told me.
Some things didn’t need to be said out loud to be understood perfectly. My man was going to protect me with his life, and that much I know.