Chapter 21
twenty-one
I don’t go home for two days.
I tell my brothers everything. Every word, every pause, the way her eyes looked when she said London and alive in the same sentence.
Adrian and Mavik tear the city open. Every tower they can ping, every street, traffic, and storefront camera they can hack, any angle they can find.
They dive so deep into Melinda they know exactly who stood near her on any given day from the second she set foot in Vegas.
They read call logs and texts and scrape her phone and laptop metadata to pull the things that think they were deleted.
Caleb runs her life to the penny—checking, savings, retirement, cards, subscriptions, cash deposits and withdrawals, transfers back to the day she opened the accounts.
I used to watch her because I wanted to learn her toothpaste, how she takes her coffee, whether she sleeps with socks, the way she lines her phone up flush with surrounding lines.
That was me wanting her. This is prying up floorboards to see what’s rotting underneath.
This isn’t love; it’s suspicion. I never wanted this.
They search for London everywhere, checking the places we always monitor and adding new ones we can think of or stumble upon. Every member of the Accord looks in their own hiding spots for her too.
We find nothing. No aliases. No partners. No coffees with stupid Detective Blake. No connection, financial or otherwise, to Spider. Every line adds up clean, which is somehow worse.
Her texts stack.
Lindy girl:
I’m sorry I hurt you.
I shouldn’t have brought her up like that. I won’t ever again.
I’m not lying to you.
If you need distance, I’ll give you distance from the subject. Please come home.
Tell me how to prove I’m on your side and I’ll do it.
I don’t reply but every half hour or so my phone goes off like fireworks.
I’ll take any test you and your brothers want. Hook me up to machines, interrogate me, torture me. I’m telling the truth.
I’m loyal only to you, above anyone and anything else.
I type I’m coming home and delete it. I type I can’t do this yet and delete that, too. I flip the phone face-down, turn it over again like a coin. Logan checks in every four hours. She hasn’t left. She’s wearing the blue sweater I love today. She makes a lot of tea.
I don’t answer. I stare until the typing dots vanish.
Uncle Leven visits Adrian’s late the second night. He smells like cedar and gun oil, like always. He doesn’t ask me to sit; I do anyway. He watches me before saying, “You look like you’re trying to cauterize yourself,” he says.
“She said London’s alive.” The words taste like a pulled tooth. “With nothing to support that.”
He nods once. If the mention of London alive bothers him as much as it’s bothering me he’s hiding it well.
“You don’t have to trust her to make her hard for others to take from you. Men kill what they don’t understand. Don’t be your father. Train her.”
“I won’t hand a weapon to a liability.”
He tips his head. “Then don’t. Hand a weapon to your wife.”
“If she’s a con,” I say, “training her makes her better at lying.”
“If she’s conned you, me, all of us, she’s already better than anything we’ve ever seen.
Training her makes her less vulnerable and if she’s had training in the past, it’ll likely show up during your sessions at some point.
Push her. Hard.” He pours two fingers of whiskey.
“You’re living with a woman in a war you started the second you texted back.
Armor her. You can love her later or kill her later.
But right now, until we know what’s actually going on, you keep her breathing. ”
I stare at the untouched glass until my jaw stops grinding. I stand. The chair legs bark against the floor. On the way out, my phone lights again.
Lindy Girl:
Come home. I won’t say anything unless you ask.
I go to her. Not because I’ve forgiven her. Not because I believe her. I go because Uncle Leven is right. I’m not my father and keeping her alive until we know what’s what comes above everything else.
I unlock my own door. Logan fades to the stairs. She’s at the island in the blue sweater, hands around a mug. She starts to speak. I lift a hand.
“Three rules,” I say. “One: you don’t say her name.
Not out loud, not in a whisper, not even in a dream.
Two: if you want out, say it now and I’ll put you in a car and send you anywhere you want and we’re done.
Three: until I say otherwise, everything from this point forward between us is provisional. No more talk of ghosts.”
She nods. “Okay.”
“Okay what.”
“Okay to all of it.” She steps closer. “And three back. One: you act normal. No punishing silence, no vanishing. If you need distance, say that. If you need me, come take me. Two: you don’t call me a liar unless you can prove it, and if you think you can, you say it to my face first, not to your family.
Three: if you decide to end this, you tell me before you walk out the door. Look me in the eye.”
I hold her stare. “Fine.”
“Fine. Provisional, and normal,” she says, and doesn’t flinch.
God, I missed her. Nothing about her is provisional for me, no matter what I just said.
I don’t know where we go from here, so I take her rule and act normal.
I’ll fucking force normal if I have to keep her close, to watch her, to train her, and to decide every other fucked up thing later.
I cross the room and take the cup from her hands, and set it aside.
My mouth finds her like I’ve been starving for days, because I have.
The first kiss is a hit; the second is slower, deeper, greedy.
I lift her to the counter, drag her to the edge, slot my hips in and spread her knees with mine.
One hand palms the back of her neck and holds; the other slides under her sweater, heat to heat, up her ribs until her breath breaks against my tongue.
She fists my shirt and yanks me closer. I bite her lower lip, gentle, then not, and taste tea and the salt of blood.
I kiss down the line of her neck, pause where her pulse trips, drag my mouth along her jaw, and come back for her mouth when she gives me that wrecked little sound.
“This isn’t me forgiving you,” I say into the seam of her lips. “This isn’t me believing you.”
“I know,” she whispers, tugging me back.
“Good.” I take her again, thumb stroking the soft under her jaw, palm anchoring her waist, her heel hooking my hip as our kiss drops the room away and all that’s left is the sound she makes each time I breathe her in.
I keep her home.
The days blur. We cook together. I run baths hot enough to make the mirrors cry. I make love to her at night and in early morning, and I fuck her on every surface of this house in the minutes in between. Every time she comes apart in my hands, a corner of the fear inside me goes quiet.
And still, I don’t start.
I check in with Adrian and Caleb. I try Atlas twice back-to-back, but there’s no answer.
Thirty seconds later he texts: finding the kid.
I’ll call when I can. He promised some woman he’d find her daughter.
He won’t say her name, but I know he kept the girl from the hotel.
Uncle Leven assures me that everything is under control and Sava is taking marks from Travis for us both.
And still, I don’t start.
Because I’ve never in my life wanted to be gentle more than I do with her.
Breaking her, even a little, even to save her, will be the hardest thing I ever do.
Harder than every throat I’ve opened. Harder than putting my own father in the ground.
I’ve plucked men’s eyeballs out with ungloved fingers, and this will be worse.
Because I’ve never loved anyone before. Besides my family, I’ve never had anything to lose, and there’s a twisted, fucked up part of my insides that knows I’d choose to lose any of them if I could keep her.
But no matter how hard I love her, that won’t keep her breathing.
But, I keep hearing her say it. London. It curdles something that I thought was unbreakable inside me.
I don’t know how to hold that without hating her.
So I do the only thing I trust and put the anger in a box, lock it, and pretend that whole fucked conversation never happened.
I can’t forgive her, not yet. But I can teach her how to survive the men who may come because I love her.
Because I do love her, even though right now I hate her.
So this morning, I stop choosing easy. I stop choosing normal. I need something I can measure. We’ll live there for a while.
She’s at the kitchen bar with coffee and a book when I find her.
“Get changed, Lindy girl,” I say, kissing her temple. “Meet me in the basement.”
“What are we doing?”
“Training.”
Downstairs smells like rubber and iron. The heavy bag thuds when I palm it.
Mats. A rack of weights. A folded table with what looks like junk until you know what you’re seeing: zip ties, paracord, a roll of duct tape, a scarf, a belt, a collection of knives, a handful of bobby pins, two shoelaces, and a pistol.
Things I can fix laid out in metal and cord.
When my hands are busy, my head shuts up. At least, that’s the hope.
She comes down barefoot, leggings, a hoodie slipping off one shoulder, hair pulled back. Too soft for what I’m about to ask. A softness I will take from her in a way that she’ll never get it back.
“We start slow,” I tell her. “I need you to remember that panic is a liar. Breath lives under panic. Find it and you won't drown.”
Her chin lifts. I stand behind her, hands light at her ribs.
“In three,” I count against her body. “Out five.” We do it until the tremor in her exhale is gone.
I make her do it with eyes open, eyes closed, face turned to the corner like a child, then facing me.
I watch the pulse in her throat, the way her shoulder blades settle.