Chapter 31
thirty-one
Cassius moves through the kitchen barefoot, careful, like the floor might bite.
He still has a bandage high on his chest. I still have one that takes over my shoulder.
We look like a pair of badly mended books, spines taped and pages dog-eared.
He kisses the corner of my mouth and steals half my toast, and when I roll my eyes he tells me to do it again because I’m “obnoxiously sexy when I’m sassy. ”
We make lists of names and places and threads of Spiderweb to tug until it gives way. We sit with our knees touching and our scars behaving and use the system Caleb and Adrian started to keep mapping out all the ways to stay breathing in a world that sometimes forgets how.
“Sit,” he says, sliding a mug within reach, then hovering, then pretending not to hover. He tucks a pillow behind my back, checks the edge of my dressing with two fingers that could break necks and barely graze skin. “How’s the pain?”
“Manageable.” I sip. “Tolerable.” The window over the sink throws a bar of light across his throat.
There’s a scar there I hadn’t noticed. We spend the day starting to relearn simple things.
How to stand without swearing, how to laugh without pulling stitches, how to share the bed or the couch without either of us needing to be the one on guard.
He brings me water without asking. I make him take his meds on time.
When the nightmares close in and my hands start to shake, his don’t.
When his breathing turns labored, his wounds forcing his heart to pump harder, I close his face between my palms and we breathe together in odds, three, five, seven, until it eases.
My phone doesn’t house a purple reminder of Mila anymore.
Nathan and Cedric and my parents were worried sick when they heard about the carjacking, but once I told them I got married their fear morphed into shock and then to happiness.
Nathan keeps texting menu photos and soft-opening updates—Valentine’s Day is coming fast—and we’re planning to fly in for the grand opening if Elsie clears us.
Victoria insisted on coming too, and I’m glad.
She was at our door the second we were discharged.
She doesn’t know everything, not about Spiderweb, or the basement training, or the parts of me that will always ache on the inside, but she’s a great friend.
Sava’s the opposite; she knows everything and, except for hiding from Adrian, we’ve become almost inseparable.
Between the two of them I somehow ended up with the best of both worlds.
Victoria, my work-wife who, when I heal, will spend nights with me at Mirage and sneak out for coffee with me in the middle of the day.
And Sava, who will wait until I’m healed and then kick my ass in sparring sessions, and stay for movie sleepovers when Cassius is away.
And just like that, the list I wrote to prove I could be okay alone turns into proof I’m not alone at all.
The truth that’s been beating under my skin finally pushes through.
He never caged me. He taught me to load and unload, to slip knots, to breathe through fear and punch through panic.
He drilled it into me—I will always come for you—until it soaked into my bloodstream, absorbed into my veins; tucked inside was the other half I only hear now: I’ll burn the world to reach you, but never your wings.
The ghosts keep their distance today. Gideon lingers in the kitchen. Red-blazer sits on the windowsill for a while, chin in her hand, and then tips an invisible glass to me before she goes.
That afternoon everyone comes in a noisy and chaotic breeze.
Atlas arrives first, refusing to hug us because we’re “gross looking.” Leven shows next, with Eland, Evie, and Elsie in tow.
Dominic, Vex, Havoc, and Graciela walk in a few minutes later and the house smells like gasoline for an hour.
Marco brings drinks and desserts, and Kosya comes with Nikola and Dmitry.
When Travis shows, he tells Cassius that Marianna sends her regards.
“Another agent,” he whispers in my ear. Sava ghosts around Adrian and everyone acts like they don’t see it.
The day after that, he lets me unwrap his bandage, and I let him unwrap mine, and neither of us flinches.
The quiet between us is new—not the kind born of running out of words, but the kind that says we don’t have to fill every inch of space to prove we’re not alone.
I used to think happily ever after meant a quiet life.
Turns out, it means a hand on my back and a knife in my grip; a plan on the table and books on the counter; a man who is a storm to the world and shelter to me.
Before bed, we write a new list on the back of my old one and slip it back between the pages of his favorite book.
Be home by breakfast. If work steals a night, it never gets the morning.
Learn Russian and Italian.
Take a trip that has nothing to do with work.
Family dinner with the Accord once a month.
Bring London home.
And as I fall asleep with his breath in my hair and tomorrow’s hunt mapped out between us, I realize something simple and wild. The story I want isn’t the one where I’m saved from the horrible and tragic things.
It’s the one where I walk through them, with him, and come out the other side still holding hands.
He doesn’t make me strong. He reminds me I am.