32. Kat
thirty-two
Kat
The door doesn't creak anymore. It just sits there, silent, no weight leaning against it from the other side. Two nights ago I would have called that a mercy. Tonight it feels like something got amputated and nobody warned me the phantom part would still ache.
I hate that I know the sound his knuckles make when he checks the frame before bed. I hate that I noticed, three nights running, before he stopped showing up to notice it for me.
I move through my own loft like I'm casing it for someone else's life.
The kitchen counter where he used to lean with his arms crossed, watching me work like I was a threat assessment he hadn't finished running.
The spot by the window where he stood for an hour once, silent, just making sure the street outside stayed empty.
All of it hollowed out now, furniture with the person removed, and I am furious at how much space that leaves.
I never asked for a guard dog. I fought him on it from the first door, from the first night he stood there uninvited and rearranged my sense of safety without my permission.
I built my whole life on needing no one, and then some infuriating, silent, six-foot-three wall of a man went and became the thing I reached for in the dark, and now the reaching finds nothing but cold hallway air.
My hands won't stay still. I catch myself picking up my phone, thumb hovering over his name, then setting it down like it burned me.
My chest does something complicated I don't have a word for yet, the ache sitting low and hollow, the exact shape of a body that got used to another presence and doesn't know how to unlearn it overnight.
I built my entire life around needing no one, brick by deliberate brick, and I was good at it, I was a fortress with the drawbridge welded up and it took one silent man and one door six weeks to walk in and quietly dismantle every wall so that now the whole structure leans toward a space where he is not.
This is the thing nobody warns you about letting someone in: you do not get to take it back cleanly when they go.
The need does not dissolve because the person left.
It just stands there in the dark with nothing left to hold, an outstretched hand in an empty hallway.
I am furious — not heartbroken yet, that is later, tonight I am only furious that he got to me, then walked out and leave me to pick it apart alone.
Reyes knocks softly to check in. I don't answer right away. I'm too busy staring at the door, at the space on the floor where a man used to sit like sleep was something he could ration out in three-hour intervals, like rest was a luxury he hadn't earned yet.
He gave me a choice, once. Then he took it back the second things got hard, the second guilt convinced him love was something dangerous to carry.
Fine. If he wants to hide inside his own guilt, I know exactly where to find him.
I grab my coat off the hook, and Reyes straightens like he's about to ask where I'm going.
"Echelon," I tell him, already moving. "I need to talk to somebody who thinks leaving people alone is the same thing as protecting them."
Reyes can follow if he wants. I'm done waiting on the other side of a door that isn't holding anyone up anymore.
The elevator doors open on my floor and there he is, standing outside my door like nothing happened, like leaving me was a thing he can undo just by showing up again. Reyes hangs back near the stairwell, smart enough to know this isn't his conversation.
Naveed doesn't move when he sees me. He never moves first. That used to feel like patience. Tonight it feels like a man bracing for a hit he thinks he deserves.
I unlock the door and he follows me in without asking, and something about that, the ease of it, the way his body still knows this space, makes my throat go tight.
"You transferred my protection," I say, not a question, because I already know the answer, I got the email from Sienna an hour ago with someone else's name on it.
"It's the right call. We spoke about this."
"For who?" I'm not touching that last part.
He doesn't answer that. His jaw sets as it does when he's decided a thing, and I hate how well I've learned to read him, hate that I know exactly what that muscle means now.
"Amir died in your arms," I say, quieter than I mean to. "And now you think the answer is making sure I'm not close enough to end up the same way."
"I can't be the reason you die." His tone resolute, nothing left on it but the fact itself. "I've protected everyone I've ever loved by staying far enough away that my failures don't reach them. That's the only math that's ever worked."
"You don't get to leave and call it love."
The words land in the room and stay there. I watch them hit him, watch something behind his eyes flinch like I put a hand on a wound he thought was closed.
He says nothing.
Nothing at all, and it's worse than any word he could have chosen, because it tells me he already knew what I was going to say. A man who runs toward gunfire without blinking, standing in my kitchen unable to open his mouth for the thing that actually matters.
I wait. I give him the full weight of the silence, let it stretch until it turns into its own kind of answer, and at that moment, I understand I am not going to get anything else from him tonight. Maybe not ever. He has already made his choice, to him leaving is easier to survive than staying.
I'm not going to beg a man to want to stay.
I've spent my whole life proving I don't need anyone's permission to be whole, and I am not about to hand him the power to make me less than that now, not for a man who thinks nobility looks like a locked door and someone else's name on my file.
There is a distinct rage reserved for being managed by someone who loves you.
I learned the art of collecting it at a young age.
The detective who told a kid to let the professionals handle the questions nobody wanted asked.
The foster father who decided how much I could bear to know about the accident.
Every man since who mistook deciding for me for taking care of me.
This is the oldest wound I own wearing a brand-new face, and the new face belongs to the one man I ever let myself love.
"Go," I say.
Two letters. That's all it takes.
I watch it land on him the way nothing else I've said tonight has landed, not the accusation, not the silence I gave back, just this one word, and his shoulders do something I've never seen them do. They drop.
He nods once.
Then he turns around and walks to the door.
My whole body goes cold in a way that has nothing to do with the window unit or the hour.
Because this is the man who slept sitting up against a door for a week straight rather than leave me unguarded for one night.
This is the man who put his body between me and gunfire without a second of hesitation, who refused a direct order from Tariq once because he thought my safety mattered more than the chain of command.
He has ignored every reasonable request I have ever made.
He stayed when I told him not to bother.
He pushed when I told him to back off. He has never, not once, done the thing I asked him to do simply because I asked it.
And now, when it is the one thing I do not actually want, he obeys.
My hand finds the edge of the counter without my permission, fingers pressing white into the stone like I need something solid to keep the floor from tilting. My throat closes around a sound I refuse to let out. Not yet. Not while he can still hear it.
He reaches the door. His hand settles on the handle, and for one suspended second, I think he might turn around, might look back at me the way he used to check a room before deciding it was clear, but he doesn't. He opens the door and steps through it like a man completing a task, the latch clicks shut behind him with a small, ordinary sound that does not match what it just did to my chest.
I stand in my own kitchen and listen to nothing.
No footsteps in the hall. No low voice checking in with Reyes. No weight settling against the other side of my door, because there is no door between us anymore that he intends to guard.
My knees want to give out and I don't let them.
I press my palm flat against my stomach like that will hold anything in place, like grief has a location I can pin down with pressure alone.
It doesn't. It moves through me instead, hot and then hollow, my breath catching somewhere behind my ribs and refusing to come loose.
I gave him permission to leave and he took it.
That is the whole tragedy folded into one small, obedient action.
I spent this entire fight demanding he treat me like an equal, like someone whose word mattered, and the first time he finally does, it costs me the one thing I actually wanted him to fight for.
That is the joke the universe machined to my exact specifications, cut to a tolerance nothing else in my life has ever matched.
I could call Reyes back in. I could pour a glass of wine, sit with the silence until it stops roaring. I could do a hundred small, sensible things.
Instead I stand very still in the middle of my own home, alone, and let myself feel every inch of it, because I already know something about myself that scares me more than any of this.
I am going to survive it.