Chapter 33 Rivals-to-
Lovers No More Running
Bishop
The argument starts in the car.
Not loudly. The Delilah kind precise, contained, every word chosen before it's released and the choosing is its own kind of pressure.
"I'm not going to Margo's back room while you work the problem," she says.
"I didn't say Margo's back room."
"You were thinking it."
I was thinking it.
"The rat changes things," I say. "Someone has been feeding them our movements for months. Until we know who."
"My exposure is the same whether I'm here or somewhere else." She looks at the lake road.
"We've had this conversation. Distance isn't protection. It's just a different address for the same threat."
"That was before someone shot through our kitchen window."
"Which is exactly why I'm not going anywhere." She turns to look at me. "If I disappear, all that tells them is the threat worked. That you can be moved by threatening me."
"I can be moved by threatening you." I grip the wheel. "That's not a weakness. That's just true."
"I know." Her voice drops. "I'm not asking you not to be scared. I'm asking you not to let the scared make decisions without me."
The rest of the drive is silence.
Not the cold kind. The kind with things moving in it Margo's office, the scapegoating, the capo's voice, the rat. Both of us working. Both of us arriving at different places and neither of us saying so yet.
Come back or she bleeds.
The house is locked and the perimeter is clean. I check before I let us in. Delilah waits without commentary, which means she's still running something and hasn't finished.
She finishes it in the kitchen.
"You're already planning something alone," she says.
I'm pouring water. I set the glass down.
"I can see it." She steps toward me. "The same way I could see it in July when you answered Cole's call before I knew what was happening. You go quiet in a specific way.
Still in a specific way. Like you're already somewhere I can't follow and you're being careful not to let me see you leaving."
"Margo's plan isn't."
"This isn't about Margo's plan." The step she takes when she's decided something. "This is about the version you're building in your head where you do something alone and call it protecting me. The martyr version. The one where you walk back in and trade yourself and I get to be safe without you."
I look at her.
"You have a tell," she says. "And I've been watching you long enough to know what it looks like."
"Delilah"
"You promised me together." Her voice doesn't rise. It drops. "In the kitchen after the shot. You said it and you meant it and I watched you mean it." She holds my gaze. "That wasn't a word you said to calm me down."
"No."
"Then act like it."
I look at her across the kitchen.
At the woman who has been choosing in since July every version of hard, every reason to leave, choosing in. Who is standing in front of me right now with her jaw set and her eyes steady and the particular expression of someone who is done watching the person they love disappear into a plan that doesn't include them.
I cross the kitchen.
I don't have words for this. I've never been good at the words for this the version where I say what it actually is instead of the managed version, the deflected version, the version that costs less because it's smaller.
I cup her face in my hands.
"I'm scared," I say. The words without armor. Without anything around them. "Not the kind of scared I learned how to use the kind I turn into action and call competence. The kind that just sits in your chest and doesn't become anything useful." I look at her. "I'm scared because you're here and you're pregnant and someone shot through our window and you're the only thing I can think about protecting and you're also the thing that's making it impossible to think clearly about how."
She looks at me.
Her hands come up and cover mine where they're holding her face.
"Then stop thinking clearly," she says. "And move with me."
She kisses me.
Or I kiss her. The distinction stops mattering in the first second it's both at once, the argument and the fear and the four months and the dock and everything that's been building since July all arriving in the same place at the same time.
She pulls me closer by the shirt. I pull her closer by the waist. Neither of us is being careful.
We make it to the bedroom.
Barely.
This isn't July. July was the first time tender, slow, both of us careful with something new and fragile. The supply room was fast and risky. This is something else entirely. This is four months of working beside each other and fighting with each other and choosing each other in every room of every version of this situation and all of it is in the room with us right now.
Raw. Honest. Nothing managed about it.
Her hands in my hair, mine at her waist, and I'm not running a calculation or maintaining a perimeter or being careful about anything. I'm just here fully here, the thing I'm worst at, the thing she's been asking me to do since the dock and she knows it and responds to it like she's been waiting for it.
She has been waiting for it.
So, have I.
She says my name the way she says it when she's stopped managing it. I say hers the same way. Neither of us is quiet and it doesn't matter because the marina is closed and the house is ours and after everything that has happened in the last forty-eight hours this, this specific thing, the two of us in the dark being completely honest about what we want is the only uncomplicated thing left.
I want her.
She wants me.
That's enough. That's more than enough.
Afterward we lie in the dark with the boarded window at the end of the hall and her head on my chest and both of us breathing.
Her hand rests over my heart. The same place it was the night Cole called. The night everything changed. I cover it with mine without thinking about it, the same way I pull her closer when she's cold and check the perimeter when she's asleep the things my body does before my brain has a chance to overthink them.
"Promise me something," she says.
"Okay."
"No martyr moves." She tilts her head up. Holds my gaze with the steady directness that has undone me since July. "No solo sacrifices. No deciding the cleanest solution is one where you disappear and I get to be safe without you."
I look at the ceiling.
At the specific texture of a promise that's going to cost me. Not because I don't mean it I mean it completely. But meaning it requires giving up the version of the plan I've been building. The version where I walk back into Club Eidolon territory alone and trade myself for her safety and call it love.
It would be love.
It would also be exactly what she just asked me not to do.
"I promise," I say.
She holds my gaze. Checking the weight of it. Whether it's real.
She decides it's real.
She puts her head back on my chest.
"Good," she says. "Because I'd like to actually keep you."
The thing that does to my chest the warm specific weight of it, the particular feeling of being wanted in the kept sense and not the useful sense, the thing I haven't let myself believe in for eight months and longer. I don't try to manage it.
I just let it sit there.
I let it mean what it means.
I hold her and she lets me hold her and the house settles around us. The lake. The boarded window. The list of things we'll have to do tomorrow. Margo's plan. The rat. Graham somewhere in this town with people we don't know yet. All of it.
Tomorrow.
Tonight, I hold her.
My phone buzzes on the nightstand.
Cole.
"Hey"
"Delilah's ex-fiancé is here." The scared register. The controlled tight voice of my brother managing something he doesn't want to be managing. "And he's not alone."