Chapter 14
Ruby
I lock the padlock behind me and climb into daylight carrying a secret that isn't mine.
Nash returns at noon. He takes his usual spot by the door, feet shoulder-width apart, and arms at his sides. I wait for the weight of his gaze to settle between my shoulder blades the way it has every day this week.
It doesn't come.
He watches the window. He watches the street. Professional. Correct. Everything he's supposed to be and nothing he was three days ago when he pressed me against a wall as he groaned into my mouth.
I work a back piece for a walk-in. My hands are steady. My chest isn't.
I glance at him twice. First time, he's scanning the street. The second time, his eyes are on me, but they cut away the instant mine find his. Quick. Practiced. A man actively choosing not to look at me.
My chest tightens. I wish to cross the room, then stand in front of him and say look at me. The way he did to me. The way he made me take the compliment, made me stop running. I want to stand there and make him see what this distance is doing to me.
I don't. I work. I ink. I wipe.
Frankie catches my eye once across the room. The look says Leo and nothing else. But her gaze flicks to Nash and back to me, and the second look says what happened between you two?
I shake my head. She doesn't push.
At closing, Nash rides me back to my apartment. My arms go around his waist the way they always do. My chin finds the spot between his shoulder blades. But his body is rigid under my hands, the muscles locked, and the thumb that traced my kneecap two days ago stays on the handlebar.
The ride takes ten minutes. It feels like thirty.
He walks me up the stairs. I unlock the door.
Nash follows me in, checks the windows, the back door, and the camera feed on his phone.
The routine. Every night the same. Except before Tuesday, the routine included his eyes finding mine across the room, a jaw twitch, the gravitational pull of two people orbiting closer. Now the routine is just the routine.
I kick off my shoes. Drop my bag. Stand in my kitchen watching a man who kissed me like I was the only thing keeping him alive move through my apartment like I'm a perimeter he's clearing.
The rejection sits in my sternum, heavy, spreading.
"I need to head out tonight," he says, pulling his phone from his pocket. "Vesper rotation. Kyle's covering your building."
"On a Friday?"
"Arden's got something he needs to handle. I'm filling in."
Arden. Something to handle. My mind goes straight to the basement, to Leo, to the man who turned him. Maybe Arden's handling something for Leo tonight. Maybe that's what "something" means in this town, where every word carries a second weight.
"What time?"
"Eight. Back by ten."
I lean against the kitchen counter. "Be safe."
"Always."
He leaves at eight. I shower. I sit on my couch with my sketchpad and try to draw, but I can't focus because the filing cabinet is open and everything is spilling out.
Leo in the basement. Frankie's hand on his shoulder.
The look in his eyes when he said it's complicated about a woman who's been hiding him for eleven months.
The way Frankie's tenderness looked like it was costing her something she couldn't name.
At nine-thirty I give up. Kyle's bike is parked out front, which means he's somewhere in the building or on the street. I check the window. He's on his phone by the front entrance, leaning against the wall.
I grab my keys, slip out the back stairwell, and take my car to the gas station on Fifth for candy, because sugar is a coping mechanism I refuse to apologize for.
Nash would have my head for leaving the apartment alone.
The locked door, the deadbolt, the whole protocol I promised to follow.
I'm breaking every rule he set, and the part of me that cares about that is currently outvoted by the part of me that needs to move or shatter.
On the way back, I take the long route, the one that curves through the industrial stretch on the south end near the old warehouses. I almost miss it. The parking lot is set back from the road, half-hidden by brush and a rusted fence. But the bike is unmistakable.
Nash's Harley. Parked at the far end of a gravel lot, next to a warehouse with no sign and blacked-out windows.
The fight circuit.
I pull over. Kill the engine. Sit in the dark.
He told me he had a Vesper rotation. He didn't tell me he was coming here. To the place where Naya fights. The place he disappears to on nights when he thinks nobody tracks his absences.
I get out. Cross the road. A row of narrow windows runs along the upper wall; the glass is dirty but transparent. I brace one hand against the brick, rise on my toes, and peer through.
The interior is packed. There's a ring at the center under harsh lights. I scan the faces.
I find him.
Nash is standing near the back wall in a corridor that leads to a storage area.
He's facing a woman. Tall. Dark-haired. Hands wrapped in tape stained with sweat.
Sharp and beautiful in the way that certain faces are beautiful because they look built for surviving things.
She's standing close to him. Close enough that their conversation is private, their heads angled toward each other, the posture of two people who share something that doesn't include anyone else.
Naya.
Nash's thumb finds the headband and presses. He's looking at her when he does it. Looking at Naya, pressing the headband, and the two actions together form a circuit I've been tracing for months, and the trace ends here.
Naya reaches out. Touches his arm. Just above the headband, her wrapped fingers resting on his sleeve for two seconds before she pulls back.
Nash lets her. He lets her touch him with the ease of someone who is used to her hands, and the ease is worse than surprise would have been because what I'm looking at is familiar. Practiced. Old.
I step back from the window.
This is why.
The distance. The retreat. Why he stopped looking at me after the hallway.
The way he kissed me like I was everything, then spent two days treating me like a perimeter.
Not like this. Not in a hallway. Not because you can't sleep.
I thought he was being careful. I thought he was protecting something between us, holding it until the timing was right.
He was coming to his senses.
The headband belongs to her. The headband has always belonged to her.
He wears it every day, sleeps with it on his wrist, presses it when he's thinking.
I told myself it was a talisman, a habit, a comfort object.
It's not. It's a leash. And the woman holding the other end is standing in front of him right now with her taped fingers on his arm with the kind of ease that says I was here first.
I was a slip. A late-night, post-adrenaline slip that he corrected in the morning the way he corrects everything: with discipline, with distance. With the wall going back up brick by brick until the woman who climbed him in a hallway is just another detail on the other side of it.
The case I've been building just closed.
I walk back to the car. Get in. Close the door. Put my hands on the steering wheel and grip until my knuckles turn white.
I don't cry. Don't shake. I sit in the dark with my hands on the wheel and the conclusion I've been running from sitting in my lap. It's not a detonation. It's a door closing. Quiet. Final. The click of a lock engaging on a room I was never invited into.
I start the engine and drive.