28. Novak
TWENTY-EIGHT
Novak
I knew pain. I could work through it, file it, reduce it to something manageable, but people touching me, pressing into it, probing for damage, that was different, that was noise I couldn’t filter, hands where they shouldn’t be, control taken in small, deliberate ways that made it harder to think.
I remembered leaving the cabin in pieces, snapshots that don’t line up cleanly—kids in the back of my truck with Kai driving, the van that was Caleb’s, Zach organizing the rest into the vehicle they’d arrived in, movement and voices and the pressure of time pushing everything forward—and I remember insisting on being with Caleb, because distance from him wasn’t an option, not after the blast, not with the way my body was starting to fail.
I demanded my gun, an extra one just to be safe, and my knife.
No one argued.
I sat in the passenger seat, or I think I did, the details slipping, the world narrowing to the sound of my own breathing and the rhythm of the road under us, each bump sending a line of pain through my side that I cataloged and then dismissed, because reacting to it wouldn’t change the outcome.
Caleb kept talking.
“Stay with me, Leon,” he said, voice tight but steady. “Count with me. One, two—keep breathing.”
I don’t remember the words, only the way they cut through the static in my head and gave me something to anchor to, something consistent, and I focused on that instead of the rest of it, instead of the way my hands didn’t feel entirely under my control, instead of the way the edges of my vision were starting to darken.
“Hey Leon, stay with me,” he said at some point.
I turned my head just enough to acknowledge it, because if I stopped responding, he would escalate, and that would slow us down.
I wasn’t going to slow him down.
Not now.
Not when we were this close to getting out of this alive.
Pain I could handle.
Losing him wasn’t acceptable.
Time fractured after that.
I remember a voice, not Caleb’s, brisk and clinical. “Doc,” someone said, like a call and a warning at the same time, and then hands again, more of them, and I tried to push up, but my body didn’t respond the way it should.
A jab.
Pressure in my arm.
Then nothing.
The next time I surfaced, everything was too bright, light cutting through closed lids before I even opened my eyes, and when I forced them open, recalibrating to the space, Caleb was there, right beside me.
“Hey, Leon,” he said, voice softer now, steadier, his hand coming up to my face, thumb brushing under my eye as he checked my pupils, a slight tremor in his fingers. “How are you doing?”
I ran a quick assessment on the pain, but it wasn’t critical enough to kill me.
“I’m okay,” I lied.
Caleb exhaled, something easing in his expression, and then he started talking, filling the silence the way he had in the truck, but this time I caught the words.
“Eden?” I said. “Noah?”
“Some of the girls, Eden included, went back to Maine with Zach and Kai,” he said. “They’ve got a proper medical setup there. Noah and the boys went with them. Everyone else is at the hostel with Mickey,” he added.
I turned my head slightly to confirm the environment, exits, and threats, though I couldn’t do much about them. “Where are we?”
“Doc’s place.”
Recovery was unproductive.
“Drink this,” Caleb said, pressing a glass into my hand. “Now.”
They kept me in bed for two days, a restriction I didn’t agree with but didn’t have the capacity to override, so I adapted, limiting movement to what was necessary—bathroom, repositioning—because there was no scenario where I needed help with that, not from anyone, not even Caleb.
Caleb, who stayed right next to me.
He worked from a chair too close to the bed, laptop balanced on his knees or the edge of the mattress, shoulders hunched, attention split between whatever he was doing and me, monitoring both without losing efficiency, and every time I surfaced properly, he was there, exactly where I expected him to be.
He talked sometimes.
“Doc says you’re being impossible. Drink this, then sleep,” he said at one point.
“You’re a stubborn fucker,” he said at another, then, “Just fucking live, asshole!”
Then the conversation became more complicated.
Caleb worked through the file beside me, laptop balanced on his knees, fingers fast and uneven, breath catching every few minutes when something on the screen cost him something I couldn’t see from where I was.
I didn’t ask. I tracked his face instead—jaw set, eyes too narrow, the muscle at the side of his neck working when he forgot to relax it.
He talked while he worked. He always did, but it was different this time, less narration than discovery, the words spilling out in pieces because he was finding the pieces in real time and didn’t have anywhere else to put them.
“Okay,” he muttered. “Okay, so—Lyric flagged this account already, but—wait. Wait, no, that’s the same routing number. Leon, that’s the same routing number as the church one. Fuck.” A breath. “Fuck, that’s not even hidden. They didn’t even try.”
I didn’t answer. He wasn’t asking.
“Michael Jennet,” he said a minute later, slower, the name settling into something he could see now. “SaintMichael, Father Michael, Uncle Michael, all the same guy. Eleven years, Leon. He’s been doing this for eleven years.”
I logged that and went under.
When I surfaced, the laptop was still open and Caleb was still in the chair, but the angle of the light had moved across the floor and the cup beside him had gone cold.
He didn’t notice me come back. He was scrolling, slow now, lips moving without sound, and I let him keep going because he needed to finish the page before he could look up.
“Three jurisdictions,” he said eventually, more to himself than to me.
“Two charities. Both registered as youth outreach, both with the same accountant—Jesus Christ, the same accountant. Who hires the same accountant for two laundering fronts? That’s amateur.
That’s almost insulting.” A short, breathless laugh that wasn’t a laugh.
“There’s a board, Leon. There’s a board.
I—I know one of these names. I’ve seen this guy. He’s done a TED talk.”
His voice cracked at the end of that and he stopped, set the laptop down on the mattress, and pressed both palms into his eyes for a long moment.
I watched him.
There was nothing to say that would make him take his hands down faster, so I waited, and eventually he did.
“Jesus this is a mess,” he said, not even aware I was watching, then he picked the laptop back up.
“Buyers above him,” he murmured, returning to his pattern.
“Suppliers below him. He’s the choke point.
We get him, we get the layer above, we get the layer below.
We get all of it, Leon. We can get all of it. ”
I went under again before he finished the next sentence.
When I woke fully, he was asleep in the chair, the laptop on his stomach, head tilted at an angle that would hurt him later.
The folder was still open on the screen.
I couldn’t read it from where I lay, but I didn’t need to.
It was day three—or what I took to be day three—and I was done with the constraint.
I sat up first, tested balance, pain response, range, then swung my legs over the side of the bed and stood without assistance, ignoring the tug through my side because it was manageable, because stopping was no longer required.
“I’m up,” I said.
A sharp inhale from Caleb; something clattered to the floor as he jolted and looked up so fast his chair scraped against the floor, the laptop nearly sliding off his knees as he caught it one-handed, eyes locked on me as if I’d done something reckless instead of inevitable.
“What are you doing?” he demanded, already on his feet.
“Standing,” I said.
“No, you’re not,” he shot back, hands hovering as if he didn’t know whether to touch me or not after how that had gone last time. “You’re supposed to still be in bed.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“That’s healing,” he snapped, then dragged a hand through his hair, frustration bleeding through the edges. “You nearly died. You don’t get to just decide you’re done. You don’t get to do that to me.”
“I didn’t nearly die.”
He stared at me.
“You were bleeding out in my arms,” he said, quieter now, but it landed harder than if he’d shouted it. “Don’t rewrite it.”
“I’m still here,” I said.
“That’s not the point,” he said.
It was.
But I didn’t say it.
He stepped closer, more careful this time, one hand coming to my side, light pressure, checking without pushing, tracking my reaction, and I let him, because stopping him would escalate this in a way that wasn’t useful.
“You’re not fine,” he muttered, more to himself than to me.
“I am.”
He huffed a breath that wasn’t quite a laugh, something strained and tired and too close to breaking, and for a second, he stared at me as though he was trying to decide what to do with me.
“Sit down,” he said. “Please.”
“No.”
“Leon—”
“I’m not getting back into that bed.”
We held there, a stand-off that wasn’t about control so much as it was about something neither of us was saying, and then he exhaled and stepped back.
“Fine,” he said. “Then don’t fall over.”
“I won’t.”
I meant it.
He wasn’t convinced.
“Unbelievable,” he muttered.
And when I went into the bathroom, he stayed close, supervising a shower, watching me brush my teeth, and only giving me space when I needed the toilet. He was as obsessed as I was.
That was a very good feeling.
He handed me a towel without a word, then another. “Hold still,” he said, brisk and efficient, except his hands weren’t steady and his eyes kept tracking me as if I might disappear if he looked away for too long.
“Dry off,” he muttered, then stepped in closer anyway, taking over when I slowed, roughing the towel over my shoulders, my back, careful around the bandaging but not gentle enough to be called soft.
I let him.
When he was done, he didn’t step back.
He held me in instead.
Close.
Arms around me, one hand braced at the back of my neck, the other at my side.
“You could have died, idiot,” he said into my shoulder, voice low, rough. “Don’t do that again.”
“Clearly I didn’t die.”
“Well, you could have.”
“But I didn’t.”
He huffed and checked on me, frustration and something sharper underneath it cutting through. “Look—” he started, then stopped, dragging a hand over his face. “Fuck. I’m trying to say something here.”
I waited.
“I love you,” he said.
He held my shirt, breath hitching as if the words cost him.
“A life without you would be wrong,” I replied. “I think that’s love, right?”
His lips twitched into a smile, then he huffed. “Jesus, yes, that’s love, asshole,” he said. “So, no dying on my watch,” he added, quieter now but no less certain. “No more jumping on me like that. No heroics that are gonna get you hurt.”
These weren’t reasonable conditions given I’d do anything to get between him and danger.
But I understood what he was asking.
Caleb said he loved me, and I catalogued it the way I did everything that matters—tone, timing, the absence of hesitation.
Love wasn’t a variable I experience the way he does, but if Caleb loved me, then it meant I was the one he factored into decisions.
That was something I could work with. I didn’t need to feel it the same way to understand its function; I just needed to learn what it required from me, where it held, where it could break, and how to maintain it.
Because if his love was fixed on me, then I would make sure it remains.
“I love you,” he repeated.
I adjusted for that.
“Noted,” I said.
He produced a sound that could have been a laugh or something else entirely, then leaned in and pressed his forehead to mine.
I didn’t move.
I didn’t need to.
He was already where he belonged.
A week into my enforced bedrest and we were in the kitchen at Doc’s, making coffee, and I sat at the table because I was allowed to be vertical for an hour at a time, and watched Caleb.
He moved the same way he worked—efficient, no wasted motion—except softer at the edges, slower, because he didn’t have to be sharp here.
He found the mug he’d seen me reach for once.
He filled it the way he’d watched me fill his.
He carried it back to the table without spilling and set it down at exactly the angle I would have set it down myself.
I cataloged that.
I didn’t have a file for it.