Epilogue
Epilogue
CALEB
FIVE MONTHS LATER
“This isn’t a date,” I said, keeping my voice low as I adjusted the lens and zoomed in on the building across the street.
“We’re together,” Novak replied from beside me. “That meets the criteria.”
“That’s not how dates work.”
“It is now.”
I huffed out a breath that might have been a laugh and leaned against the cold brick, eyes back on the target, the quiet rhythm of a stakeout settling in around us—cars passing, distant voices, the hum of a city that didn’t know we were watching it.
He stood close, his attention split between the building and me in a way that didn’t make sense and somehow made perfect sense at the same time.
“I can’t believe you planned surveillance as a date.”
“It’s optimal,” he said after a moment. “Me. You. Together. We get work done.”
“Dinner and candles might be better.”
He shot me a glance. “You’d prefer that?”
Would I? I shook my head. “No. Me. You. Together. Getting work done,” I said with a smile.
“Best date so far,” he said.
Now that I didn’t believe. “Better than the firing range? Or the time you made me stalk Killian as practice?” I asked.
Killian had spotted me in under thirty seconds, walking straight up to us, and saying, deadpan, “If you’re going to follow me, at least commit,” before taking my coffee out of my hand and drinking it while Novak recalibrated in real time.
Novak had sat me down afterward and called it a data point, told me it was commendable I’d lasted that long.
I’d laughed it off at the time, but it stuck with me—because that was how he worked, how he understood the world, and somehow I understood him right back, wanted him anyway, wanted all of it, the way he thought, the way he chose me, the way he’d become something that wasn’t separate from me anymore but threaded through everything I was.
Because he might’ve been a possessive asshole, and had gone past casual acquaintance in a heartbeat, to deciding I was his, to telling me I was his forever in as many meetings, but I called him boyfriend and learned new things every day, determined to have my own journey in this relationship.
He still had nightmares, but I’d never woken up with his hands around my neck.
I never asked him about his time at the convent or in the military, and he never offered it to me.
Apart from dreams that woke him, he didn’t spend time in the past, and couldn’t understand why anyone would want to, but that was okay.
Whatever had shaped him, I loved the man he was. He was determined to protect me in everything I did, but fuck, I protected the man I loved straight back.
Levi had asked me once how it worked between us, and I hadn’t had an answer for him, just that it did —that Novak chose me, and I chose him back, and somewhere in that, it became real and something I wasn’t willing to lose.
I adjusted the camera again, caught movement in one of the upper windows, logged it, filed it, did the job I always did, and then my phone buzzed in my pocket.
I ignored it.
It buzzed again.
“Check it,” Novak said.
“I’m working.”
“It’s not being covert,” he said.
“We’re two hundred feet away from the mark. How would he hear it?”
“They won’t, but I can.”
I dragged my phone out and glanced at the screen, a message and a photo waiting, and when I opened it Eden was on a couch with a baby in her arms—small, wrapped up tight—her expression softer than I’d ever seen it, Noah beside her with one hand braced on the back, and Ezra and Seth kneeling in front, pressed in close, both smiling, all of them alive and safe in Maine.
The caption was simple: Meet baby Connor.
“What’s wrong?” he asked. “Are we needed elsewhere?”
I turned the phone so he could see. “Eden had her baby.”
He took it, stared at the photo a second longer than necessary.
“It’s a boy,” I added when he stayed silent.
“She called him Connor, so I assumed it was a boy.”
I blinked at him. “That sounded like you made a joke. I mean, the delivery was flat, and you need to drop in more sarcasm, but I’m proud of you.”
He stared at me, considering. “I make jokes.”
I smiled despite myself, and he smiled back, and it was beautiful. I had to kiss him. So, I did, heat building as I pulled him closer. So much for surveillance, because he made sure to be thorough with the kiss, and a small bomb could have gone off, and we wouldn’t have noticed.
“Eyes back on the target,” he said at last.
I slipped my phone back into my pocket and leaned my shoulder into his, enough contact to remind me he wasn’t going anywhere, and he adjusted so we fit better side by side.
“You still think this is a date?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“What part?”
“We’re together.”
Then I nodded once, because for him, that was enough.
And maybe for me, it was too, because he was learning about me in the only way he knew how, by watching, by adapting, by choosing the same things I chose until they became ours.
I loved this man so much that it hurt. I never used to say it out loud.
It never seemed to land right unless I couched it as an obsession.
But I found myself blurting it out. “I love you,” I said.
He nodded.
“I love you too.”
He’d taken to saying it back to me, but it wasn’t said in the way most people used it.
For him, it wasn’t soft or easy. It was a statement, a claim, a promise wrapped in something unyielding.
It meant I was his, that he wouldn’t let me go, that as long as we were breathing, I was the one he’d stand beside no matter what it cost. It should have scared me—maybe part of it did—but it was also the purest thing he knew how to give.
His love wasn’t gentle or uncomplicated.
It was obsessive, rooted deep, sharpened by everything he’d survived and everything he refused to lose.
It wasn’t about letting go or setting free; it was about holding on, protecting, staying.
And somewhere in all that intensity, he’d learned something quieter—that when he said those words, it made me smile, that I leaned into him instead of pulling away, that I always kissed him after.
I lifted the camera again, refocused, and settled back into the work as part of our tight two-man team. He wasn’t cleaning any more for Doc, he’d passed the business over to some guy called Jeremy, and now he was my associate—his words, not mine—and where I went, he went.
Sonya once asked me if Novak’s intensity scared me.
I wasn’t afraid of him. I’d never been. I was afraid of losing him. I loved him.
“Hey, Leon?”
He glanced at me, “Yes?”
I touched his lips and he caught my hand and held it there.
I kissed him and using words that meant something to him, I told him one thing.
“You’re mine.”
THE END