34. Wolfe #3
“You left me your laptop,” she says. “Knowing what was on it. Knowing what I do for a living.”
“You told me once that my blind spots scare you. You were right. I was so locked into the operation and Ronan and Thursday that the files on my laptop weren’t even registering. By the time I realized what I’d done, I was already in Boston, and you were already inside the encryption I’d built.”
“That’s a hell of a blind spot, Wolfe.”
“It is. And it cost me everything.” I pause. “Almost?”
She stares at me. “I’m going to need time. I’m not saying I forgive you. I’m not saying we’re okay. I’m saying I heard everything you just told me, and I believe it’s the truth, and I need time to figure out what that means.”
“Okay.”
“And I need you to know something.” She reaches up to touch the side of my face.
Her warm palm against my jaw, her thumb grazing my cheekbone.
It’s the first time she’s touched me in two weeks.
My whole body reacts so hard that my breath hitches and my eyes close and I have to fight to keep my legs from giving out underneath me.
“I looked for Daniel in you,” she murmurs. “From the second I opened that case file, I have been looking for him, comparing you to the man who ruined my life, and trying to make you fit the same pattern.”
“Did you find him?”
“No.” Her voice breaks. “I looked everywhere, Wolfe. I couldn’t find him. Because Daniel ran the second things got hard. And you drove across a city and walked into a room with two armed men and put your body between me and a bullet.”
I open my eyes. She’s crying now, not even trying to hide it. Eva Moreno is standing in front of me with tears pouring down her face. She’s not wiping them away, and she’s not turning away to hide them.
“I don’t know what comes next,” she says. “But I’m not leaving this cabin tonight.”
“Okay.” My own voice wobbles along with my heart.
“And I need you to hold me right now, before my brain catches up with my mouth and talks me out of it.”
I wrap my good arm around her and pull her against my chest. Relief surges through me as I drop my face into her hair.
Her face presses into my neck and her arms circle my waist, careful around the sling, and her whole body trembles against mine as the tears continue to fall.
I hold on as tight as my one working arm will let me.
And the noise in my head finally goes quiet.
The real quiet. The kind that only exists when she’s here.
We stand in the kitchen of the cabin that nobody else has ever been to as she cries against my neck. It’s not pretty, and it’s not clean, and it’s not the version of this moment that any sane person would script.
But it’s the best moment of my life.
“I missed you,” I say into her hair. “Every second of every day. That’s a fact.”
She pulls back and looks at me, her face a mess of tears and mascara and that stubborn jaw that make her more beautiful than she’s ever been.
“I missed you too,” she says. “And I’m furious that I missed you. And I’m still so angry I could scream.”
“Eva.”
“What?”
My throat tightens. Then my chest. Then everything else because my body knows what I’m about to do, and it’s trying to stop me the way it’s been stopping me for weeks.
The wall goes up. My nervous system screams that the last time I let these words out of my mouth, they were handed to a woman who was paid to catch them.
But Eva is standing in front of me with her hand on my jaw and tears on her face. She drove three hours to hear the truth from a man who has done nothing but fail her. She stood in front of a gun for her brother. She held me together on a restaurant floor while I bled.
She is not a test. She never was.
“I love you.”
My throat almost closes around the words. They come out rough and cracked and my voice breaks halfway through, and I don’t care because they’re out and it’s about damn time she heard them.
“I love you. It scares the hell out of me but I’m saying it anyway because you deserve to hear it, and I’m done letting my father’s experiment decide what I get to feel.”
She stares up at me. Her lower lip trembles and she bites down on it hard.
“Say it again,” she whispers.
“I love you.”
“Again.”
“I love you, Eva.”
She lets out a breath that sounds like it’s been locked inside her for two weeks. Maybe longer. Maybe since prison. Maybe since the first time a man said those words to her and then proved they meant nothing.
“I love you too.” Her voice is thick, garbled with tears. “I love you and I hate that I love you and I’m still so mad at you that I can barely see straight. And if you ever hide something from me again, I will put a knife through a part of you that isn’t already damaged.”
“Challenge accepted.”
“I’m not joking, Wolfe.”
“I know you’re not. You always have a knife on you. I’m not stupid enough to make you use it.”
She makes a sound that’s half laugh and half sob and pushes her face back into my neck and holds on.
I hold her back, my eyes latching onto the two chairs on the porch out the kitchen window.
Our chairs.
And for the first time in two weeks, my cabin isn’t empty.