Chapter 29 JACE
JACE
I’m at the window before I realize I got out of bed.
The apartment is quiet. The city is dark. I’m in sweatpants. I didn’t bother with a shirt or the lights.
She’s asleep down the hall. I left her there about an hour ago.
I know what she almost said tonight in the kitchen. I know because I almost said it too.
My phone is on the side table.
I pick it up.
Davis : Vaughn picked up. Breach of the order. Holding him overnight, arraignment in the morning.
Overnight . I know what overnight means with the lawyer Vaughn has. He’ll be out by midday, the charge knocked down to nothing, back on that corner by tomorrow night like none of it happened.
I put the phone back down just as I hear her—bare feet on the wood floor. I turn from the window.
She’s in my t-shirt and nothing else. For a second I forget what I was thinking about.
She crosses to me and slides her arms around me from behind as I turn back to the window, pressing her cheek between my shoulder blades, her hands flat on my stomach.
I close my eyes.
“What are you doing up?”
“Thinking.”
She doesn’t push. She stays where she is, and the truth of why I can’t sleep tonight sits in my chest where her hand was an hour ago.
She whispers against my back.
“You okay?”
“Yeah.”
I cover one of her hands with mine.
“That was a bad lie, Jace.”
I don’t answer that.
“You said something tonight.”
“I said a lot of things tonight.”
“You said you had to choose between killing him and walking back to me.”
“Yeah.”
She goes quiet a moment. Her hands stay flat on my stomach.
“What happened to you overseas, Jace?”
She isn’t asking out of fear. She’s already decided she wants to know and steps around in front of me.
The thing I’ve kept off my face for ten years is on it now. I can feel it and I don’t try to put it back.
Her fingers find the small line of coordinates over my heart and rest on them.
“These are from over there, aren’t they?”
I look at her.
“From when you were deployed.”
Quiet.
Then I nod.
“We were running overwatch outside Kandahar. Intel said hold position. I knew something was wrong.” My jaw tightens once. “I listened anyway.”
Silence.
“We lost people.”
I stare past her shoulder when I say it.
“Walker was one of my guys.”
My voice roughens slightly on the name.
“Good soldier. Smart. Twenty-four. He trusted me.”
I swallow.
“We were in a building. There was movement on the floor below us I didn’t like. The CO told me to hold position. I was senior in the stack. I could have gone anyway.”
She doesn’t speak.
“I didn’t. They were waiting for us on the next floor. Walker was point. He went through the doorway first.”
I stop.
“Jace.”
“He didn’t come back through it.”
She closes her eyes for a second. Opens them.
“Three weeks later I sent a letter. Four weeks later I was out.”
“Of the army.”
“Yeah.”
“Because of him.”
“Because of me, Wren. Because of what I didn’t do. He’s the consequence. I’m the cause.”
She looks at me and shakes her head. “Jace, no.”
“Yes. And ever since then I don’t wait when I know something’s wrong. Not on a job. Not in a room. Not on a sidewalk.”
She steps in and wraps her arms around me. Pulls me against her, cheek to my chest, hands flat on my back.
I don’t move at first.
Then I let her have me.
My arms come around her. My face settles in her hair.
She holds me like she’s decided no one else is going to.
I let her.
After a while, she speaks against my chest.
“Come back to bed.”
I look down.
Her face is tipped up to mine. River light catches her cheek and the curve of her mouth, and for a second the only thing in my head is her.
We walk down the hall in the dark.
She pulls back the sheet and waits.
I get in.
She slides in beside me and turns onto her side, one hand flat over my heart.
She doesn’t say anything.
This woman knows the worst thing about me now and she’s still here.
She’s not asking me to be lighter about it.
She’s not trying to fix it.
She’s just here.
I should feel lighter.
I don’t.
Because the thing I haven’t told her—the part she didn’t ask about, the part about counting hours and sightlines and exits since the second I walked into her shop, the part about what I’m willing to do if Tyler Vaughn comes near her again—that one is still mine.
She knows the man who failed Walker.
She doesn’t know yet what that man became.