Chapter 29
Both Of Them
~
Everything after Silas shouted her name happened in pieces too fast to fully process in the moment, the kind of fragments Briar knew she'd spend weeks afterward trying to stitch back into a single coherent memory.
Silas moving between her and Kessler's outstretched arm.
The crack of the shot, impossibly loud, swallowed almost immediately by a second sound — Ortega's own weapon, and behind her two more from investigators who'd closed the distance faster than Briar's mind had tracked them doing it.
Kessler going down hard against the gravel, the small weapon skittering from his hand, and Silas —
Silas still standing.
"You're hit," she said, or thought she said, already moving, hands finding his side where a dark stain was spreading fast across his shirt, lower than his shoulder this time, worse than the graze at the annex had ever been.
"Grazed me again. Different side." His voice was tight, breath coming short, but he was upright, conscious, his hand closing hard around hers even as he swayed. "Kessler's shot went wide when Ortega's team hit him. I think I just got unlucky standing in front of the wrong angle."
"That's not luck, that's you throwing yourself in front of a bullet meant for me."
"Would do it again." He said it simply, no drama in it, just plain fact delivered through gritted teeth while a state medic already crouched beside him, hands moving fast and professional over the wound. "Wasn't going to be the reason you didn't make it out of this."
She stayed beside him while the medic worked, one hand gripping his the whole time, and watched the rest of the scene unfold around them in pieces — Ortega's team securing Kessler, cuffed and bleeding from a shoulder wound of his own, alive but finished in every way that mattered; Boyd and two others taken down near the truck, Wire and Marcus standing over them with the grim satisfaction of men who'd finally been allowed to prove exactly what side they'd chosen; the cargo in the truck's bed catalogued under harsh flashlight beams, more than enough, Ortega would tell her later, to end any question about what this depot had actually been used for over the better part of two years.
The night around them had gone strange and loud in the way of a scene still settling — radios overlapping, someone's flashlight beam sweeping the gravel in slow methodical arcs, the metallic smell of blood mixing with cordite and cold night air.
She was aware, distantly, of Preacher crouched beside one of the fallen men checking for a pulse with the same steady hands he used on an engine block, of Birdie's absence from the scene registering as its own small mercy — whatever else tonight had cost, at least the club's matriarch hadn't had to watch it happen.
"He's stable," the medic said finally, straightening. "Needs a hospital, not a scene, but he's not in danger. You got lucky, sir. Inch to the left and this is a different conversation."
"Feels lucky," Silas said, though the look he gave Briar suggested luck had very little to do with how he actually felt about the trade he'd have made without hesitating.
Ortega found her twenty minutes later, once the scene had settled into the slow, methodical work of processing an arrest this size — evidence bags, photographs, radio traffic calling in support from three different agencies who all suddenly had an interest in Amber Falls County.
"Kessler's talking," Ortega said. "Not much yet, lawyer's not here and he knows better than most people what that means, but he's talking.
Confirmed the trafficking operation, confirmed Faulkner's role, confirmed enough about Tom Doyle's death that we're going to be able to close that case properly, on the record, the way it should have been closed three years ago.
" She studied Briar a moment, something almost gentle in the assessment.
"Your father's case ends tonight, Sheriff.
Officially. Murder, not accident. His name gets that back, at least."
Briar felt the words land somewhere deep, a three-year weight finally, actually lifting instead of just shifting position, and found she didn't have anything to say that wouldn't have broken her voice completely.
"Thank you," she managed instead.
"Don't thank me. You built this case with four months of quiet paperwork nobody asked you to do, while the county tried to end your career for doing it.
" Ortega nodded toward Silas, being loaded carefully into an ambulance a few yards away, watching Briar the whole time like he didn't trust the scene to hold together if he looked away from her for too long.
"Go be with him. I'll need your statement tomorrow. Tonight, you've earned the rest of it."
She rode in the ambulance beside him, holding his hand the entire way, and somewhere on the dark county road between the depot and the hospital, with lights flashing quiet red and blue against the trees and the adrenaline finally starting to ebb out of both of them, Silas turned his head toward her, tired and pale and looking at her like she was the only steady thing left in a night that had nearly cost them both everything.
"I need to tell you something," he said, "before the drugs they're about to give me make it come out wrong."
"You don't have to say anything right now. Just rest."
"I've spent fifteen years making sure I never had to say this to anyone, because saying it meant admitting how much it would cost me to lose them.
" His hand tightened around hers, weak but certain.
"I love you, Briar Doyle. Not the careful, half-measured version I let myself believe in for the first few weeks.
All of it. The kind that would've put itself between you and worse than a bullet tonight, and the kind that's going to keep choosing you tomorrow, and the day after, for as long as you'll let me. "
She leaned down and kissed him, careful of the IV line and the oxygen mask hanging loose around his neck, and felt the whole terrible, extraordinary night finally settle into something she could hold instead of something that had been holding her.
"I love you too," she said, against his mouth, certain in a way she hadn't let herself be certain of anything in three long years. "And I already told you that once today. I meant it then. I mean it more now."
The ambulance doors closed. The county rolled by outside the windows, dark and quiet and, for the first time in longer than either of them could remember, actually safe.