Chapter Ten #2
He nodded slowly, like he understood exactly what I meant, and something in his expression shifted, a kind of cautious, unguarded hope that I recognized because I'd felt the same fragile thing rising in my own chest despite every effort to keep it contained.
"Can I ask you something," he said, quiet, like he was testing whether the moment could hold the weight of it. "Do you think there's a version of this where we actually come out the other side of it. Not the same as before. I know it can't be the same as before. But something real."
I sat with that question longer than I wanted to admit, watching the steam rise off my cooling coffee, feeling the pull of wanting to say yes fight against every instinct that had kept me guarded for two months straight.
"I don't know," I finally said, honest in a way that cost me something to be.
"I want to believe there is. I'm just not ready to bet everything on believing it yet.
I need to see more than one good night before I let myself hope for that specifically. "
"That's fair," he said, and meant it, I could tell, something in his shoulders settling slightly at getting an honest answer instead of either false reassurance or outright rejection. "I'd rather have that than a promise you didn't mean, given everything."
"That's the first genuinely wise thing you've said to me in two months," I said, a small, unexpected note of dry humor slipping into my voice despite everything, and watched surprise flicker across his face at hearing it, followed by something like relief.
We sat there in that strange, unguarded quiet for another minute, the space between us different than it had been an hour earlier, not resolved, not anywhere close to resolved, but different, the way a wound looks different once it's finally been cleaned out properly instead of just covered over.
The motion sensor alarm went off at one-forty, a sharp electronic bleat from the tablet Rourke had set on the table, and whatever softness had been building between us vanished instantly, replaced by the same cold, focused alertness I'd felt every time this investigation had turned dangerous instead of just painful.
Rourke was on his feet immediately, checking the camera feed on the tablet, jaw tight. "Back fence. Northeast corner." He looked at me, something protective and urgent crossing his face. "Stay inside. Lock the office door behind me."
"Rourke—"
"I mean it, Marisol. Whatever's out there, I need to know you're safe while I deal with it, and I can't do that if I'm worried about you being exposed at the same time."
He was gone before I could argue further, out the back door into the dark, and I sat there with my heart hammering, phone already in my hand calling Dutch, watching the camera feed on the tablet he'd left behind, catching a blurred, grainy glimpse of a figure at the fence line before the picture cut to static, someone having apparently cut the feed entirely the moment they realized they'd tripped the sensor.
Dutch picked up on the first ring, already half awake, already moving by the sound of it, and I gave him what little I could see on the feed while straining to hear anything through the office door, a shout, an engine, footsteps, anything that would tell me whether Rourke had walked into something worse than a single trespasser.
Dutch told me to stay put, that he was five minutes out, and hung up before I could ask him to stay on the line, leaving me alone with nothing but the tablet's frozen static image and the sound of my own pulse.
I sat in that locked office for eleven of the longest minutes of my life, listening for anything, a shout, an engine, gunfire, anything, running through every worst possibility my mind could construct, picturing Rourke on the ground somewhere out past the fence line, picturing headlights and men I couldn't identify, picturing a version of tonight that ended so much worse than it had any right to.
I understood, sitting there with my hands shaking around a phone I wasn't even using, how thoroughly my anger at him had apparently failed to erase whatever older, more stubborn thing still lived underneath it, because no amount of fury at what he'd done to me two months ago changed the raw, animal fear I felt at the thought of losing him to something violent tonight.
Rourke came back through the door breathing hard, unhurt but clearly rattled, and I was on my feet before I'd fully decided to move, some instinct pulling me toward him before my better judgment could catch up and remind me why that instinct wasn't supposed to exist anymore.
"They cleared the fence and got away on a bike before I made it halfway across the lot," he said, dropping into the chair across from me, hands still faintly unsteady. "Cut the feed first. Which means this wasn't some drive-by scare tactic."
"They cut the feed," I repeated. "Before you even got out there."
"I know. Which means they were already inside our perimeter long enough to find the right cable, which means whoever's running this operation understands our security better than we understood it ourselves until about three weeks ago.
" He scrubbed a hand over his face, and for a moment looked less like the composed man who'd just calmly reported a break-in and more like someone genuinely rattled by how close it had come to being worse.
"This was reconnaissance. They're not just threatening us anymore, Marisol.
They're actively planning something, and I think whatever it is, it's coming soon. "
Dutch arrived a few minutes later, walked the fence line with a flashlight, found nothing beyond a single cut cable and a boot print in the soft dirt too smudged to tell them much, and the three of us sat in the office until nearly three in the morning going over what little evidence there was, the strange, unwelcome intimacy of shared crisis pulling Rourke and me back into something that felt almost like partnership, even with everything still unresolved between us.
Dutch left a little before three, promising to send a fresh set of eyes on the security footage first thing in the morning, and for a few minutes it was just Rourke and me again in that small office, the adrenaline slowly draining out of both of us, leaving something rawer and more exposed in its place.
"You should get some sleep," he said, not moving to leave himself.
"So should you."
"I'm on until two, technically. Somebody has to cover the rest of the shift."
"Then I'll stay until it's covered," I said, surprising myself with how easily the offer came out, how little I second-guessed it once it was said.
We sat in a comfortable, exhausted silence after that, not talking much, just present with each other in the aftermath of something frightening, and I found myself, in that quiet, unguarded stretch, thinking less about the danger outside and more about the strange, complicated comfort of not having to face it alone.
When I finally drove back to Essie's a little before four, exhausted in a way that went past physical tiredness into something closer to emotional depletion, I found myself thinking less about the danger, oddly, and more about the moment before it, his hand under mine on that small table, the rawest thing he'd said to me since the whole nightmare began, and I fell asleep that night uncertain, for the first time in two months, which fear was actually keeping me awake.
I woke a few hours later to a text from Deacon, brief and businesslike: Table meeting tomorrow evening.
Full security review. Your presence requested, given the books.
I read it twice, the word requested landing with more weight than it probably deserved, and understood, staring at my phone in the gray early light, that whatever else was still unresolved between Rourke and me, the danger circling us both was no longer something either of us could afford to face at arm's length from the other.