Chapter 33
Gabe
The knock is softer than I expect.
I’m at the door before the second one lands.
I’ve been waiting. Forcing myself to remain awake, watching a dot on the Find My Friends app.
The blue glow of the screen is still burned into my vision.
I tracked her progress block by block like I was clearing a grid.
Like she would arrive quicker if I watched it closely enough.
If it wasn’t for the strict warning to avoid driving while on the painkiller they gave me, I would’ve picked her up and driven her myself.
Hudson assured me he’d get her here safe, and true to his word, he dropped her off, texted that it was late, and said he’d check in tomorrow. It is late. After midnight.
When I open the door, Evie’s loaded down with a wheeled suitcase with a box resting on the top, her messenger bag, and a cat carrier. My good arm reaches out to help but she brushes me aside, lugging everything in like she’s used to getting by on her own.
I close the door behind her, and the first thing she does is open the cat carrier. Atlas pops out, ears forward, tail twitching, then trots down the hall without a backward glance.
Evie watches, messenger bag over her shoulder, hair pulled back loosely, exhaustion sitting under her eyes in a way that doesn’t diminish her—it elevates her. Makes her look like someone who has just finished an event she trained for—and not only finished, but won.
For a moment, we just look at each other.
Pristine white bandages cover the bullet entry and exit.
Bound in place with medical tape that crosses my shoulder.
I didn’t bother with a shirt, only pulled on pajama pants when I arrived home.
A dull, steady pull aches every time I move too fast or lift my arm—hence, shirtless.
She clocks all of it in less than a second. I can see the assessment happen.
“You’re supposed to be resting,” she says.
“I am.”
“Lying down,” she scolds.
“Other than my shoulder, I’m fine.”
With my good arm, I reach for the suitcase handle. She lifts the box that had been resting on top, and I wheel the luggage down the hall, past the closed guestroom door—equipment storage now, guns locked away, the way my father always taught me.
“This apartment’s bigger than I thought it would be,” she says as I deposit her suitcase in the entry to my bedroom. “It’s nice. But…sparse.”
“Haven’t lived here long.”
She takes in the living area, which includes an open kitchen, and makes up the bulk of the apartment. There are two small bedrooms and a bath off the entry hall, and the master en suite at the opposite end.
“Where should I set Atlas up?”
“Why don’t you use the guest bath for his litter box?” I gesture down the hall.
She takes the litter box from the box. I reach in and grab his water and food bowls. The kitchen is as good a place as any to set him up.
As an adult, I’ve never had a pet. When I was a kid, we had a family dog.
Evie rejoins me in the living area, and the room feels different with her in it—smaller, maybe, or just less like a place I only sleep in. I’m too tired to find the right word for it, so I don’t try.
Atlas makes a slow circuit of the living room before pausing at the balcony door to seemingly take in the view.
Evie sets her bag down on the kitchen counter. She doesn’t launch into an update or a prosecutorial summary—Hudson’s kept me in the loop most of the night, so there’s not much left to say. She just walks toward me slowly, gaze lingering on the bandage.
“Did you speak to Harridan?” I ask.
“Yes.”
“And?”
“He said he thought I was smarter. Basically, he thought I’d cave.”
That sick bastard.
“He was wrong.” Exhaustion tinges her statement—and blunt fact. “We didn’t get much out of him tonight, but we will.”
She stops a foot away from me. Close enough that I can see the faint smudge of ink on the side of her hand—either from writing, or from an evidence bag. Close enough that I can feel the heat from her skin.
This is the first time we’ve had a room to ourselves since it happened. No officers. No Jake. No comm line. Just this.
“You didn’t tell me,” she says quietly.
“No.”
Her fingers find the edge of the bandage. Not probing. Just contact—the careful inventory of someone confirming that what they feared didn’t happen.
“You were talking me through it,” she says. “The whole time.”
“Yes.”
She’s quiet for a moment. Her thumb traces the medical tape along my shoulder, and I let her, because I understand what she’s doing.
She’s reading the evidence. Building the timeline.
Putting together what was actually happening while she was upstairs in that locked room thinking I was positioned at the east end of the block, whole and operational and fine.
“I kept thinking—” She stops. Starts again. “Your voice sounded exactly the same.”
“That was the point.”
“I know.” Her hand stills. “That’s what I can’t get past.”
She looks up at me. Not accusation. Something rawer than that—the particular expression of someone who has just understood the full cost of something they thought they already understood.
“You were bleeding,” she says. “And you stayed.”
“There wasn’t a version of going dark that helped you.”
“I know that too.” Her voice breaks slightly, and she doesn’t try to hide it.
“I keep picturing you on that pavement, alone, still talking to me like nothing was wrong, and I wasn’t there, and I didn’t know, and I hate that I didn’t know.
” Her palm presses against my sternum, right over my heart.
“I’m not thanking you. Or, maybe I am. I just need you to understand that I know exactly what it cost you. All of it.”
The ache deep in my chest loosens—the thing I’ve been holding since the pavement, the same question I couldn’t answer alone that night: whether staying quiet, whether choosing the mission over telling her, was the right call or just the easiest lie to justify with a gun and a comm line.
She’s not telling me I made the right choice.
She’s telling me she sees the choice clearly. That she knows what it required.
That’s different.
I lift my good hand and rest it at her waist. Not pulling. Just anchoring.
“You kept talking,” I say.
“You kept directing.”
“That’s what we do.”
Her mouth curves—not quite a smile, something more private than that.
“That’s what we do,” she agrees.
Atlas hops onto a table that allows him a view of the space. The refrigerator hums. Outside, most of the windows across the way have gone dark. Only a few remain lit, holdouts against the hour.
Evie’s hand slides from my hold to my chest. Over my heart.
Her palm is warm.
“You did everything right today,” I say quietly. “You backed a group of powerful men, starting with a colleague, into a corner they won’t get out of. Proved actions receive consequences.”
She watches me carefully.
“You don’t need me in front of you.”
“No.”
“But you don’t have to walk alone either. Neither do I.”
I know exactly where this goes. I’ve known for longer than I’ve admitted. She’s it for me.
Her eyes, incredibly dark in the dim light, stay locked on mine. Not tentative or questioning in the slightest. Certain.
“Good,” she says.
I bend my head slowly.
The kiss isn’t frantic.
It isn’t fueled by adrenaline or relief.
It’s deliberate. Meaningful. Grateful.
A claim on ground neither of us is giving back.
Her mouth is warm and steady and present. She tastes faintly of mint and coffee and the long day she’s carried.
When she exhales against me, it isn’t shaky—it’s controlled release. The kind that comes after holding everything together for hours.
I caress her waist. To comfort her. To ground myself.
She leans in fully.
And for the first time since clocking the van, the math stops running in my head.
There’s no variable to calculate.
Just her.
“If this had been bad, if you’d—” Her voice cracks. “You don’t get to bleed quietly. That doesn’t happen again,” she murmurs.
A faint, humorless huff escapes me. “Noted.”
“And I don’t get to decide alone how far I go.”
I brush my thumb along her jaw.
“Deal.”
Her gaze softens. Not weaker. Softer.
Atlas makes a small, judgmental sound from the chair.
Evie smiles into my shoulder.
And everything settles into place.
Not because the case is over.
Not because the danger is gone.
But because we’ve stopped negotiating whether we stand together.
We already are.
“Let’s get you to bed.”
“I’ll never argue with that.”
She swats my rear playfully and strides into my bedroom, pulling back the comforter and fluffing pillows.
“Lie down. I’m going to wash my face and I’ll join you.” She pats the mattress, directing me.
“How’d you know which side?”
“Because I sleep on the right side, so this side is yours.”
“Staking your claim.” I pull her to me, press my lips to her temple. “I like it.”
“If you want the other—”
“If you’re in my bed, I’m good,” I tell her, grimacing from the ache as the mattress sinks from my weight.
“I don’t know how you’re still awake,” she says, standing beside me, watching carefully as I settle into the bed.
Truthfully, I’m not entirely certain either.
My eyelids feel like weights are tugging them down, and the exhaustion pulling at me is bigger than just the meds—though those aren’t helping.
Now that she’s here, that exhaustion is like a weighted blanket, my body finally allowing the effects of the day to take their toll.
The tension that’s been holding my spine upright dissipates.
My body decides, without consulting me, that the perimeter is secure.
Evie exits the bathroom in an oversized T-shirt and pulls the comforter up over my chest. I run my hand up the back of her thigh. The heat of her skin under my palm is immediate, grounding. Real.
She offers a coy smile. “You need sleep.”
She’s right. I do. And I’d like to say I’m not in pain, but I am. Still, when she curls into my good side, the warmth of her body a balm, leg crossing over mine, I feel at ease. Not because the danger is gone. Because she’s here.
I press a kiss to the top of her head as her fingers trace my chest hairs up to the edge of the medical tape.
Atlas hops up on the bed.
“He won’t sleep here,” Evie says of her cat. “He’s just surveying the landscape.”
“Does his name have any meaning?”
She lifts her head from my chest, smiling. “You.”
“Me?” I don’t get it.
“You remember that paperback you carried around with you for a solid year? Corners curled on the edges?”
“Atlas Shrugged?”
“That’s the one.”
“I hated that book.” Could never get into it but was determined to finish. “How’d you remember that?”
She exhales slowly and her breath carries across my skin in a warm caress. “You’ll think this is weird, but I had this recurring dream, and you were carrying that book.”
“So you named your cat after that book of all books.”
“I named him for the memory of you.” She says it like it’s obvious. Like she’s been carrying that truth quietly for years.
A memory her subconscious wouldn’t let go.
Not entirely different from the folder on my encrypted drive labeled Evie—photos of her that go back further than I’ve ever admitted.
Or the fact that she’s one of three starred contacts on my phone.
I don’t tell her that tonight. Some admissions need space to unfold.
Sleep comes fast and heavy, pulling me under before I can catalogue another variable.
The last thing I register is the steady rhythm of her breathing against my chest and the faint, territorial purr of a cat who has decided this is acceptable.
For the first time in a long time, I sleep easily and deeply.