7. Ezra
EZRA
I’ve known for days.
Her cycle has been regular since I started tracking it—calendar app on her phone, entries she marked herself. I noted the pattern during one of the early break-ins. The kind of detail that only matters if you’re planning something you haven’t admitted to yourself yet.
I admitted it to myself around week four of the scope.
She’s late. I know because I’ve been checking.
I know because the week before her period she usually makes the pasta standing at the counter and eats it fast, the way she eats when her body wants something heavy—and this week she made the pasta and didn’t finish it and stood at the kitchen window holding her stomach with a look on her face I’ve never seen through the scope before.
She bought a test yesterday.
I watched through the scope—the pharmacy west on Garfield, the white bag, the way she held it on the walk home with both hands in front of her.
She went inside and didn’t come back to the window for a long time.
When she did, she had her sleep shirt on and her hair pulled up and she stood at the window and looked across the alley at me.
I knew before she moved that it was positive.
I’ve killed men and read nothing on their faces in the seconds before.
I’ve watched targets through a scope and cataloged every micro-shift of posture for days and learned nothing useful about what was happening inside them.
Dove I can read from two hundred meters.
Six weeks of scope and weeks of close range.
I know what’s on her face when she looks across the alley and finds the scope aimed at her window: not fear, not fury.
Something she hasn’t named out loud yet.
She goes to her desk. Gets paper. Gets the marker.
Holds up the note.
Come now.
I’m already reaching for my jacket.
She opens the door before I knock—standing on the other side of it, waiting. Sleep shirt, bare feet, the test in her right hand. She looks at me and opens her mouth and closes it.
“I saw the pharmacy bag,” I say. “Through the scope.”
She blinks. “You?—“
“Your cycle. I’ve been tracking it since the early weeks.” I come inside. She steps back. “When you went to the pharmacy I already knew why.”
She looks at the test. At me. Back at the test.
“You tracked my cycle,” she says.
“From your calendar app. During the break-ins.”
She starts laughing. Not the small private laugh I know from the scope—the full one, the bend-forward one. A little hysterical. A lot of something else underneath.
“Rifle scope, break-ins, stolen underwear, my cycle. Of course.” She looks up. Her eyes are bright. “I want to meet the person who tried to hire you before you found my window.”
“They got another contractor.”
“Did the other contractor deliver?”
“He’s dead. Different reason.”
She stops laughing. Looks at me. I give her that one without flinching.
“Of course he is,” she says. Quieter now. She looks at the test. Her face goes more complicated—the laugh fades and underneath it something she’s been sitting with since the bathroom. I cross the room.
She doesn’t move back.
“I should feel things I’m not feeling.” She holds the test between us. Two lines. Clear. “I should be scared. I should be angry—you planned this, you’ve been tracking my cycle since the beginning because you planned this.”
“I didn’t use the word planned.”
“You tracked my cycle from a calendar app you accessed during unauthorized entries into my home. While watching me through a rifle scope. While killing people for money. While coming here every night.”
“Yes.”
“And you’re not apologizing.”
“No.”
She looks at the test a while longer.
“I’m not scared,” she says. “I should be and I’m not.”
She puts her hand flat on my chest. Checking whether something is real—she’s been doing this for weeks, this touch, and every time I hold still and let her check because it matters that the answer is always the same.
“Mine,” she says. Quiet. “The baby is mine. Ours.” She looks up. “When I looked at the test the first thing I thought was mine, and it didn’t feel wrong.”
Something moves in my chest. The thing that’s been there since the first night she walked to the kitchen window in the sleep shirt.
It has a name now. I’ve been sitting with the name for a while.
I have killed for this woman and will again and what I feel looking at the test in her hand is larger than anything a trigger has ever given me.
I lift the test out of her fingers. Set it on the counter. Put both hands on her waist.
“Mine,” I say. “You and the baby. Mine.”
She comes toward me. Both arms around me, her face in my chest, the full exhale—the held-up thing finally setting down.
I hold her. These arms. I’ve held a rifle in these arms for eighteen years.
I’ve carried bodies. I’ve held a man underwater until he stopped moving.
And Dove fits against my chest and my arms go around her and the thing I feel is so far past anything the work has ever given me that the comparison insults it.
Then I pull back and take her right hand in both of mine. Turn it over. Run my thumb across her ring finger—bare, warm.
“This finger,” I say.
She looks at her hand in mine.
“Soon,” I say. Not a question.
“Ezra—“
“I’m telling you. Not asking.” I look at her. “You understand the difference.”
She holds my eyes. Her face cycles through things and lands on the version I’ve been watching build since the scope: not resigned, not afraid.
“I understand the difference,” she says.
I pick her up. She goes—both arms around my neck, body adjusted to this after weeks, the geography of us familiar. She’s warm. She smells like the shampoo she switched to before I crossed the alley and she is carrying my baby and she’s going to wear my ring and she knows both and she’s still here.
I don’t take her to bed. I press her against the bedroom wall.
“Ezra—“
“I’m not asking for this,” I say. My mouth at her neck, her back against the wall, her legs already wrapping around my waist. “But I need you to know. This is permanent. You and me and what’s coming. I don’t go back. Once I know where I am, I don’t go back.”
“Then don’t go back,” she says.
I hold her up with one arm—she weighs nothing—and reach between us and push her underwear to the side and guide my cock into her.
The sound she makes against the wall.
She’s wet. Drenched. She’s been wet since the note, since the test, since I walked through the door.
I push in slow and her cunt fights me the way it always does—tight, resistant, that first inch where her body hasn’t caught up to what’s happening—and then she opens and takes me and I feel every inch of the slide in, velvet and heat and the grip of her pulling me deeper.
I press my forehead against hers and hold still because if I move right now it’s over.
I’m so hard it hurts. I’ve been hard since the pharmacy bag. Since the two hands holding it. I’m throbbing inside her and she can feel it—her breath catches and her cunt clenches around the pulse.
“I’ve been where I am since week one,” I say.
“Week one of the scope, or week one of being here.”
“Both.”
She pulls me closer. Her hands in my hair. “Come here, Ezra.”
I go.
Deep and slow against the wall. Her legs locked around me.
Every thrust is an effort of discipline because her cunt is so wet and so tight and every time I push in she grips me with her whole body—legs, arms, the internal clench that runs the full length of my cock.
I’ve held my fire on kills for days. I’ve sat in hides with a finger on a trigger and waited.
Holding back from coming inside this woman is harder than any of it.
“You know what I did last Tuesday,” I say against her ear.
“Yes.” Her voice tight. Her hips rocking, taking me deeper.
“Came straight here after. Didn’t clean the rifle. Fucked you on the kitchen floor with a dead man’s blood still on my hands.” I thrust up into her and her head tips back against the wall. “And you came so hard you couldn’t walk.”
“Yes.” Her nails in my shoulders. Her cunt clenching around me in slow pulses.
“My baby.” I press deeper. Hold. Feel her stretch around me. “You’re carrying my baby. A killer’s baby. And you’re soaking my cock right now.”
“I’m not scared of you.” She grips my hair and pulls my face to hers. “I’ve never been scared of you.”
“You should be.”
“Probably.” Her hips grind down and her cunt squeezes me so tight my vision narrows. “Probably I should be scared of the man who killed Connor Reyes and tracked my cycle and put a baby in me. Probably.”
I drive up into her harder and she gasps.
“But I’m not,” she says. “And you’re not sorry.”
“No.” I fuck her harder. The plaster creaks behind her. Her tits pressed against my chest and her legs locked around me and her cunt taking every inch of me and I can feel myself leaking into her, pre-cum, the slick of it mixing with how wet she is. “I’m not sorry about a goddamn thing.”
I fuck her against the wall and I am not gentle.
Each thrust buries me to the hilt and her cunt resists and takes me and resists and takes me and every time I bottom out she makes a sound that goes straight to the base of my spine.
I’m close. I’ve been close since I walked through the door.
The effort of not coming inside her is a physical thing—jaw clenched, every muscle locked, my cock aching with the need to let go.
“Mine,” I say. “You and the baby. Mine.”
“Yes.” Her nails drawing blood on my shoulders. “Yes.”
“Say it. Tell me what it is.”
“Permanent.” Her legs tighten. “You and me—permanent—don’t stop?—“
“Never.”
“Permanent,” she says again—and her cunt goes impossibly tight around me, the pre-orgasm clench I know, and I drive into her harder because her body asked for it before her mouth did.
Her legs lock tighter. Every stroke I feel her getting closer—the grip tightening, the wetness increasing, her breathing going shallow and fast.
“Permanently,” I say.
She comes. Her whole body at once against the wall, her cunt clamping around my cock in rhythmic waves, and I last one more stroke before I break.
I slam in and hold and come harder than I’ve come in my life—the orgasm ripping through me, my cock pulsing inside her, my cum flooding into her.
I stay buried and feel every beat of it, her cunt milking every pulse out of me, her back against the wall, my arms the only thing keeping either of us up.
I carry her to bed. Set her down. She’s still shaking and I hold her until she stops.
She’s still. The stillness Dove settles into when she’s done turning it over and has landed somewhere.
Her hand on my back, drawing the same slow shape she always draws, something she does without knowing she does it.
I’ve noticed it. I keep my mouth shut about it because the day she notices, she’ll stop.
“Eight weeks,” she says eventually. “For the first appointment.”
“You’re approximately four weeks along. I counted backward.”
She starts laughing. Quietly, into my shoulder.
“You counted backward,” she says.
“I wanted to know.”
“Of course you did.” Still laughing, soft and tired. “Rifle scope. Break-ins. My cycle. Counted backward. Of course.”
“The pasta night. You made it and didn’t finish it.”
“Because I felt off.”
“And I was watching through the scope.”
“Obviously.”
“You’ve finished that pasta every time I’ve watched you make it. You eat it fast when you’re tired, slow when you’re not. That night you made it and stood at the counter and looked at it and put it in the fridge. That’s not your pattern.”
She stares at me. “You know my pasta patterns.”
“I know everything about you.”
She laughs again, shorter. “So you started counting backward.”
“And I suspected. I wanted confirmation.”
“The pharmacy trip.”
“The way you held the bag on the walk home. Both hands. You never carry anything with both hands.”
She stares at me.
“You noticed how I carry things.”
“I’ve killed men I studied less than you.” I say it flat. True. “I’ve sat in hides for weeks learning a target’s patterns and I never learned anything as thoroughly as your walk home from the pharmacy.”
She puts her face against my shoulder. After a moment her hand finds mine and places it on her stomach—flat, warm, nothing to feel yet except the fact of what’s there.
“Watch me sleep,” she says. “Isn’t that what you usually do?”
“Yes.”
“Then watch.”
She closes her eyes. I watch her—the face I know from two hundred meters and two feet and every distance in between. The low exhale she makes when she’s going under. The tension going out of her shoulders, then her hands, then her jaw unclenching last.
I put my other hand over hers on her stomach.
I’ve been a man who moves for eighteen years. Left every city before the weight of familiarity could settle. Familiar meant comfortable, comfortable meant slow, slow got people killed. More cities than I can list. Pack time under ten minutes. I know which direction to run in most major airports.
I am not leaving before six tomorrow.
Next week I’ll stay for seven. The week after that I’m going to stop counting the hour and start counting the mornings.
I know exactly where I am. I have no plans to go anywhere.
I watch her sleep.