Chapter 16 #2
I picked her up. Carefully, despite her assurances, one arm behind her back, the other under her knees.
She wrapped her arms around my neck and her face pressed against my chest and I felt her breath through my shirt, warm and real, and I carried her down the hallway with the kind of deliberate care I usually reserved for evidence that couldn't be replaced.
Much later. The city glittered beyond the windows, doing its indifferent thing.
Lindsey was curled against me, her head on my chest, her finger tracing absent patterns on my skin.
The room was dark except for the ambient glow from outside, and the silence was the good kind.
The kind that exists between people who've stopped performing.
"Tell me about this one." Her fingertip found a scar on my knuckle, old and faded. "I've been wanting to ask about it for weeks."
"College. Before law school." I watched her trace the raised line. "Bar fight."
"You were in bar fights?" Her voice carried genuine surprise, which I found oddly flattering. Apparently the tailored suits had done their job.
"I was angry. After Mom died. Before I figured out how to..." I searched for the word. "Channel it."
"So you hit people."
"Mostly. Anyone who provided a reason. Or didn't." I lifted my hand, examining the scars in the dim light.
They looked like what they were: evidence of a person who'd once let his damage run the show.
"Nicole used to beg me to stop. Said I was going to end up dead or in prison.
I didn't particularly care about either option at the time. "
"What changed?"
"Law school. I figured out that words could do more damage than fists, which was appealing to the part of me that wanted to hurt things." I paused. "And then Nicole. What happened to her. And suddenly there were better things to hit."
She was quiet for a moment, her finger still tracing.
"I'm still scared," she said. The words arrived without preamble, the way she delivered things she'd been thinking about for a while: all at once, no warm-up.
"Of what?"
"That I'll wake up and this will be different.
That you'll be behind the mask again and I'll be on the outside trying to figure out what went wrong.
" She didn't look up. Just kept tracing, like the scar was a path she needed to follow.
"I know you've changed. I know the balcony was real and the eggs were real and this is real.
My brain knows all of that. The other part, the part that grew up watching someone perform love while stealing everything underneath it.
.." She swallowed. "That part doesn't always listen to my brain. "
I tightened my arm around her. Not the desperate, constricting hold from the hallway. This one was different. Measured. The hold of someone who was learning that strength and gentleness weren't opposites.
"I can't promise I won't fall back," I said.
The honesty was uncomfortable, which was probably a good sign.
Comfortable honesty wasn't really honesty.
It was just saying what the other person expected.
"The walls will go up before I realize I'm building them.
That's how it works. It's not a switch I can flip. "
"I know."
"But I can promise to let you tell me when it's happening. And to listen instead of defending. And to stay in the room even when the room feels like the last place I want to be."
"Even when you want to install a tracking app?"
"Even then. Especially then."
She lifted her head and looked at me, and in the low light her eyes were dark and searching and very close. "Say something that isn't strategic."
"What?"
"Something you haven't planned or rehearsed or run through a cost-benefit analysis. Just say something that's true."
I looked at her. The bruises were gone. The scar on her temple was a thin line, fading. She looked tired and beautiful and completely herself, and the thing that came out of my mouth had been sitting in my chest for weeks, waiting for an exit.
"I'd rather be terrified with you than comfortable without you."
It came out rough, unpolished, nothing like the clean sentences I usually constructed.
She stared at me for a moment, and then her face did something complicated, crumpling and brightening at the same time, and she kissed me again, soft this time, a seal pressed against something we were both too cautious to name.
"We should sleep," she murmured against my mouth. "The trial prep starts next week."
"I know."
"Reeves will have better lawyers than the ones at the preliminary hearing."
"Probably."
"They'll come after both of us. You know that."
"Let them." I pulled her back against my chest, her head settling into the hollow of my shoulder. "We'll deal with it."
"Together?"
"That seems to be our thing."
She exhaled. A long, slow breath, the kind that carries the weight of a whole day with it. "I could get used to that."
"So could I."
Her breathing evened out gradually, her body growing heavy against mine. I lay awake longer, watching the city lights and listening to her breathe and running nothing. No scenarios. No contingencies. No threat assessments. Just listening.
My phone buzzed on the nightstand. I reached for it carefully, one-handed, because my other arm was wrapped around a sleeping woman and I was not going to be the person who moved.
A text from a blocked number:
You think you've won. You haven't. The trial is just the beginning.
The message disappeared as I watched, self-deleting, untraceable. Reeves's people. Either a genuine threat or the flailing of a man who'd just been indicted on all counts and wanted to feel powerful.
Six months ago, this message would have triggered a full operational response. New security protocols. Threat analysis. Contingency plans cascading through my brain like dominoes.
Tonight, I set the phone down. Pulled Lindsey closer. Felt her murmur something against my chest, a sleep-word, meaningless and warm.
Let them threaten. Let them scheme. They didn't know what they were dealing with. Not me, the Monster of Sterling & Steele, the man who hunted from the shadows. That version of me was real, but it wasn't the whole picture anymore.
They were dealing with two people who'd survived each other. And that, in my experience, was harder than surviving anything else.
I closed my eyes. Sleep came slowly, the way it always did, but tonight the slow approach felt less like insomnia and more like savoring. The room was warm. She was here. The city hummed.
Tomorrow, the war would resume. Reeves's lawyers would file motions. The press would circle. The long, grinding machinery of a federal trial would begin its work, and we'd be in the middle of it, exposed and vulnerable and together.
But tonight, the war could wait. Tonight was eggs and scars and her breath against my chest and the quiet, unremarkable miracle of two broken people choosing to stay in the same room.
I'd take it.