Total pages in book: 49
Estimated words: 46223 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 231(@200wpm)___ 185(@250wpm)___ 154(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 46223 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 231(@200wpm)___ 185(@250wpm)___ 154(@300wpm)
Everything in me holds and then lets go. The room tilts toward true north. “Riggs,” I try to say, and the gag turns it into a broken vowel. He hears me anyway. I know he does. I can feel his yes in my chest.
“Step back from the woman,” Turner says, conversational, like he’s ordering tacos. “Show me your hands. Let’s not do this the hard way.”
Kellan rips the handkerchief from my mouth like he’s performing some act of mercy. “Don’t say his name,” he snarls. “Do you know how many nights I—”
“Every night a choice,” I rasp. My voice is scratchy and raw like sandpaper. “You made this. You don’t get to call it love.”
He stares at me like I’ve spoken a language he refuses to learn. His hand twitches like he wants to touch me again. The driver hisses, “Bro,” and starts to edge toward the office.
“Don’t,” a third voice says, close and flinty, and I glimpse a big man’s shadow slide at the roll-up’s edge. Lalo. The driver freezes, instinct winning over stupidity.
“Mr. Stevens,” Turner continues, closer now, patience thinning but not gone, “last chance.”
Kellan goes very still. He looks at the phone in his hand, at me, at the slit of light, and you can see him building three different cuts in his head. In none of them does he lose. He takes a breath like an actor finding his mark, grips the rope with both hands, and—
Men move—shadows resolving into Lalo, Turner, and Riggs, my Riggs, filling the doorway in a charcoal shirt and a face that will never, ever be a prop. He doesn’t look wild. He looks… quiet. The kind of quiet that makes stupid men stop moving.
“Hands,” Turner says, voice clipped. “Now.”
Kellan bolts for performance—jerks the rope, drags at me like he can pull me into his cut. He doesn’t get far. Riggs is already there, silent fast, intercepting the rope with one hand and taking Kellan’s wrist with the other, twisting just enough to make bone talk without tearing ligaments. It’s a precise correction, not a fight. Kellan yelps, drops the phone, and it skitters under the folding chair and dies facedown.
“What the fuck,” the driver whines to no one brave enough to be him, and Lalo peels him off the door with a control hold that looks like a hug and ends in zip ties.
“Good,” Turner says dryly, stepping in with cuffs. “Let’s discuss your sudden passion for arts and crafts in a room with glass and a lock.”
Kellan is still talking. He doesn’t hear himself. “She loves me—this is—this is—” He’s looking for the word when Lalo, bless him, supplies one: “Over.”
The rope falls slack. The zip ties bite harder for a second with the jolt, and I suck air I don’t have and then it’s there—his hands, sure and gentle, at my wrists. He has a tool I don’t see, and I hear the plastic whisper and then I’m free and the blood rushes back hot. He’s already checking my shoulder, scanning for breaks, for discoloration, for the kind of damage that hides. He’s breathing shallow, like he’s the one who ran here.
“You’re okay,” he says. It’s not a question but he waits on it like one.
“I’m okay,” I tell him, and the moment I say it, I am more okay than I was. I tip my forehead to his and close my eyes because I can. “I tried to remember every detail.”
“I know. You did so good,” he says, and the sound he makes on good is not a laugh and not a sob but it’s something I’ve never heard from him. “Bracelet in the stall. Blood on the van. Heel under the mat in there.” He nods toward the dark mouth of the sliding door, already past it and refusing to look. “You did perfect.”
“Always do,” I whisper, and the room blurs. Turner’s people are in now—plainclothes, competent, no sirens, no cameras—pulling Kellan upright, mirandizing over his rant, moving the driver without bruises and without kindness.
Riggs cups my face and tilts it up. His eyes are dark, steady, wrecked around the edges. “I’m sorry I was late,” he says, and I hate that he means it.
“You’re right on time,” I tell him, because he is.
He breathes out. His thumb catches a tear at my cheek I didn’t feel fall. He looks at me like he’s checking fifty little things and then he just… lets himself look. The quiet inside him shifts. Something opens. Something decides.
“I love you,” he says.
It lands like shade after hours in the sun. Like water. Like the word I didn’t let Kellan use turned right-side up and handed to me clean. It isn’t performative. It isn’t a brand. It’s a vow in a room that smells like pine and gasoline. I feel it everywhere the rope cut and everywhere it didn’t. Tears come easy then. I don’t hide them. He’s earned them.