Total pages in book: 61
Estimated words: 58377 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 292(@200wpm)___ 234(@250wpm)___ 195(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 58377 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 292(@200wpm)___ 234(@250wpm)___ 195(@300wpm)
She blinks tears away. “I trust you. But what happens when this is over? Do you return to defusing bombs elsewhere?”
“I return to wherever you hang your canvases.” The truth clears a fog I didn’t know I still carried. “The job might end, but I’m not stepping out of your frame.”
She exhales shakily—half laugh, half sob—then kisses me, mustard and all. Heat ignites, but I keep it tempered because the hall cameras still run.
“Careful,” I murmur, pulling back. “I still have interviews.”
“Tonight?” She pouts.
“Duty, then bedtime. I promise.”
She pins a paint-smeared sticky note on my chest: “Trust your gut.” Then she heads upstairs.
I tuck the note in my pocket.
The rest of the day passes in a blur. Duty done. Suspect list trimmed to three: a food-runner who vanished after his shift, a florist assistant with fake references, and the recently fired COO Spencer DeLuca (no alibi, known grudge).
Cam opens her door at my soft knock. She’s in a cotton nightdress, hair down. Her smile is both exhaustion and relief.
“Hall post or inside?” she teases.
“Inside,” I say, stepping in, bolting the door. “I kept my promise.”
She slips her hand under my shirt, over my abdomen, eyes shining. “I painted after dinner—found a new shade of lake blue.”
“I’d like to see,” I whisper, nuzzling her neck.
“Tomorrow,” she answers, mouth finding mine. “Tonight, let’s make our own color.”
We do.
Between breaths she whispers fear, hope, unspoken vows. Between kisses I assure, vow, plan. Outside, threats still lurk, but inside the echo of her laughter against my skin, they lose shape.
And tomorrow, when dawn floods the windows, I’ll track that food-runner’s rental car, dig through florist invoices, and corner DeLuca’s last known associate—because safety is more than walls and doors. It’s finishing the battle so she never has to look over her shoulder again.
Until then, I hold her—steady, fierce—while the storm outside hunts for cracks it will never find.
20
Camille
I’m mixing lake blues again—three parts ultramarine, one part phthalo, a breath of Payne’s gray—when my phone buzzes face-down on the studio table. I ignore it at first. The morning light slants across my canvas, turning the wet paint into a slab of water I can almost step into, and I don’t want to be tugged back to reality where reporters hunch outside our gates and my life is an itinerary of camera angles and safe words.
The phone buzzes again. And again.
I wipe my fingers on a rag and flip it over.
Dad.
Dad: Pumpkin, come meet me in the garden for tea. I miss you.
I scan the studio’s corners—windows latched, door ajar to the corridor where Rae’s footsteps just passed five minutes ago. I can still smell Sawyer’s cedar-and-wool ghost from when he popped in earlier to kiss my hair and promise he’d be two rooms away in the security den.
I type back On my way, then hesitate. Protocol whispers: Text Sawyer. Pride answers: It’ll be sixty seconds. My thumb hovers over his name. A second message arrives before I decide.
Come alone. Quick.
That prickle climbs my spine, the one my body learned somewhere between the first threat letter and the bomb. It’s ridiculous—I’ts dad. And yet…
I grab my phone, my small pocket pepper spray, the slim palette knife I’ve used as a box opener, and slip into the hall. “Be right back,” I call toward no one, hoping Rae hears it through the open command room door. Stupid. I know better. But the south garden gate has always been the least formal place to talk—delivery drivers, dog walkers, Gregory’s spontaneous meetings.
The house is quiet as a museum. The blue runners swallow my barefoot pads. At the conservatory, the air shifts—cooler, fragrant with damp soil and crushed geranium leaf. I push through the glass door to the terrace. Sunshine hits me like a cymbal crash.
Beyond the rose arbor, the south lawn unspools in clipped emerald, dotted with white garden chairs we never remember to bring inside. The breeze carries a thread of diesel, faint and wrong among jasmine.
The service drive.
“Hello?” I call, rounding the hedge toward the wrought-iron side gate.
A white panel van idles nose-in at the curb cut, unmarked except for a magnetic orange hazard triangle slapped haphazardly on the back. The garden service sometimes uses rentals when a truck goes into the shop. Normal. It’s normal. The driver’s side door stands open, no one visible.
I step closer, heart rate flicking upward like a metronome cranked too fast. “Hey? Have you seen my father?”
The van’s sliding door snaps open so fast the sound knifes through the air. Two figures burst out—coveralls, caps, masks that aren’t masks so much as cheap PPE—the kind everyone wore in 2020. One grabs my elbow, the other my waist.
Every nerve I honed in the safe house lights up.
Wrist rotate, heel stomp, knee.
I twist toward the thumb, wrench free, slam my heel onto the instep of the one on my right. He swears, grip loosening. I drive my knee toward the other’s groin with everything Sawyer drilled into me.