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)
And when I’m ready, there will be a door opening that doesn’t creak like a warning, and a man stepping over the threshold not because he’s paid to guard my life, but because I asked.
For now, I rinse my brushes, hang my apron, and leave the studio light on low. It turns the white line on the new canvas into a moonlit river across blue, the zip tie hidden underneath like a fossil from a time when I didn’t know what I could survive. I stand a minute and let the sight write itself on the inside of my eyes.
Color can’t cover blood.
But it can point the way home.
25
Sawyer
Three weeks, four court dates, and more coffee than a platoon in winter. That’s how long I give her the quiet she asked for. It’s how long I keep one foot out of the house and both eyes locked on it, working the case to the nub while letting space do its gentler work. We close loops: Vale folds, pleads to conspiracy and manipulation, agrees to testify against the black-listed fixer; Kestrel dissolves in a cloud of statements; Rourke learns he’s not half as dangerous in a jumpsuit under lights as he was in a mask. Gregory sits under oath and under the weight of what he did. He’s smaller, but he doesn’t look away. HarborShield settles into their rotation, unobtrusive, competent. The city exhales.
And me? I live in a rental in Atlantic Heights that still smells like paint, run drills with BRAVO Team, file after-action reports, and try to teach my body that every midnight creak isn’t a van door finding us again. I tell myself space is part of the mission. Sometimes that feels noble. Sometimes it feels like standing at parade rest outside a room where your whole life is sleeping.
On a Thursday that glows like hammered copper, my phone buzzes with a photo. A crooked mug, a curl of steam painted as a smudge, a strip of sky dashed in blue above it. Boring thing #12, the caption reads.
I don’t even realize I’m smiling until the mirror tells me. My thumbs move. Permission to trade boring for better? I send.
Dots. Then: Tonight. Seven. Gate code unchanged. A pause long enough to make me lean against the kitchen counter. Bring nothing but you.
I stand in my rental and let that settle into my bones. Then I shave like a rookie on inspection day, iron a shirt that’s never seen a crease, and try not to count miles between hearts like yards between blast craters.
Nathan is on the veranda when I pull through the gates. He lifts a hand. “We’ll keep the perimeter light and the porch lighter,” he says, reading my face the way all good guards read a client’s weather. “Go on in, Maddox.”
“Thanks for holding the line,” I tell him, because gratitude belongs in the open.
Inside, the house isn’t a fortress tonight. It’s a home. Lamps set low, windows cracked to let the jasmine ride in. Somewhere Edgar hums—old soul song turned soft. The white line she painted months ago—Never Cover—hangs in the entry, thin as breath, bright as oath.
She waits for me at the base of the stairs.
Blue dress, barefoot. Paint on her fingers like she forgot to finish washing it off. Hair down, eyes the color that started this whole war in my chest. For a second we don’t move; we just drink each other in, re-memorize edges dulled by distance.
“Hey, Soldier Boy,” she says, like a secret we share.
“Hey, Blue,” I say, because that’s what she is to me—color and oxygen.
We close distance without thinking. She stops with her fingers at my shirt placket, not touching yet. “I’m okay,” she says. “I needed time, and you gave it. I needed proof, and the world handed some over. I needed to know that this next part belongs to us and not to the fear that barged in. I know now.”
My hands find her waist with care born from a thousand don’ts and one resounding do. “What do you want?” I ask, because consent is music and I can’t hear enough of it.
“You,” she says simply. “In this house, in my studio, in my mornings. Not as a line item on a security plan but as the reason the kettle whistles.”
I swallow, and it lands like something holy. “Copy,” I whisper, and then she’s in my arms.
The first kiss is careful—like we’re fitting a hinge back into a door. The second forgets about carpentry and remembers fire. She takes the collar of my shirt in both hands, pulls, and I go willingly, letting her set the pace. Months of sleeping on chairs and walking perimeters and staring at ceilings slip off my spine when she opens against me, when her breath sighs my name in a way that rewires a soldier down to boy.