Total pages in book: 69
Estimated words: 64044 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 320(@200wpm)___ 256(@250wpm)___ 213(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 64044 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 320(@200wpm)___ 256(@250wpm)___ 213(@300wpm)
But I still have to live with it. The images. The sounds. The knowledge that the world I've chosen to be part of, the one Poe kept me out of, includes rooms with drains in the floor and corridors that smell like gunpowder and people who stop being people in the time it takes a suppressed round to cross a dark hallway.
The lake doesn't care about any of this. The stars don't care. The moonlight lands on the quilt, on Render's shoulder, and on the floor where his boots sit neatly beside the bed because even in a room with no threats he keeps them within reach.
I go back to bed and slide under the quilt. His arm finds me automatically, settling around my waist with the unconscious certainty of a body that’s already learned where mine belongs. Even in the deep recovery sleep the fever earned him, some part of him is still tracking me. Confirming I'm here. Confirming I'm safe. Confirming the distance between us is measured in inches of warm sheet instead of feet of cold concrete.
I press my back against his chest and feel his heartbeat through my shoulder. Steady. Twelve to fourteen beats a second. The rhythm I learned to count in a different cabin that doesn't exist anymore.
I hold on to that. I hold on to the memory of a man who picked wild mint for my water and drove around a town of two thousand people because their lives still mattered. A man who sat across from me with his palms up when I fell apart and later learned that staying close was the better answer. A man whose face opened for half a second in a diner years ago like a door that was usually locked. And a girl who stole fries because annoyed was better than invisible.
I hold on to that.
I sleep.
In the morning I tell him.
Not everything. Not the exact images from the dreams or the precise thoughts I had standing at the window with a glass of water and the weight of violence sitting in my chest. But enough. The broad shape of it. The nightmares came. I got up. I stood at the window. I came back.
He listens the way he listens to everything, completely, without interrupting, with the focused attention that used to feel like surveillance and now feels like the safest place I've ever stood.
When I finish he's quiet for a moment. We're sitting at the small kitchen table with coffee he made before I woke up, because that's what he does now. Makes coffee. It’s small and perfect. And it’s mine.
"I know," he says.
I look at him. "You know what?"
"About the nightmares. Last night wasn't the first time."
I set down my mug. "You've been awake."
"I'm a light sleeper." He pauses and drinks his coffee with the careful calm of someone choosing his next words the way he'd choose a tool for a specific job. "I didn't get up with you."
"I noticed."
He crosses the room and takes my hand. “I knew you needed space. You needed to process things without me hovering close by. I love you, but I also know you need space.”
I squeeze his hand. “I do need space sometimes, but I also need you, Render. All of you.”
He leans in and kisses me, and the kiss is everything. Every. Simple. Thing.
Dean calls that afternoon. Dinner at the farmhouse. The whole crew.
The drive takes forty minutes. Render drives. I watch the landscape change and think about what my life is shaping into.
The farmhouse glows in the early evening light. Warm windows. The porch with the rocking chairs. Cars in the gravel driveway that I recognize from the extraction: BRAVO's transport, the sedan Gage drove to Havenridge, Knight's motorcycle parked at the end of the row with the same precision he brings to everything.
Inside, the team’s already there. Seeing them all in one room, not as names on a map or voices in my ear, but as real people who eat and argue and take up space, changes something in my chest that I didn't know still needed changing.
Arrow’s in the kitchen cooking. Actually cooking, standing at the stove making something that involves garlic and olive oil with the focused attention of a man who's rediscovered that ordinary tasks still exist.
Gage is at the counter beside him, eating everything Arrow puts in front of him and offering commentary that sounds like criticism but is really just the familiar, abrasive warmth of a lifelong friendship.
"Your sauce needs salt."
"Then get the salt."
"I would, but you're guarding the stove like it owes you money."
"It does. I've invested emotional labor in this meal."
River sits next to Gage, laughing. Juno’s at the table, calm and steady, the organizer, the one who made sure everyone ate breakfast and did their homework when they were kids. She looks at me when I come in and something in her expression shifts. She’s got the look of a woman who lost her sister to violence and is watching another woman walk into the room where the people who fight that violence gather.