Cole said, “We should call Church.Get everyone in the room before --”
“Not yet,” I said.
He stopped.
I stood there another full minute.I counted it in my own pulse, which was louder than it should have been.The two Prospects held their ground a few feet back and said nothing further, and I was glad for the silence because I needed the minute and I needed no one to make anything of it.Whoever had been in that vehicle had seen what they came to see, and they’d left.Where they were taking the knowledge and who was waiting for it, I didn’t know yet.
What I knew was the two inches of window.
Not far enough to show a face.Far enough to show that they’d wanted me to know someone was there.
I turned around.
The Prospects fell back as I came through them, reading the set of my jaw without asking about it.Cole would write up what he’d seen and put it on Beast’s desk.The other one would go back to watching the yard, probably with more attention than he’d had this morning.They were learning, both of them.
My fingers had left red crescents in my palms somewhere between the road and the tree line.
The cottage was still locked.The porch light was on.Through the window above the kitchen sink, her shape was visible -- standing there -- and I saw her as I crossed the yard.I didn’t look away for the whole distance back.
* * *
Lennox
The key in the lock was the first sound I’d heard from outside since he’d left.Then the door opened and he was there, and I stayed where I was -- at the window, not the door, which took effort I didn’t examine -- and I looked at him.
He stopped in the doorway.
He looked at my face first, then the cut, then my face again, the same route he’d taken every morning that week.The cold had come in around him when the door opened, and it was still moving through the room.He pushed the door shut and stood on the entry mat, jacket still on.The careful control in his posture, the slight heave of his chest from the walk back -- it told me everything his blank face was trying to hide.
“What happened,” I said.It wasn’t a question.
He crossed to the middle of the room, stopped, and looked at me.“They were watching the property line.They’re gone now.”
“Grant’s people.”
“Yeah.”
I’d known it before he said it.The confirmation sat differently than the knowing had -- heavier, more specific.I was still holding the cut’s lapels where I’d pulled them closed when I’d seen him through the window.I could feel the stitching against my palms.My knuckles weren’t white this time.I noticed that.
“It’s handled,” he said.“For now.”
I held his eyes.“What does ‘for now’ mean?”
He held my gaze.
Not the quick assessment he gave rooms and roads and the faces of men who came through his gate.This was slower than that.It moved from my feet up.The cut itself: the Reckless Kings insignia on the chest, the patches, his name on the leather above my left ribs.It stopped there, just for a second, and then came the rest of the way to my face.
I didn’t look away.
The bruise on my wrist had faded to yellow that week.I’d looked at it that morning and felt something I couldn’t name -- not satisfaction, not relief, something quieter than either, the strange feeling of a fact beginning to become the past.I pushed the hoodie sleeve up an inch, a nervous gesture.I watched him register the faded yellow bruise before his gaze moved on.
Some of the tension left him.
The line of his mouth softened -- I’d watched that mouth in a dark kitchen, at a meeting table, across the two feet of mattress between us -- and the hardness went out of it like a hinge releasing.
He closed the distance.
He came all the way across it and he didn’t stop at the middle, didn’t keep the careful foot of space he’d been maintaining since the first morning.He came until he was close enough that I had to tilt my head back to look at him, and he brought one hand up and curved it around the back of my head -- fingers in my hair, palm warm at the base of my skull -- and he put his forehead against mine.