Three words. No punctuation. The message of a man who'd woken up and found the bed empty and was too proud to say he was worried and too honest to pretend he wasn't.
Zain typed back:Driving. Back soon.
A pause. ThenSeth:Bring food. I'm starving.
The corner of Zain's mouth lifted. Not a full smile. Zain didn't do full smiles. Not yet. But the beginning of one.
He drove to the all-night diner on Vernor. Ordered two coffees and two burgers with everything, the kind of burgers that came wrapped in wax paper and left grease stains on the bag. The waitress, a woman named Dalia who'd known his mother, who still called himhabbibieven though he was thirty-four and armed, added extra pickles without being asked because she remembered that his mother had ordered the same way.
"You look tired,habbibi," Dalia said.
"Long night."
"They're all long nights with you." She pushed the bag across the counter. "Eat. Sleep. Whatever order works."
Zain drove back. The safehouse, the converted warehouse in Corktown, the place that had been a base of operations for five years and was now, somehow, becoming something else. Something that had to do with a man who texted him at three AM asking for food and made the drive back feel like coming home instead of returning to base.
He parked. Grabbed the bag. Went inside.
The kitchen was empty. He set the food on the island, poured coffee from the pot Seth had apparently started before texting, and waited. Upstairs, footsteps. The creak of the staircase. Then Seth appeared in the kitchen doorway, hair mussed from sleep, eyes still half-closed, wearing one of Zain's t-shirts that hung too big across his shoulders and loose on his frame.
The sight of it did something to Zain's chest that he was not prepared to examine.
"Burgers," Zain said.
"You're an angel of mercy."
"I'm really not."
"Shut up and give me the hot sauce."
They ate together at three-thirty in the morning, in a kitchen that smelled like gun oil and old wood and the fading ghost of Jack's last dinner. They didn't talk about the op or Mercer or the cages or the dead. They talked about burgers, and hot sauce, and whether Dalia's diner or Jack's cooking was superior, and they talked about nothing, which was everything, because nothing meant there was space between them that didn't need to be filled with survival.
For the first time in as long as Zain could remember, the tension in his chest eased. Not disappeared. Never that. But loosened. Like a fist unclenching. Like a held breath finally allowed to go.
Seth caught him looking.
"What?" Seth asked, mouth full.
"Nothing."
"Liar."
"Eat your burger."
Seth ate his burger. And smiled. Small, private, a smile that wasn't meant for anyone else and that Zain filed away in the part of himself that his mother had calledqalb, the heart-place, the storage room for things too precious to leave unguarded.
Outside, Detroit breathed.
Inside, something began.
CHAPTER 15
Five days after the kitchen. Five days. The pressure had migrated from his chest to his jaw to his teeth. He'd been clenching in his sleep.
He broke on a Thursday.
Five days of avoidance. Five days of pretending the air didn't change when Seth walked into a room. Five days of professionalism and distance and sleeping like shit because every time he closed his eyes he saw green and felt heat and hearddon't be careful with mein a voice that took his control apart like a fieldstripped weapon.
