"Everyone likes Jack. It's deeply annoying."
"And the others?"
"Marcus will ask if it affects the operation. I'll tell him it doesn't. He'll accept that because he trusts me." Zain paused. "Ghost won't comment. Nate will make exactly one joke and then never mention it again. Elijah will pretend he doesn't know."
"And you?"
Zain turned his head. Looked at Seth: really looked, the way he'd been trying not to for weeks.
"I'm done pretending this is a mistake," he said.
The smile that broke across Seth's face was the first real, unguarded, fully committed smile Zain had ever seen from him.It changed his whole face, washed the wariness away and left something young and bright and fierce.
"Good," Seth said. "Because I was going to be really annoying about it if you tried to run again."
"You're already really annoying."
"Yourannoying."
Zain huffed. Pulled him closer. Let the morning settle around them like something they'd chosen instead of something they'd survived.
Chapter 23
The first wave hit at breakfast.
The eggs were scrambled. Jack's scrambled eggs were different from Nate's, rougher, less precise, cooked withaggressive confidence, like breakfast was something to be subdued. They were also, inexplicably, perfect. Golden and soft and seasoned with something Seth couldn't identify.
"Smoked paprika," Jack said, reading the question on Seth's face. "And a little bit of cream cheese. Don't tell Nate. He thinks cream cheese in eggs is an abomination."
"It is an abomination," Nate called from the hallway.
"It's delicious and you know it."
"I know nothing of the sort."
Seth ate. The food was warm and the kitchen was warm and Jack's casual banter was warm, and the warmth was doing something to the cold place inside Seth's chest, the place where the memory of Levi's body hitting the wet ground lived, where the recoil still vibrated in his wrist, where the sound of the shot still echoed with flat finality. Something that couldn't be taken back.
Jack sat across from him. Didn't say anything for a while. Just drank his coffee and existed in the same space, offering the gift of presence without demand, the same thing Nate had offered on Seth's first morning, the same thing this whole crew seemed to understand instinctively, that sometimes what a broken person needed wasn't words or wisdom or advice but simply another human body in the room, breathing, being alive, providing proof that the world continued and that you were still in it.
Two days after Levi. Seth was sitting at the kitchen island with his coffee, same spot, same mug, same bitter black that Nate brewed strong enough to strip paint, and Jack was making eggs. Scrambled, with cheese and hot sauce, the way Jack made everything. The normalcy of it was the problem. The eggs hissing in the pan. The scrape of the spatula. The smell of butter browning.
Levi had loved scrambled eggs. Made them on the hot plate they'd stolen from a Goodwill, back when they were sixteen andsleeping in the back of an abandoned Chrysler plant on the east side. Levi couldn't cook anything else, but he made eggs like they were the only thing between him and the end of the world.
The memory surfaced without warning, and with it came the sound.
Not the gunshot, he'd expected the gunshot, had been bracing for it like a punch he could see coming. What came instead was the sound Levi had made right before. A small sound. A breath that was half a word.Seth.
Just his name. Not even the whole thing. Just the beginning of it, cut off.
The coffee mug slipped.
It hit the counter instead of the floor, and the sound, ceramic on granite, sharp and hard, went through Seth like a bullet through paper. His hands were shaking. His vision had gone narrow, the edges dissolving into something gray and cottony, and he couldn't feel his legs.
"Seth."
Jack's voice. Calm. Grounded. The spatula was down and Jack was standing at the island, not crowding him, justpresentin the way that big men who understood violence could be present without being threatening.
"I'm fine," Seth said.
