Beckett signals me and nods. His watchmen are already out the door behind Vance. Daniel’s truck is in motion before Vance reaches his car. The tail we lost a week ago will not be lost today.
Alexander Voss doesn’t lose wars.
We’ll see.
Outside, the sun is blinding.
Jenna exhales in a full-body release, her shoulders dropping, chin tipping toward the sky. Dust and warm asphalt and juniper from the hills. Home.
“Who’s Alexander Voss?”
I shake my head. “I don’t know yet. But I’m going to find out.”
She nods, looking at me—not at my face, but at my hands.
I follow her gaze. My hands are shaking, the fine, involuntary vibration of a body releasing everything it held while the predator was in the room. Adrenaline, fury, the fear I didn’t show. The distance between Vance’s hand and Jenna’s shoulder. What I’d do if he moved wrong.
I curl my fingers, trying to still them. The ordnance specialist can steady a detonator with hands that don’t shake. The husband standing outside a diner after watching a man threaten his wife cannot.
Jenna takes my hands, wrapping her fingers around mine. She doesn’t squeeze or pull; she just holds.
My turn to do the holding.She said it the night she closed my laptop and put her hands on my shoulders. She’s saying it without speaking now.
My forehead drops to hers.
She holds my hands until they stop shaking.
It takes a while. The sun moves. Beckett walks out of the diner, checks his phone, and walks back in—the small choreography of a brother giving us the minute. Daniel’s truck rounds the far corner on its way to pick up the tail. Through the window behind us, Mabel turns her back and makes herself busy with the coffeepot. The perimeter holds while I fall apart for thirty seconds.
When my hands are still, she lifts her head. The expression on her face is something new. Not the woman I carried from a ditch, not the analyst at the tech station, not the wife who said yes on a porch. This is the woman who walked into a diner she helped choose and told the man who terrorized her that she’d see him in court.
My arm goes around her waist, my hand flat against her lower back, and I pull her against my chest in the middle of Main Street. She fits the way she has since the first time I held her—the tuck of her head under my chin, her palm on my chest, her fingers gripping my shirt like she’s anchoring herself to something she’s decided to keep.
I press my mouth to her temple, her jaw, the spot below her ear where her pulse beats against my lips.
“Do you have any idea,” I murmur against her skin, “what you just did to me?”
She makes a sound—the breath of a woman whose careful vocabulary just cracked.
“You faced him. You looked him in the eye, and when it was done, you turned around and held mine until they stopped.” My hand presses against her lower back like I'm branding her through her shirt. "You saw me."
She tips her head up. Her eyes are bright and fierce. “I’ve been seeing you, Ethan. Keep up.”
Something low and territorial floods through me; pride and want and the possessiveness of a man whose wife just stood in a public diner and wrote over every inch of her history with her own hand.
I lean down. My mouth finds her ear. “When we get home,” I tell her, rough in a way I can’t control, “I’m going to show you exactly what that did to me. Every part of me, Jen. Every single part.”
Her fingers curl tighter into my shirt. Her breathing goes uneven against my collarbone. “Promise?”
“Jen.” I pull back enough to see her face. Flushed cheeks. Bitten lip. Glasses crooked from pressing her forehead against mine. “I promise you things you don’t even know to ask for yet.”
She presses her face into my chest. I hold her there, my chin on her hair, my hand on her back, and I don’t care that Mabel is watching through the diner window or that Roy Watkins just raised his coffee in our direction. Let them see.
Somewhere down Route 9, Daniel and Beckett’s watchmen are running a tail Julian Vance will not shake this time. In a federal field office, a warrant is already being drafted. Out past the ridge, a man I haven’t learned the shape of yet is going to get a phone call tonight that he won’t like.
But my wife is warm against me, I can still feel her pulse against my lips. The truck is parked thirty feet away. Home is twenty minutes down a road I could drive with my eyes closed.
I take her hand. “Let’s go.”
