Rivera's voice is flat and immediate. "Anyone hurt?"
"Negative."
"Lock compromised?"
"Attempted. Not breached. I'm looking at fresh tool marks."
"Don't touch anything else. I'll have a team there in twenty."
"Copy." I lower the phone and stand in Ireland's living room with the Sig in my right hand and the truth settling into my chest with the weight of a tactical assessment that doesn't have a comfortable conclusion. Whoever broke into her car yesterday just tried to get into her house. The escalation pattern is clear and specific and aimed at the woman upstairs.
"Boone."
She's in the doorway at the bottom of the stairs in my t-shirt, the hem hitting her mid-thigh, her hair wild and her face pale in the light from the patio. She's been watching. She saw the weapon. She saw me move through her home like a combat zone.
The man who was inside her two hours ago is standing in her living room with a loaded sidearm and the flat, operational expression she's never seen on me before.
"Someone tried the patio door. They're gone. Rivera's sending a team."
She nods. Her composure holds. The fear is visible only in the set of her shoulders and the way her fingers curl around the hem of my shirt at her thigh. "The townhome isn't defensible."
The words are mine from last night, spoken back to me in her voice, and the fact that she arrived at the same tacticalconclusion without being told is one more reason this woman is going to be impossible to walk away from.
"No. It isn't."
"Your place on base has perimeter security. Gate access. Military police response."
"Yes."
She looks at the patio door, the scratched lock, the evidence of someone with tools and intent standing where the water view used to be just a pretty backdrop. Then she looks at me: weapon in hand, barefoot, bare-chested, the scars she traced two hours ago visible in the low light.
"I'll pack a bag."
She turns and climbs the stairs, my shirt skimming her thighs with each step.
I stand in her living room with the Sig in my hand and wait for Rivera's team, and the operational part of my mind is already running the logistics of relocation and perimeter security and threat assessment. But the other part, the part that writes poetry on a deck overlooking the water, is standing in the wreckage of the safe warm life she built and understanding that the man she let into her bed is also the man who just cleared her house like a war zone.
Both versions are real.
And the woman upstairs is packing a bag to come with me, and the distance I've been measuring for months just collapsed into the space between a loaded weapon and a borrowed t-shirt, and I'm not sure which version of tonight tells us more about what we are becoming.
Rivera's team arrives in eighteen minutes. I give them the exterior. I give them the tool marks. I give them the timeline.
Ireland comes downstairs with a duffel bag and a steady face and walks past the evidence team processing her patio door toward my truck without looking back.
6
IRELAND
Iwake in an unfamiliar bed with a man's arm heavy across my waist and no memory of closing my eyes.
The details assemble themselves in fragments: the king-size mattress, the iron headboard cool against my knuckles where my hand rests against it, sheets that smell like salt air and laundry detergent, the single pillow we're apparently sharing because this man owns a bed built for two and one pillow.
Boone's breathing is deep and even against my hair, and the arm draped over me hasn't shifted since he pulled me against him at 0400 when we stumbled through his front door on adrenaline and exhaustion and the last fumes of a night that started with his mouth on my skin and ended with a Sig in his hand.
I lie still and let the clock on his nightstand come into focus. 0545. We've been asleep for less than two hours, and the alarm I didn't set is about to go off.
His arm tightens when I shift, a reflexive pull that's proprietary even in sleep. The fact that he held me like this for two hours without moving, without loosening his grip, without the restless shifting that marks most people's sleep, tells me more about Boone Aldridge than any conversation could.
