“I don’t know. I never knew. Everything went one way. They sent proof she was alive, I sent what I had, and that was it. I dug for months on my own. Careful, quiet. I got nothing.”
“Then that’s where I start.”
I lift my head off his chest so I can see his face. “Start what?”
“Finding her.”
He says it like it’s nothing. Just something he’ll do next. I search his eyes for the part where he’s managing me, softening the blow, buying my cooperation. It isn’t there.
“You don’t even know if she’s—”
“Finding what people want hidden is what I do. It’s all I’ve done for twenty years. The Syndicate is good at hiding things.” His jaw sets. “I’m good at finding them.”
“Just like that?”
“No. Not just like that.” His thumb moves once against my back, slow. “It’ll take time, and you’re not going to like how much. If anyone senses someone hunting for her, they’ll move her, and every thread I have goes dead. So I work quiet, and you stay put, and you don’t do anything brave. That’s the price.”
“I’ve been sitting on my hands for months.”
“Then you’re already good at it.”
I huff. It’s almost a laugh. Trust him to turn the worst months of my life into a qualification.
“There are people outside Aurora who want the Syndicate’s whole supply line torn out by the roots,” he says. “I’ve crossed paths with a few. That’s a door I know how to knock on when I need it. But it starts with me, on the ground, doing what I do.”
“And Viktor? He thinks I’m—”
“Let me worry about Viktor.”
“He’ll bury me.”
“He’ll hear me out first.” Something flat and certain sits under the words. “I’m not done with the file he has on you. When I go to him, I’ll have something worth saying.”
I want to ask what that means. I don’t get the chance to, because it hits me all at once, the whole weight of it, and my chest cracks open around it.
Someone is going to look for her.
I swallow hard.
For months, the search was me alone, whispering into a burner phone at midnight. Now it’s him. This man, who tracked me when no one else could see me, who took a dragon apart with his hands, who is lying here with all that I’ve done and hasn’t flinched once.
The tears come up fast, and I don’t fight them. They just run, quiet, into the fur and onto his skin, and I shake through it while months of carrying her by myself work their way out of me.
He doesn’t tell me it’ll be okay. He doesn’t shush me. His hand stays flat on my back, and he holds exactly as steady as he’s held all night, and he lets me come apart against him without asking a single thing of me.
It takes a while. He never once checks whether I’m done.
When it finally runs dry, I stay where I am. Wrung out. Lighter. My face an inch from where his heart beats, slow and even.
“Thank you,” I whisper.
“Haven’t done anything yet.”
“You have. You just don’t know it.”
His breathing changes. A long, slow exhale, deeper than the ones before it, and beneath my palm his heartbeat picks up. Just a little. Just enough.
I go still.
