Page 19 of Grim

Her pulse kicked. She spun toward her car.

A shape stepped out of the shadows.

Sophia gasped, stumbling back. “Dios mío! What the hell…”

“It’s just me,” the man said.

Just him. Of course it was him. The one man who made her feel seen and unsettled in equal measure. As if he wasn’t built like a wall and standing exactly where no one should be standing at six in the morning.

“You scared the life out of me!” she snapped, pressing a hand to her chest.

Sophia’s pulse was still racing, her breath uneven, her hand pressed hard against her chest as if she could steady her own heartbeat. She hated that he’d startled her. Hated how shaken she felt. Hated that exhaustion had stripped her down to something thin and breakable.

But what rattled her most wasn’t the fear.

It was the way he was looking at her.

Not at her scrubs. Not at her badge. Not at the keys clenched in her fist.

At her.

Like he looked straight through the calm she wore like armor — caught the tremor in her hands she’d been pretending wasn’t there, saw the exhaustion she hid from everyone else.

People asked her for things all night, meds, updates, reassurance. No one asked about her. No one looked at her like she was more than what she could give.

But he did.

And she didn’t know what to do with the way that made her chest tighten.

She swallowed hard, trying to pull herself back together, trying to rebuild the walls she’d let slip for half a second. Exhaustion made everything feel thinner, sharper, closer than it should have, but she refused to let him see more than she meant to show. She didn’t have room for this, not for him, not when her patient was fighting for his life, not when danger was suddenly bleeding into her world.

But the truth pressed in anyway, quiet and unwelcome. He saw her. And she wasn’t ready for that.

“You shouldn’t walk alone at night.”

“It’s morning.”

“Doesn’t matter.”

Up close, he looked worse. His right forearm was wrapped, the bandage already spotting through. His jaw was cut. His shoulders were tight, like he’d been bracing for hours. He moved like a man held together by adrenaline and sheer will.

Her nurse brain cataloged every detail before she could stop it. She didn’t look away. She took him in the same way she took in every trauma patient, calm and focused, even with exhaustion tugging at her edges.

And God help her, it worked on him.

Maddox’s gaze flicked over her face, sharp and assessing, like he was checking for injuries she didn’t know she had. His jaw tightened.

“You’re in danger,” he said.

She blinked, “From what? My shift?”

She could handle chaos. She lived in it, thrived in it at work daily. But this, being the one protected instead of the one protecting, rattled her.

“From the men who chased Reyes.”

Her stomach dropped. The cold concrete of the garage suddenly felt closer. “Reyes? My patient? I have nothing to do with any of that.”

“They don’t care.”