Page 55 of Secret Baby Daddy

“You just saved her life,” I tell Piper, once the reroute is confirmed and Sloane is safely moving through an alternate path I built in under ten minutes because she gave me the ten minutes to build it.

“I read a room. It’s what I do.”

But there’s something almost fragile under the deflection, like she’s still deciding whether to let herself believe it mattered.

“It’s not just reading a room. It’s threat analysis. You do it with headlines instead of floor plans, but it’s the same discipline.”

I mean it as a correction to everything I’ve believed about her methods for a year, and I watch it land somewhere unguarded behind her eyes.

I have spent a year dismissing an entire discipline because it didn’t look like mine, the same mistake I have spent my whole career warning junior analysts against.

Piper Vale has been running threat assessment this entire time.

I simply refused to call it by its correct name.

We don’t get the luxury of sitting with that for long.

The van reappears forty minutes later, closer this time, parked at the edge of the north access road where the tree line breaks.

I have three men move on it, and it should be simple: contain, question, hold for the police Cordelia’s already agreed to call.

It isn’t simple.

The passenger door opens before my men reach it, and a man moves fast, faster than the amateur photo account suggested we were dealing with, straight past my detail toward the only person standing exposed near the gate.

Piper.

I don’t remember deciding to move.

I remember the distance collapsing faster than should be physically possible, and I remember getting my hand on the man’s collar half a second after he’s already got a fist around Piper’s wrist, already dragging her a full step toward the tree line before I put him on the ground with more force than the situation strictly requires.

There is no version of the next four seconds I can reconstruct later with any precision, only the fact of moving, the fact of his collar under my hand, the fact that some deeper, faster part of me made every decision before the analytical part caught up.

He doesn’t get back up quickly.

I make sure of that.

“Piper.”

I have her by the shoulders before I’ve fully processed putting my hands on her, checking her wrist, her arms, the side of her face where I can see the beginning of a mark forming.

“Are you hurt? Look at me. Are you hurt?”

“I’m fine, Calder, I’m—”

“Are you hurt?”

My voice doesn’t sound like mine.

It comes out low and rough and entirely unfamiliar, and I realize, distantly, that my hands are shaking, actually shaking, for the first time since a rain-soaked alley twelve years ago, as I turn her wrist gently in my grip, checking for a fracture that isn’t there, needing the physical proof more than her words.

“I’m okay.”

She says it quietly this time, watching my face instead of arguing with me.

“You got there in time.”

“I got there in time.”