Page 124 of Fatal Pattern

“I’m good.”

She gave him the look that all paramedics gave people who said they were good when they were clearly not good.

“Sir, you have a broken nose, two cracked ribs, a laceration on your bicep that needs stitches, and your knee—”

“I know what I have.” He stood. His knee made its opinion known immediately, but he kept moving. “Where’s Dr. Crew?”

She pointed.

Tori was sitting on the edge of a gurney, a second paramedic working on her side. She had her chin up and her eyes on the ceiling. She didn’t see him coming until he was three feet away.

She looked at him the way she had in the closet after the stalker attack. Like she was checking to make sure he was real.

“Give us a minute, will you, Deb?” Tori asked the paramedic.

The woman applied one last strip of tape to the gauze on Tori’s wound and pulled her gloves off. “I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

He eased down beside her, their shoulders brushing. Across the room, techs crouched, dropped yellow placards, swept flashbulbs across blood and broken glass. The adrenaline had burned down to nothing, leaving behind a bone-deep exhaustion that put lead into every muscle.

“Nice shooting,” he said.

“You too.” She glanced at his knee, his nose, the bandage already dotted with blood on his arm. “You look terrible.”

“I’ve looked worse.”

“No,” she said. “You really haven’t.”

That made him chuckle. He hadn’t lost her. He knew exactly what she was to him. He just hadn’t said it out loud yet.

“You know what I keep thinking about?” Tori asked.

“What’s that?”

“How quiet it is now.” She gestured toward the CSU team setting up their equipment. “All that gunfire, all that noise, and now it’s just . . . work. Regular police work.”

Blade watched a technician photograph Wells’s body. “Feels weird, doesn’t it? Being on this side of it.”

“Yeah. Usually I show up after all the shooting.”

“Usually, we don’t have to do the shooting.”

She turned to look at him. “You okay with that? What happened in here?”

“Are you?”

“I asked you first.”

Blade considered the question. Three men were dead. He’d been in a fight that could have gone either way. Tori had killed two people to save his life and Stryker’s.

“Yeah,” he said finally. “I’m okay with it. They made their choices.”

“Good answer.” Tori’s eyes locked on him. Her skin close, her breath right there.

He wanted to pull her in for a long kiss. Tell her how much he loved her. Get down on his bruised knee and ask her to marry him. But he shoved the want down.

Not here. Not like this.

Instead, he kissed her forehead and let her lean into him. Blade felt the connection. A love that had survived everything life had thrown at them.