Page 76 of Forbidden Protector

She gets her shoulder under my good arm and takes more of my weight than a woman her size should be able to carry. I let her. Some fights a man doesn't win by refusing help. I learned that in a snowbank in February. I'm relearning it now with considerably more blood involved.

"Talk to me the whole way down," I tell her. "I want your voice in my ear. Same as before."

"Bossy, for a man who just lost a fight with a bullet."

"Still won the fight that mattered."

"That's not how any of this works."

"Feels like how it worked."

She talks anyway. Count your steps. Almost there. Don't you dare go down on me now. None of it means anything and all of it means everything, and by the time the truck's shape comes up out of the dark, I've stopped trying to tell the difference between her voice and my own pulse.

She gets me into the passenger seat, slams the door, and comes around fast. Her radio crackles alive in the hand that isn't currently holding pressure on my arm like she's done this a hundred times in a hundred other lives.

"This is Mackenzie Tatum." Her voice doesn't shake. Not once. "Shots fired. Officer down. No. Correction." One breath, the only crack she lets herself have, gone as fast as it comes. "Civilian down. Gunshot wound, right hand, bleeding controlled. Grain elevator, Birch Creek pullout off Highway 89, Blackwater land, north section."

A pause on the other end. I can't hear the words, only the shape of a question she doesn't want to answer.

"Tatum. Special Agent." Her jaw sets, steel coming up hard under her voice, blood dried dark across both her hands. "Currently on administrative leave. Reporting anyway."

Her hand finds mine on the seat between us, careful of the belt, careful of everything, and holds on like letting go isn't a thing her body remembers how to do.

"You held the wheel tonight," I tell her. "In every way that counted."

"Save it for when you're not in shock, Blackwater."

She lifts the radio one last time. "Send everyone," she says, into a night that isn't done with either of us yet. "And hurry."

Only then does she set it down.

TWENTY-FOUR

MACKENZIE

I put the badge on the counter before anyone asks me to.

The desk clerk at the hospital looks at it, then at me, and then at the blood dried dark into the creases of my knuckles. She doesn't say a word about federal jurisdiction or visiting hours or any of the twelve things I'd have said in her position. She just slides a clipboard toward me and asks if I'm next of kin.

"No," I say. Then, because there's nothing left in me tonight to spend on protecting the truth: "I don't know what I am to him. Just don't make me leave."

She looks at the badge again. At the sidearm I set beside it, safety on, mag out, the whole ritual of a woman disarming herself in a building full of people who didn't ask her to.

I've surrendered evidence before. I've never surrendered myself before, and my hands don't shake doing it, which unsettles me more than shaking would.

Some part of me that ran on procedure for nine years is still running it now: badge, weapon, one federal agent, voluntarily relieved of duty at two-nineteen in the morning. The Bureau doesn't have a box for the actual reason.

"I'll keep them behind the desk," she says, gentle enough to tell me she's done this before, for other women, other nights. "Nobody touches them but you."

I don't sit. Sitting means admitting there's a length of time this might take, and I'm not ready to give the night that kind of shape yet.

The waiting room at two in the morning has the hush of a place built for exactly this. Low light, chairs bolted in rows, a television bolted to the wall playing infomercial reruns to nobody, sound off, captions scrolling too fast to read.

Somewhere behind two sets of double doors, a surgeon has his hands inside the one part of Holt that made him what he is. I stand in a hallway that smells like bleach and burnt coffee and think about how many times I've watched that hand find my pulse and never once thought to memorize what it looked like whole.

I should have memorized it.

My eyes burn, and I don't let them do anything else. Not here. Not yet.