Page 79 of No Good Fight

His hand curls into a fist at his side. “I don’t want to leave you.”

“I know.”

“I mean it, Alex.”

“I know that too.” I reach up and touch the front of his shirt, just once, right over the hard beat of his heart. “That’s part of the problem.”

His jaw tightens beneath the weight of everything he doesn’t say.

The radio chirps again.

Ryder catches my hand before I can lower it and presses his mouth to my knuckles. Fast. Hard. Not romantic enough to be sweet. Too desperate for that.

Then he lets go.

“Call me,” he says.

“I will.”

“Promise me.”

I almost argue because it is what I do. Instead, I nod. “I promise.”

He looks like leaving costs him something physical, but he does it. He walks out of Marcy’s office, speaks to Remy in a low voice, then disappears through the newsroom toward the front door.

I watch until he’s gone.

Remy steps into the doorway a moment later, evidence bag in one hand and sympathy written all over his face. “You want to wait?”

I look at the article through the plastic. My name. My words. Preston’s marker trying to turn both into a lie.

Then I think about Ryder on his couch all night, choosing not to come upstairs.

I think about him leaving because I told him to.

I pick up my purse from the chair and wipe under one eye before my mascara can make a public statement.

“No,” I tell Remy. “Take me to file the report before I talk myself out of it.”

15

RYDER

The man pinned in the upside down SUV on the side of the hill is bleeding through a towel, and I’m thinking about Alex instead of getting him out and to safety.

Rain runs down the back of my neck and beneath the collar of my turnout coat while Josh braces the driver’s door and Captain Bell calls for the spreaders. The pickup that hit the SUV is nose-down in the ditch off Route 9, its rear tires sunk deep in mud, one headlight still cutting a weak beam across wet grass.

The driver is conscious, scared, and trying to keep his eyes on me instead of the cracked windshield or the blood on his sleeve, which means he deserves every bit of focus I have.

I give him most of it.

My phone sits heavy in my pocket anyway.

“Cook,” Josh says from the other side of the door, rain dripping from the edge of his helmet. “You with us?”

I adjust my grip on the tool instead of looking at him. “Yeah.”

The driver’s eyes flick between us, and I force my expression back into something steady. “You’re doing good, Mark,” I tell him, because his license is somewhere in the mud and his name is easier for him to hold on to than the sound of metal shifting around his legs. “We’re going to open this side up. It’ll be loud, but you’re safe.”