He shrugged, which took effort given the cords pinning his arms. “You’re too valuable to let walk. I was supposed to bring you in alive, but after the last fiasco, well…” He nodded at the mess of blood on her knuckle. “They said dead was fine, too.”
I reached forward, grabbed him by the hair, yanked his head back so he had to look at her. “Finish,” I said, voice low.
He snorted, but I saw the terror under it. “Your code is compromised. The moment you typed in your fail-safe last week, they had it. There are no secrets, not in your world, not in mine. They’ll rebuild it, or they’ll ruin you trying.”
Seraphina stared at him, face unreadable. “How much did you get?”
He laughed. “Not as much as I wanted. There’s always a bigger fish, right?”
She nodded, once, then balled her fist and shattered his nose with a single, clinical punch. The crack echoed off the tile, the blood a fine spray across his tie and the white grout of the floor. Holloway howled, then went limp, his eyes watering, the pride draining out of him like he’d sprung a leak.
I let go of his hair, impressed. “You’re a quick learner,” I said, grinning at her. “Most people flinch.”
She flexed her hand, shook the sting out. “I’ve had good teachers.”
We left Holloway slumped in the chair, bleeding and sobbing, and stepped out onto the porch. The air was cool, the silence absolute except for the faint sizzle of her porch light and the low whine of distant coyotes.
She leaned on the rail, hair wild, jaw set. I watched her in the moonlight, the way her body held the tension, the way she never once looked away from the night.
“They’re never going to stop, are they?” she said, voice almost a whisper.
I shook my head. “Not until you’re obsolete. Or dead. Or both.”
She turned to face me, eyes full of something I’d never seen before. Not fear—resolution.
“Then we make them regret it,” she said.
I put my arm around her, and she let me. We stood there, two scarred-up animals on a deck in the middle of nowhere, and I thought about all the times I’d tried to quit this life, all the times I’d lied to myself about starting over.
“You know,” I said, “you’ll like club life. You get to punch a lot of people.”
She smiled, blood still on her knuckle. “I’m starting to see the appeal.”
We watched the stars for a long time, until the porch light buzzed out and the cold made her shiver.
She glanced at me, her glasses tilted in a funny way, and then at the road below, then back. “Stay with me tonight?”
I nodded, no hesitation. “Always.”
She grabbed my hand, pulled me inside, past the bleeding and unconscious Holloway, and down the hallway to her bedroom. I could smell the iron tang of blood, the faint, lingering sweetness of her perfume. She shut the door behind us and leaned against it, breath coming hard, her body alive with the aftermath.
I stepped to her, hands on either side of her face, kissed her slow, gentle, letting the violence drain away, letting the world disappear until all that was left was her.
We undressed in silence, letting the night swallow all the questions we couldn’t answer. Her body was warm, real, every inch of her mapped with scars new and old, every line a story I wanted to hear again and again.
We fucked like people who had run out of words, who needed only the language of skin and breath and the hard, electric pulse of being alive. There was nothing left to prove, no angle, no trick—just the raw, impossible certainty that, for now, we’d beaten the odds.
Later, wrapped in her sheets, we listened to the wind outside, the way it curled around the eaves and battered at the glass. She lay with her head on my chest, her fingers drawing idle lines across my stomach.
“You’re not going to leave, are you?” she said, so quiet I barely caught it.
I thought about lying, about giving her some clean, hopeful answer. Instead, I told her the truth.
“I don’t know how,” I said.
She nodded, and I felt the smile against my skin. “Good.”
I closed my eyes, and for the first time in years, I let myself believe in something.
