She hesitated. “Only if you’re?—”
“Let them back,” I said more firmly than before.
With a subtle dip of her chin, she slipped from the room.
Trailing the tips of my fingers along Mallory’s stomach once the door shut, I let my stare drift to the ultrasound my fingers kept brushing against as I whispered, “I know you have to be a fighter if you’re anything like your mom. So, fight.” Pressing my forehead to Mallory’s temple, I breathed, “Both of you, fight.”
When the door opened again just a handful of minutes later, I wasn’t surprised to see Briggs quietly stealing into the room, filling it with all his solemn intensity as he moved toward the bed. His stare briefly met mine before returning to his inspection of Mallory.
“Never thought I’d see Monroe this way,” he admitted as he stood on the opposite side of me, arms folded over his chest, voice rougher and deeper than usual. “Honestly thought she’d survive all of us overseas.”
“She would’ve made it a point to.”
The corner of his mouth twitched but quickly fell back into a frown. Clearing his throat, he gently commanded, “Tell me what you know.”
I told him the little I did, from the slow decline of Mallory’s vitals to what the nurse had just informed me about the baby. He accepted the news with a nod, but didn’t say anything else. I hadn’t thought he would. It was Briggs, after all. He wasn’t the kind of person who felt the need to fill silence with idle talk.
And if it’d been any other day, I was sure he would’ve shocked me when he eventually asked, “Did I make the wrong call yesterday?” When I just stared at him, he prompted, “In the takedown of the Davises. Did I make the wrong call?”
It wasn’t that the absolute worst minutes and hours of my life had somehow beenyesterday—granted, the time following had been disorienting, feeling like years and seconds all at once, but I would’ve sworn it was still the same night. It was that Briggs was doubting himself. He never doubted himself.
Even when we’d lost members of our team overseas, Briggs had known he’d led our team in the exact way he was supposed to, and they’d been tragic casualties of war.
So, for him to do this now?
“If I would’ve made everyone switch places,” he began, but I spoke before he could continue.
“There was a second guy, Briggs,” I reminded him. “It wouldn’t have mattered who you sent to Mallory’s place—they had a second guy hiding in there. No one would’ve been expecting him, and someone still would’ve gotten hurt.”
“There was a second man at every location,” he informed me, but again, I didn’t have the ability to feel surprise at this news. “And your second man wasn’t how Monroe ended up here. He also didn’t catch you off guard.”
Because I’d been sure I’d seen the blinds from her bedroom shift as I’d pulled away to keep up our ruse, even though she andDavis had still been standing outside her door. The same way I’d seen the blinds shift at Davis’ condo earlier that day.
Even through my fear and the grief clawing at me as I’d held Mallory in the kitchen, I’d thought about those blinds and listened for any tell of someone coming up on us, because I hadn’t been able to leave her to clear the condo the way I should have.
All training had gone out the window, and I refused to apologize for it.
There could’ve been a dozen other people in her condo, and I would’ve stayed right there, holding her, ready to shoot them as they came to us instead.
“You didn’t make the wrong call,” I finally muttered. “We all agreed on it.”
Briggs didn’t respond. Just stood there, staring at Mallory, looking as angry as ever until his stare drifted over her again and caught on where my hand rested on her stomach—on the photos there.
I watched him struggle to swallow before his head shifted just slightly. Unfurling his arms, he dragged his fingers through his short beard, then hesitantly reached out, his dark stare meeting mine as if asking for permission.
The possession I felt in that moment was irrational, I knew. If this had been under different circumstances, I would’ve been shoving those ultrasound photos in everyone’s faces, forcing them to look. Now? The situation was more fragile than pregnancies already were. I didn’t want to share in something that was being torn from my grasp.
But again, Briggs was family. The team wasourfamily. So I reluctantly grasped the edges of the film and lifted it out to him, watching as he took the photos from me more gently than I’d ever seen him take anything, his dark stare studying them before he shakily returned them to me.
When he looked at me again, his eyes were glassy with unshed tears, but I wasn’t able to react to the fact that I was witnessing Briggs like this for the first time ever, when I’d been trapped in a destructive storm of my own emotions for hours, and it felt like each new reading on that monitor might send me spiraling back into it.
Briggs worked his jaw like he wanted to say something, but a minute came and went before a strained breath punched from him instead as he turned to leave.
Just as he neared the end of the bed, he paused and reached out, lightly grasping Mallory’s ankle. “I’m sorry,” he whispered before leaving the same way he entered.
I exhaled slowly and relaxed deeper into the bed, letting my eyes shut just as the blood pressure cuff started up again.
Body tensing, my eyelids snapped back open and shot to the monitor, studying her too-low heart rate and oxygen for a few seconds before drifting to the blood pressure as I waited. And waited.
