I had my own day to get through and I promised Griz I would come straight to the house when I got off so we could celebrate properly.
I pulled up at seven in the evening after I had finished a busy workday. I still have my class, on top of bonding three people out.
I sat in the driveway for a moment before I got out and just looked at the front of the house. It was beautiful. Not showy, not excessive, just right. The kind of house that looked like something a new life was supposed to happen inside of.
I got out and he must have been watching because the door opened before I reached the porch.
He stood in the doorway and looked at me and I looked back at him and my chest tightened. I had stopped trying to outrun it two weeks ago. I loved this man. That was the feeling. I was getting in my chest right now. I was proud of him, and I appreciated the effort that he was putting in for me.
I walked inside and my mouth fell open.
Marble floors running the length of the entryway, catching the evening light and throwing it back up at the ceiling. Staircase wide enough for three people, sweeping up to the second floor like it had been designed specifically to make you feel like your life was about to mean something. High ceilings that made the whole first floor feel like it had room to breathe. I turned in a slow circle in the entryway taking it in.
Griz was behind me with a champagne bottle and something on his face that he didn’t usually let show this clearly.
“This is your house,” he said. “I picked it for you specifically. It’s big enough for our kids and for however many more dogs you decide to bring home.” He looked at me.
“This is where we build. For real.”
I laughed and felt my eyes get warm at the same time and before I could do anything else I crossed the space between us and jumped, he caught me the way I knew he would, arms around me solid, spinning me once while I laughed into his shoulder.
We were still standing there when the front door came open.
Not a knock. Not a ring. The door came open hard and fast and Brendon walked in and the man standing there was not the man I had lived with for three years. His eyes were red and swollenand past them something was burning that I had only seen once before, the night he showed me who he really was.
Griz set me down and stepped slightly forward. Not in front of me, just forward. A shift that was barely visible and meant everything.
“You want to tell me,” Brendon said, his voice shaking underneath the attempt to control it, “how a man I was doing business with was sleeping with my woman behind my back.”
“Ivy has been mine since we were ten years old,” Griz said. Simple. No apology.
Something broke completely in Brendon’s face. “This was a setup. The whole thing. You used the business to get close to her.”
“The business was real,” Griz said. “The houses are mine. I paid what they were worth. The deal is closed. I don’t owe you anything, just like you don’t owe me nothing.”
“The joke is on you,” Brendon said and his voice had gone somewhere beyond grief now, somewhere past reason. “I got your money and you’re not going to live long enough to enjoy any of this.”
His hand moved to his waist.
Griz was across the room before the sentence fully landed. The collision was immediate and violent and the gun skidded across the marble floor and they went into the wall and then to the floor and I backed up against the staircase and watched Griz dismantle him. There was no other word for it. Brendon could fight in the way that a man who had never really had to fight could fight, which was to say hecouldn’t, not against this. Griz hit him like he was ending something and it was over fast. Brendon laid there bloody.
Griz stood up breathing hard and looked at me. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know he was going to—”
My peripheral caught the movement.
Brendon on the floor. Arm extended. Fingers closing around the gun he had been sliding toward for the last thirty seconds while Griz was looking at me.
I didn’t think.
My hand was in my purse and then it wasn’t and the sound filled the entire house and then everything went very still.
Brendon’s arm dropped.
The gun stayed on the floor.
I stood there and my own gun was in my hand and I was looking at what I had just done and my legs stopped working correctly. I felt myself start to go down and Griz was there before I hit the floor, his arms around me, taking my weight.
The gun fell out of my hand and I heard it hit the marble somewhere below me.
