Hope. That's what it was. The dangerous kind. The kind that had a specific face and gray-blue eyes and remembered how I took my coffee.
It terrified me how natural it still felt.
It terrified me more that I didn't want it to stop.
CHAPTER 6
Garrett
The coffee makerhissed and sputtered, filling my kitchen with the smell of dark roast while I stood at the window watching the sun climb over Queens.
I was going to see her again next week.
The thought landed like a fist to the sternum. The way it had been landing for days now. Ever since Rodriguez assigned me as her liaison. Ever since she walked back into Engine 295 and eight years collapsed into ten seconds.
I poured my coffee. Took it black—the way I'd learned to during thirty-six-hour shifts when cream meant extra trips to the bathroom and time was a luxury we didn't have.
The mug was warm in my hands. Solid. Real.
Sloane Harper was back in my life.
My phone sat on the counter where I'd left it last night. Screen dark, but I could still see the message.
Together.
She'd written it first.We'll figure this out. Together.And I'd stared at that word for a full minute before typing it back. Just the echo. Just the confirmation.
I could have sent something else. Something safer.Sounds good.A thumbs up. Anything that didn't feel like reaching across eight years of silence and taking her hand.
But she'd offered it first. That word. And some part of me—the part I'd spent a decade trying to kill—couldn't let it hang there unanswered.
Together.
Like we still knew how to be that. Like the years between us were a pause instead of an ending.
I'd told myself this was professional. The serial arson case. The corruption I'd been documenting for years. The chance to finally expose the network that killed Emma Marsh and a dozen others like her.
Engine 295 needed this story told. The city needed someone to shine a light into the dark corners where city officials made deals over bodies.
Sloane was the best investigative journalist in New York. Maybe the country. This partnership made sense. It was logical. Strategic.
And I was a goddamn liar.
Because underneath all the justifications, underneath the professional necessity and the tactical advantage, there was a simpler truth: I wanted to see her.
After eight years of trying to forget her face, her laugh, the way she used to steal my hoodies and wear them around the apartment like they were evening gowns—after eight years of failed relationships and empty apartments and work that never quite filled the hollow space she left behind—I wanted to sit across from Sloane Harper and pretend, just for a little while, that she hadn't destroyed me when she walked away.
Dangerous. This was dangerous.
I knew it the way I knew fire. The way I could read smoke patterns and structural integrity, and the moment a buildingwent from survivable to a death trap. Some risks you calculated. Others you felt in your bones.
Sloane was the second kind.
I drained my coffee. Set the mug in the sink. Headed for the door.
Keep it professional, Stone.
I almost believed it.
