I shoved his chest. "Put me down. And put on a shirt. You're distracting."
"Copy that."
WE WALKED TO PROOFat three.
Sunday shift, scaled back from Saturday's chaos. Huck coming in at three-thirty, two servers at five. The Sunday before Fat Tuesday had its own rhythm. The Quarter recovering, tourists getting one lazy night before the real push, the whole city at half speed but still humming.
Dane walked at my shoulder, same positioning he'd held all week. He was in a gray button-down, sleeves cuffed, the holster line barely visible under the fabric. I knew where to look now. I knew a lot of things about what was under his clothes now, which made the walk to work considerably more interesting than usual.
We cut through the side street behind Proof, the shortcut I'd taken a thousand times, the narrow stretch between my building and the parking lot that opened to the alley entrance.
It happened fast.
A man stepped from behind my car—my car, the one with the smashed windows still sitting in the lot—and he was moving toward me and there was something in his hand that caught the afternoon light.
I didn't process the details. My body locked, the same freeze from Wednesday night in the alley, that animal recognition of wrong.
Dane was between us before I finished the thought.
He moved so fast I didn't see the transition: beside me and then in front of me, his arm sweeping me back, his body squaring to the man. He caught the wrist, twisted, and drove him face-first into the brick wall. The knife—short, ugly—clattered on the concrete. Dane had the arm pinned behind the man's back at an angle that would snap with one more degree, his knee in the spine, his face absolutely empty.
No anger, no fear, no anything. The man who'd been laughing in my kitchen an hour ago was gone. This one was someone I hadn't met.
"Don't move," Dane said. Quiet. The voice was worse than shouting.
The man didn't move.
My hands were steady. That surprised me. I pulled my phone and called 911 and gave the address and Dane didn't shift by a millimeter until the patrol car turned onto the block.
Perry Hebert arrived twenty minutes later. Looked at the man on the ground. Broad forehead, thick neck, the scar through one eyebrow. The enforcer from my alley. Wednesday night. The same face I'd been seeing behind my eyelids for five days.
Hebert looked at me. Looked at Dane. Looked at the enforcer zip-tied on the concrete.
"He came at her with a blade," Dane said. "I stopped him."
Hebert nodded slowly. "He'll stay in holding. The DA will want this for the grand jury file. This helps your case. A lot."
I nodded. My hands were still steady. The rest of me wasn't entirely, but the hands were enough.
Hebert drove us home because my car was evidence now. I sat in the passenger seat and looked out the window and Dane put his hand on my knee and didn't say a word, and I covered his hand with mine and didn't either.
THE COUCH.
My grandmother's couch, the one I'd threatened to throw him through the window over, which felt both very recent and very far away. I sat on one end. He sat on the other. Not touching, but close. The apartment was quiet, the streetlights coming on outside, the city gathering itself for one more push before Tuesday.
"So that's what you do," I said.
He looked at me.
"When it counts. Not the grin, not the charm, not the stool at the end of my bar. That's who you actually are."
"Does that bother you?"
"No." I pulled my knees up. "It bothers me that it doesn't bother me."
His mouth moved, close to a smile, not quite. "I've been doing this a long time. I show up, I handle it, I drive away clean." He looked at his hands. "This one's not going clean."
"Was it ever?"
