"Look at me," he said. "Stay with me."
I looked at him. And whatever I'd been holding—the control, the stubbornness, the thirty years of doing it alone—I let it go. Not because he took it. Because I put it down, and I put it down for him.
I came quietly. A deep pulse that started where we were joined and radiated out, my body tightening around him, my face against his. The breath I'd been holding broke, and Ishuddered, and his arms held me through it, steady and sure while the rest of me came apart.
He followed. His arms pulling me closer, a low sound against my mouth, his hips driving up once more and holding while he spilled inside me and his whole body shuddered.
We stayed. His arms around me, my face in his neck, both breathing hard. He put his lips to my shoulder. No joke, no charm, no deflection. I pressed mine to his throat and didn't crack wise, and for the first time all week, neither of us reached for a joke to cover it.
HIS CHEST UNDER MYcheek. His hand tracing slow lines on my back. The sheet pulled up because the apartment had cooled, and through the window the streetlights were on and the brass bands were starting up again, the Quarter shaking off its nap for one last push before Tuesday.
Thursday. Four days.
His breathing changed. I felt it before I understood it, a tightening in his shoulders, the smallest shift under my cheek. He was awake. He was doing math. I didn't need to ask what kind.
I should have said something. Stay. Or don't go. Or the really dangerous one—what happens after Thursday? But I'd never been the woman who said those things, and one good Sunday wasn't going to rewire thirty years of keeping my mouth shut when it counted.
His arm tightened around me. Neither of us spoke.
I closed my eyes and pressed closer and told myself I'd figure it out tomorrow, which was a lie I'd gotten very good at over the years.
Chapter Six
Dane
I KNOTTED THE TIE INJenna's bathroom mirror at six-fifteen on a Thursday morning, and the man looking back at me was someone I recognized. The suit was charcoal, decent cut, the only one I owned. I'd worn it to depositions, sentencing hearings, three funerals, and one wedding I'd left early. It fit the way it always fit. The shoulders were right. The knot was clean.
The man wearing it was a stranger and had been all week.
I adjusted the collar and checked the line of the jacket over the holster I wasn't wearing today. Courthouse security would handle that. My sidearm was locked in the case in my truck, and the absence of its weight against my ribs felt wrong — the jolt of a missed step. Muscle memory reaching for something that wasn't there.
I heard her in the kitchen. Coffee maker, cabinet door, the particular rhythm of Jenna moving through a space she'd memorized down to the inch. I'd memorized it too. Every morning for a week: the cabinet, the mug, the pause while the machine worked, the drawer for a spoon she didn't use becauseshe drank it black. I knew the routine the way I knew sightlines and exit routes, which was the problem, because sightlines and exit routes were supposed to be professional information and the sound of Jenna Darby making coffee had stopped being professional somewhere around Sunday and I hadn't done a goddamn thing about it.
The enforcer had been in custody since Sunday. Hebert had confirmed the arrest. The threat was resolved. The detail was functionally over. And I was still here — still sleeping in her bed and eating at her counter and watching her get ready for work, still driving her to the bar and sitting in my corner and driving her home. Neither of us had said the word that would've made it real or the word that would've ended it.
I pulled the knot tight and left the bathroom.
She was at the counter with her back to me. Black jeans, boots, hair down. The leather bracelet on her wrist caught the overhead light when she reached for the cabinet.
"You clean up," she said without turning around.
"Don't sound so surprised."
"I'm not surprised. I'm documenting." She turned, and her eyes moved down the suit and back up with an expression I couldn't read. "For the record, I didn't know you owned a tie."
"For the record, I own two. This is the one without the barbecue stain."
The corner of her mouth moved. Not quite a smile. Close enough that I caught it and filed it in the place where I'd been filing everything about her for a week, which was full, which had been full since Saturday, which I was going to stop thinking about in approximately forty-five seconds because we had a courthouse to get to.
"Coffee's ready," she said.
"Thanks."
We stood in her kitchen and drank coffee and didn't talk about what was happening in two hours or what was happening after that. The apartment was quiet. Thursday-morning quiet, the city finally hollowed out after Fat Tuesday, the brass bands and the beads and the noise gone, replaced by the flat, tired silence of a town cleaning up after itself. Through the window, a city truck rumbled down the block.
I set my cup in the sink. "We should go."
"I know."
