Same easy grin.
Different man.
I drove back to airport without stopping and got on the next plane to South Dakota.
The safe house appeared through the trees around 1:00 PM, and the tightness in my chest that had been building for thirty-two hours cracked open like a fist unclenching.
I parked the car and sat for a moment. Looked at the way the sun spilled across the porch and the frozen dirt and the wall of pines.
Then I got out and walked inside.
She was standing at the window she couldn't see out of. Head tilted. Listening. The way she always listened. Completely, with her whole body, like sound was something you could lean into.
She'd heard the car. She'd heard the door. She'd heard my footsteps on the porch and she knew exactly who it was because she knew the weight of my stride and the rhythm of my breathing and the specific silence I made when I was trying not to fall apart.
She turned toward me.
The bruises on her face were a landscape of purple and green and yellow, the healing body doing its slow, relentless work. The butterfly bandages held. The swelling had gone down. She looked like a woman who'd survived something terrible and was still standing. She looked like the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen.
"It's done," I said.
She didn't ask what it meant.
I think she already knew.
She stood there for a long time, not moving, not speaking. And I stood in the doorway and waited as I felt the hollow place inside me settle around the new weight it was carrying, making room, adjusting.
Then she nodded. Once. A small motion, barely there.
"Come sit down," she said. "You look like you haven't slept in days."
I almost smiled. "You can't see me."
"I don't need to."
She crossed the room without hesitation, her bare feet navigating the cabin's geography with the same quiet precision that defined everything she did. She found a mug, poured coffee from the pot she'd made, and set it on the counter near where she knew I'd be standing.
I picked it up. Took a sip.
It was awful.
"This is the worst coffee I've ever had," I told her.
"I know." The ghost of a smile crossed her mouth. The first one since the warehouse. It was small and bruised and it hit me harder than anything Viktor or Konstantin or Dmitri could have thrown. "Drink it anyway."
I drank it.
And I stood in the kitchen of a cabin in South Dakota, three bodies behind me, the woman I loved in front of me, and the taste of bad coffee in my mouth, and I thought?—
This is what it feels like to have something worth killing for.
Setting the mug down, I crossed the kitchen and stopped in front of her. Close enough to feel her warmth but not close enough to touch, because she'd told me she wasn't ready for that, and I would wait. I would wait as long as it took.
She lifted her hand and found my chest. Pressed her palm flat against it. Right over the space that ached with my need for her.
"Your heart is racing," she whispered.
"Yeah."
