"Most grazes do."
"That is not reassuring." But her hands are already moving, tearing a strip from the hem of her hoodie with a practicality that surprises me. She presses it against my side, firm and sure despite everything she's just witnessed. "Hold that."
I do. She looks at me then with an expression I can't fully decipher—part gratitude, part shock, part something deeper and more complicated than either.
"You stepped in front of it," she says quietly. "You put yourself?—"
"Yeah."
"Why?"
The question hangs between us over the sounds of distant sirens and closer groaning. Why did I throw myself between her and the bullet instead of seeking cover? Why does the thought of her being hurt feel worse than the reality of the burning in my side?
"Because," I say, the answer rising from somewhere deeper than conscious thought, "I couldn't watch you die."
Her breath catches. For a long moment, we just look at each other.
"We need to move," I say finally, forcing practicality to override the weight of what just happened. "Police response time in this neighborhood is shit, but even shit response eventually arrives."
She nods, pulling me to my feet with more strength than I'd have credited her. Her legs are unsteady, shock setting in now that the immediate danger has passed—but she doesn't let go of my arm.
"The monitoring device," she remembers. "Did we get anything useful?"
I check my phone with my free hand, genuinely surprised to find the system worked through all of it. "Full audio and video of whatever happened inside. Plus communication logs from the past hour."
"Then this wasn't completely pointless."
"No," I agree, guiding her toward the street where our car waits, her hand still pressed against my side. "Just terrifying and traumatic and life-altering."
She almost smiles at that. "Is that your professional assessment?"
"That's my assessment as someone who just realized how much he has to lose."
The admission slips out before I can stop it, hanging in the air between us as we walk away from the wreckage of the last hour.
I've been in fights before—not often, and never without cost—but I've never taken a bullet, even a glancing one, for someone outside my family. Never felt the primal, overwhelming certainty that shielding a person with my own body wasn't a choice at all, but simply the only possible thing to do.
And Kira has seen the reality of our world now. Not the sanitized version she experiences from behind screens and in boardrooms. She's seen what I'm capable of when someone threatens what I care about—and she's seen me bleed for it.
The question is whether that revelation will pull us closer or break something between us that was only just beginning to form.
As we reach the car and I lower myself carefully into the driver's seat, her hand catches mine before I can reach for the ignition.
"Thank you," she says quietly. "For protecting me. For not letting me..."
"Always," I reply, and mean it in ways that scare me. "I'll always protect you."
Because somewhere in that alley, between the gunfire and the fear and the split-second decision to put her life before my own, I've crossed a line I didn't even know existed.
I've stopped pretending this is just an arrangement of convenience.
And God help us both, I think she has too.
CHAPTER 20
Kira
The safehouse sitsin the Catskills like a secret whispered among the trees—unremarkable from the outside, a weathered farmhouse that could belong to any rural family seeking solitude. Only the reinforced windows and hidden security cameras hint at its true purpose.
