Unanimous. Not even a pause.
The room emptied in the slow way Church always emptied: handshakes, murmured conversations, the heavy scrape of chairs on hardwood. Tank caught Tyler's eye across the table—a look that didn't require witnesses. Axel lingered to exchange a word with Hawk. Blade stood carefully, his chest clearly reminding him it had two new scars, and gave me a nod on his way out that carried more weight than a paragraph.
Dec rose beside me, his chair pushed back with the quiet precision he brought to everything, and fell into step as we walked out together. In the hallway, away from the room and the table and the eyes, his hand found the back of my neck. Squeezed once. Warm, firm, calluses rough against my skin, the grip that saidI'm herein a language older than speech.
"We've got a mission," I told him. As if he hadn't been sitting right there. As if saying it out loud made it more real.
"You were good in there." The barest hint of a smile. "The bench speech was a nice touch."
"It wasn't a speech, it was an impassioned plea for professional validation."
"It was a speech." He released my neck and matched my stride the way he'd been matching it for nearly eight years, adjusting his pace to accommodate the leg without ever acknowledging he was doing it. "You were good. But that's not what matters."
"What matters?"
"You wereyourselfin there." His voice dropped, and the correction landed with a weight that made my throat tight. "That's different."
I didn't have a joke for that. So I bumped my shoulder against his, and he leaned into it, and we walked to our room in a silence that only works between people who've said everything already.
Our room smelled like us. Leather and warm skin and the sandalwood candle Dec lit when he thought I wasn't paying attention, which meant he lit it every night, because I was always paying attention. Dark, warm, a scent that had settled into the fabric and stayed there like a promise. The bed was unmade because I'd been the last one out of it and Dec had learned somewhere around year three that expecting me to make a bed was like expecting a hurricane to file a damage report.
I caught my reflection in the mirror by the closet. The body looking back at me was different from the one I'd known six months ago. Thicker through the chest and shoulders, arms corded with new muscle I'd built through sheer fury on the heavy bag and the bench press and the boxing ring where Tank let me work through four months of frustration against his palms without complaint. I'd gotten stronger while getting weaker in all the ways that mattered. Muscles on a man whocouldn't fight when his brothers needed him. A joke that even I couldn't laugh at.
I stripped down and stretched out on the mattress while Dec moved through his nightly routine with the quiet efficiency of a man whose body was a tool he maintained with the same discipline he maintained his weapons. Teeth. Face. The scar on his left shoulder from a training accident in the Navy that he never talked about and I never asked about because some stories lived in the body and didn't need to be spoken.
He sat on the edge of the bed and looked at me. Dark eyes, buzz-cut hair, the jaw that could have been carved from something geological. A face built for stillness. A face that made you work for every expression, and made the ones you got feel earned.
"Tell me about the data."
I propped myself up on one elbow. "The data, or the man?"
The pause that followed lasted exactly two seconds. I counted, because apparently Nolan Mercer's counting habit was contagious. "Both."
"He's smart. Not the kind of smart that needs you to notice—the kind that just... is. He sat across from me and talked about fourteen shell companies and three federal conspiracies like he was reading a grocery list, and then I pulled a connection he hadn't made yet and he looked at me like—" I stopped. The sentence had a destination I wasn't ready to reach. "Like he'd been speaking a language no one else understood and suddenly someone answered."
Dec didn't move. Didn't blink. Just watched me with the focused attention that meant he was listening to the words and everything behind them simultaneously.
"He's scared." I rolled onto my back, stared at the ceiling. "He hides it well, but his hands were shaking when he drank the water, and he keeps reaching for his jacket pocket where thedrive is, like he's checking it's still there. He's been running alone for three weeks and it shows. The guy needs sleep and about forty meals and someone to tell him he can stop looking over his shoulder."
A pause. The ceiling offered no insights.
"His hands move when he talks." This came out quieter than I intended. "When he's explaining a financial structure, his fingers map it in the air. Like the numbers are physical things he can rearrange."
Silence. Dec processing. I felt the shift in his attention like a change in air pressure—heavier, closer, sharper.
"He held my waist on the ride back." Dec’s voice was neutral in a way that meant it wasn't neutral at all. "Strong grip. Didn't panic during the chase."
"I noticed."
"I know you did."
The silence between us changed texture. Not tension. Not quite. More like two people who'd spent nearly eight years learning to read each other and had just noticed a new word in the vocabulary.
He reached over and turned off the bedside lamp, and the room went dark, and I felt the mattress shift as he settled beside me in the position we'd perfected over thousands of nights: him on his back, me tucked against his side, my head on his chest, close enough that his heartbeat was the loudest thing in the room.
His hand found my leg. The left one, the one that had been healing for months, the one that still woke me at 3 AM with a pain like a railroad spike driven through the muscle. His thumb pressed into the knotted tissue the way Rosa had shown him, firm and slow, finding the adhesion points with a precision that would have been clinical from anyone else and was love from the man who'd held me through the worst nights.
I exhaled. The tension I hadn't known I was carrying bled out of the muscle and into his hands.
