"I'm not stopping," I say.
"I know."
"If Apex Meridian is the key, then someone at that company knows who's pulling the strings. A CEO, a board member, someone with authorization over those backdoor installations. There's a person at the end of this trail. A real, living person with a name and a face."
"And when we find them?"
"That's your department." I lean down and kiss him. Soft. Brief. "I find them. You deal with them."
He reaches up and tucks my hair behind my ear. His thumb lingers on my jaw, tracing the bone. "Partners, then."
"Was that ever in question?"
The hardness softens, just at the edges. He doesn’t become vulnerable in his softness. More like admission. He looks at me the way he looked at me in the corridor that first day, when I called him a coward and waited for the blow that never came.Like I'm a problem he didn't anticipate and can't solve and has stopped trying to.
"I haven't had a partner in years," he says. "Not like this."
"Dahlia?"
He goes still. I feel it under my palm. The brief tension, the held breath. Then it releases, slow, like a valve opening.
"Dahlia was someone I loved," he says. "But she was never in the fight with me. She stood outside it. Watched it. Wanted no part in it. Or me. Eventually ran from it." He pauses. "You don't run."
"I don't have anywhere to run to."
"That's not why you stay."
He's right. And we both know it.
I stay because somewhere between the interrogation room and this bed, between the shipping manifests and the gunfire, between his hands on my throat and his mouth on my skin, I stopped being a prisoner and started being more. I don't have a word for it yet. Not a soldier. Not a wife. Not a partner in the traditional sense. Harder. Something forged in violence and tempered in the quiet hours where he traces circles on my stomach and I count his heartbeats.
I stay because leaving would mean going back to the woman I was before. The courier. The daughter paying debts that aren't hers. The girl treading water in a life that was slowly, steadily drowning her.
I don't want to be her anymore.
"I stay because I choose to," I say. "Because this matters. Because you matter."
He pulls me back down against his chest, wrapping both arms around me, and presses his mouth to the top of my head.
"Get some sleep," he says. "Tomorrow we start pulling Apex Meridian apart."
I settle against him. His skin is warm under my cheek. His heartbeat drums its steady rhythm. Outside, the compound breathes and watches and waits.
Somewhere in New York, behind a desk in a building I've never seen, someone is profiting from blood. Mine. Leone's. The soldiers who patrol these halls. The Castillo men who die on their side of the line. All of it feeding a machine none of us knew existed until I started counting numbers that didn't add up.
I close my eyes and listen to Leone breathe.
Tomorrow, I start pulling threads.
And whoever is sitting at the center of this web had better hope I don't find them.
Because Leone isn't the only one in this bed who knows how to destroy things.
I learned from the best.
Chapter Eleven: Leone
Themorningstartswell.That should have been my first warning.
