“Thank God,” he whispered.
Kodiak nodded once. “He’s in ICU. Stable.”
Breakneck lay there, staring at the ceiling tiles, the beeping of the monitor suddenly loud in the quiet room. Ice alive. Ice breathing. Ice not dead on that cold concrete floor.
“I want to see him. I need to?—”
“No, kid. You can when you’re better. Right now, you need to rest and recover. If I let you go traipsing around, Blair will have my balls, and I’m pretty attached to them.”
He swallowed hard, knowing a hard line when it was presented. Didn’t mean that would stop him.
“Rest of the team?” he asked.
“Banged up. Still breathing like the badasses they are.” Kodiak took a sip of his coffee and grimaced. “They held off a Hell’s Eight contingent long enough for JTF2 to roll in. Scene’s locked down. Major Crimes and Forensics Investigations Service are crawling all over it now.”
Breakneck huffed a weak breath. “Figures.”
“And Ayla,” Kodiak added, watching him closely. “That kid’s something else.”
Breakneck’s brow furrowed slightly. “What about her?”
“Found hidden cartel cameras,” Kodiak said. “Every angle. Every move. From the moment you rolled up to the moment it ended. I’ve seen the footage.”
He paused, then shook his head slowly.
“Goddamn, Break. You stepped up to the plate and then some. Remind me never to get on your bad side when you’re unarmed.”
A faint smile tugged at Breakneck’s mouth. It didn’t reach anywhere else.
“Sorry,” Kodiak added quietly. “Too soon for jokes.”
“It’s fine,” Breakneck murmured. It wasn’t, but he didn’t have the energy to correct him.
The room settled again, the weight of everything pressing in now that the immediate fear was gone. The DEA. Carver. Jones. That death hurt, but he didn’t want to examine it too closely now. The cameras. The politics that would follow. The reports. The quiet, classified conversations that would decide how this story was told.
But all of that was noise and spinning. The only quiet space in his head and his heart was for her.
Blair.
His chest tightened at the thought of her, of her voice in his ear, her hand in his hair, the way she’d looked at him like he was something worth holding onto. Every memory ran through him like a long, drawn-out breath, the ache, the restraint, taking her, wanting her, feeling whole. All of it was a jumbled-up tangle in him, so hopelessly complicated, he was sure he was never going to recover from it.
This mess, this disaster with the DEA, was going to explode upward. Chains of command. Diplomats. Lawyers. Investigations. It would be ugly and complex and endless.
And somewhere in all of that was a clean, obvious line he could draw.
Protect her by letting go.
It would kill him. He almost couldn’t breathe thinking about never seeing or talking to her again. It was like his heart was being carved out with one of those rusty, spiked cogs.
He knew it would hurt her. She hadn’t been subtle in how she felt about him. She might…again his breath stalled…love him. In fact, he was almost certain that she did, and somewhere in the deep recesses of that lonely boy’s heart, he felt healed, whole. She had taught him so much, given him so much, there was no way she hadn’t felt it, too.
Breakneck stared at the ceiling, the truth settling in like an old friend, familiar and convincing. Vulnerability wasn’t weakness. Surrender wasn’t failure, but protecting Blair was the last thing he could do for her.
“Blair,” he managed.
“I’m sorry. She was devastated, but she got pulled away to handle everything with the cannery. She told me to tell you she would be here as soon as she could.”
Breakneck’s heart kicked at that.
