I slipped on my top and managed a weak smile. “Thank you,” I whispered.
Freddy nodded before he moved to Monty and Heath, clapping his hands loudly in their ears. “Up, girls. I’ve got an 8 am client.”
Monty barely budged but Heath let out some kind of feral screech. “Not so loud! Shhhhhhh…” She pressed her finger sloppily to her lips and went back to cuddling Monty.
“Still drunk then,” Freddy mumbled and grabbed his phone. He texted quickly. Then he lifted his head, “Mr. Creed is sending a car. Him and Delgado went home.”
Home. What a strange, unusual word.
The weeks after the thrift shop passed in a blur. Every morning, the five of us met in the parlor while Alexander stood by the window with his coffee and handed out assignments. Heath would sit cross-legged on the rug, bright-eyed and restless, pretending she was listening while she spun one of her rings around her finger. Monty would act like she was above the entire concept of a schedule. Mickey would nod with exaggerated seriousness, as if he was accepting a sacred charge from a king, even when Alexander was telling him to run mundane errands. And then there was me, sitting there with my hands in my lap, waiting for my turn like a dog that had been trained to stay.
“Go read,” Alexander told me the first morning, without even glancing up from the folder in his hand. The second morning, I fought harder, but his eyes cut to mine, annoyed. “Your time will come, Arden, and when it does, you can’t fuck up. So go study.”
By the end of the next month, I hated books and diagrams and the caution that bombs demanded. It was one thing to understand on paper how to build a bomb. It was another thing entirely to trust my own hands to do so. I started building small devices, taking them to the rooftop with Mickey and setting them off. I’d purposefully made the practice bombs as nothing more than smoke bombs, watching different colors pop to life every time I hit a detonator.
Hate to say it, but it was boring. I missed watching things burn alive, as sick as that sounds, and yeah, I guess I am a fucking pyro.
Alexander, I think, saw that I was getting more and more restless so he gave me full access to his office. He let me study the Raven operations, the names and dates, the threads that connected Buyers to Sellers to places I’d never seen. Some days he would sit on the couch with a laptop balanced on his knees, answering emails and making calls in that calm voice of his, and I would be on the floor with a binder spread open, reading until my eyes blurred. We didn’t talk much in those moments. We didn’t need to. It was like that moment in the fitting room had been a kind of quiet contract between us—our puzzle pieces slating together, leaning, forgiving.
We continued to attend auctions, bringing more assets under our protection as husband and wife. It wasn’t enough to sate me, but it did at least give me more purpose than the smoke bombs. I spent so much time on the roof, watching those pops of color go off and wishing it was Halden or Viktor being blown to tiny, infinite pieces. I continued to not sleep to avoid my nightmares, working until the sun came up, the radio cranked loud enough that I couldn’t hear myself think. I’d never really had the chance as a girl to have a favorite band or listen to music freely, so I took advantage of it then, letting the stations bleed into one another. Some songs made my chest ache. Others made me angry enoughto wire another detonator with shaking hands. But my favorites were the ones that made me feel like I was floating just outside my own body, untethered and quiet for the first time in years.
Alexander joined me sometimes, not every night, but often enough that I started to expect the weight of him beside me. He would come up with two glasses of brandy and settle into the lawn chair next to my makeshift work station, his tie loosened, and we would sit in that strange, stolen hour between night and morning watching the city wake up beneath us. The silence between us never felt like something waiting to be filled, just something we were both standing inside of together, the smoke from my practice bombs drifting lazily into the sky.
One morning, the radio caught on something soft and old, and I froze where I was, fingers stilling over the wires, my breath catching. Tears welled in my eyes, the woman’s voice so haunting, sofamiliarin its pain that another one of my walls came crashing down without permission. Alexander noticed immediately, his gaze shifting to me instead of the skyline. The song carried on, slow and aching, and I clutched the edge of my work table, a sob cracking out of me. Alexander set his glass down and stood, offering me his hand—something that Iknewhurt him to do. He never fully told me why he didn’t like to be touched, but I didn’t have to think hard to imagine the reason. That day though, he sacrificed his comfort, his hand extended toward me, and I wasn’t going to shy away from him being brave enough to try. I hesitated only a second before taking his hand. He tugged me close, resting a palm lightly at my back, and we just…swayed. Held each other. Leaned.
It wasn’t romantic. It felt almost instructional, like we were practicing a language neither of us had been taught growing up. I followed his lead, my steps awkward at first, my body stiff with the expectation that I’d misread something and pay for it, but he didn’t guide me anywhere I didn’t want to go. We justrocked gently in place, the city humming beneath us, the song threading through my ribs and making a home in my heart. I let myself imagine I was normal. My chest had stopped hurting for the first time in months. It didn’t feel like a complete healing, but it did feel like a pause, and I clung to it harder than I should have, knowing even then that pauses were dangerous things for someone like me. Eventually the music would leave, and Alexander…Alexander would die.
I laid my head on his chest, and I listened to his heart beat as his chin rested atop my hair. “Fuck you for making me care,” I whispered hoarsely.
A rumble echoed through his chest, his laugh feeling like as much of a miracle as Melody’s had. Just like hers, I wanted to bottle it and hold it close to my heart. “Fuck you too, Arden Creed, for making me wish I had more time.”
“I hate you for dying,” I told him honestly. “For thinking I’ll just be able to pick up all the pieces you leave in your wake.”
“You can do it.”
“And if I can’t?”
“Then you won’t, and that’s okay too.”
I tilted my head back and found him as serious as ever. “Okay, but I refuse to walk around with a stick up my ass like you do.”
A genuine laugh left him, his head shifting back and his fingers curling at my waist. His chest shook, and I smiled.
“See,” I told him. “If you did that more often, I probably would’ve trusted you sooner.”
He was still chuckling, his eyes watering. “Noted.” Then he hesitated before he said, “This is the longest I’ve held onto someone in years.”
My chest twinged with pain knowing that. “Why?” I asked. “You’re not my type, but I’m sure someone out there would feel lucky to have you, Alexander.”
He shrugged a shoulder and sighed, looking out across the city as we continued to sway. “I thought about it but shortly after, I got my diagnosis. I know what it’s like to be faced with death every second of every day, but whoever I brought near me wouldn’t. It wouldn’t have been fair of me to ask someone to love me.”
“That’s…incredibly selfless,” I told him.
“Thought I’d catch a break with you until I realized you had a giant cloud of Rafe hanging over your head,” he said teasingly.
I narrowed my eyes, and he laughed again.
“I am but a mortal man, Arden Creed. Take it as a compliment that I even had the thought. It takes a lot for me to have that much,” he swore, his laughter tapering off. “Besides, I’m glad Rafe has you. I used to think about what happened to him, always imagining the worst. Knowing he wasn’t alone, that he had Creed, it doesn’t take all my guilt away but it softens the blow.”
