“They’d want payback,” Chris continues. “Or at minimum, to piss on Vicente’s grave by taking his routes.”
“And if they’re backing Rafael?—”
“Then Nina’s the soft access point.” His fingers drum against his thigh. “She’s outside Vicente and Arturo’s security bubble. Regular schedule. Predictable patterns.”
“We don’t know that anyone’s watching. Her guard dogs are on point too.” I still feel a twinge in my back where Lucia tackled me and held me down practically hog-tied in Nina’s back yard after they caught us sneaking around. Though we weren’t exactly trying not to get caught... just not seen by the cameras.
“Someone’s definitely watching.” Chris shifts in his seat, fingers still drumming against his thigh.
“You have something concrete?”
He shakes his head. “Just patterns. Instinct. That prickle on the back of your neck before you spot the source.”
“That’s not nothing.”
“It’s also not enough to act on.” He exhales slowly. “When she goes back to work, we need to make sure she doesn’t leave the house without her detail. Not even to see Callie. Not until we know what we’re dealing with.”
“She won’t like that.”
“She doesn’t have to like it. She just has to stay alive.” The words come out harder than he probably intended. He catches himself, softens slightly. “Could be Dragonov’s people. Could be Rafael. Could be someone we haven’t even identified yet.”
“Mason will figure it out.”
“Maybe. Or maybe we’re looking at this all wrong.” He starts to say something else, but his phone buzzes. He checks it, frowns.
“What?”
“Tatiana. The ADA’s pushing for an earlier arraignment time. Wants to move it to one-thirty instead of two.”
I check the wall clock. It’s almost eleven. “Nina won’t even be out of recovery by then.”
“I know.” He shoves the phone back in his pocket. “I’ll handle it.”
I wait, watching him work through the logistics. The timing’s genuinely tight.
“You going to make it back before she’s out?”
“I’ll try.” He runs a hand over his face. “If they push it to one-thirty, the timing gets tight.”
“I’ll be here either way.”
He nods. But he doesn’t reach for his phone to deal with the arraignment. Not yet. This morning catches up to both of us in the quiet.
“This morning,” I say. “What Nina said about us taking care of each other...”
“I heard her.”
“I know you did. And I watched you freeze.”
He’s quiet.
“I’m not trying to keep score.” Even as I say it, I hear myself—I’ve been doing exactly that since we sat down. “I just want to understand why it hit so hard.”
“Because when she says it like that—’you’re each other’s too’—it stops being something that just happened between us and starts being something I have to be.” He meets my eyes. “When Nina calls you my boyfriend, it means something I spent my whole life being taught isn’t real. That men like me don’t exist. If I name what we are, independent of her, I can’t pretend it’s just circumstance. I can’t pretend it’s something that happened to me instead of something I am.”
The words settle between us. He’s not deflecting. He’s digging.
“And that means it was real before Nina,” he continues quietly. “Before the op. Before everything. And I’ve been lying to myself a lot longer than five years.”
