When I shifted for one last shot of an overview—names, arrows, codes all on one spread—her hand moved at the same time as mine. Fingers brushing the edge of the page just where mine was about to settle.
Skin on skin.
It wasn’t much. Just that small, rough slide of callus over callus. But something about being in that cold concrete box with death on paper between us and war humming above made it feel like a live wire.
We both stilled.
Her fingers didn’t pull back right away. Neither did mine.
For a heartbeat, the ledger stopped being a bomb and turned into just an excuse for our hands to exist in the same small space.
I looked up.
Her eyes were already on me. Not assessing. Not calculating an angle or a threat. Just… there. Dark. Tired. Softened at the very edges in a way I’d never seen on her face when she was awake.
“You never asked my name,” she said quietly.
It hit me then. She was right.
I’d been shot at with her. Nearly bled with her. Slept on her floor. Trusted her with a book that could get us all killed. And I still only knew her by the patches she wore on her cut.
“You never offered,” I said, almost gently.
Her mouth quirked.
“Bronwen,” she said. “That’s what it says on the old papers and the old scars. Valkyrie’s what it says on my cut. You get to pick.”
“Bronwen,” I repeated, tasting it. It fit her worse and better at the same time. “I’m Evan.”
She huffed out a breath that might’ve been a laugh. “Jersey Boy suits you better,” she said. Then, softer, “But… Evan works.”
Her hand finally withdrew from the page. She let it fall to her side instead of going for a second joke.
“Earlier,” she said. “At the yard. You could’ve stayed where you were. Let that Serpent take the shot. It would’ve been clean. Smart. Self-preserving.”
“Is that what you wish I did?” I asked.
Her eyes narrowed a fraction. “No,” she said. “I’m saying you didn’t. You moved. You caught him before he caught me.”
She took a breath like this cost her more than the sprint into gunfire had.
“Thank you,” she said. No sarcasm. No buffer. Just the words.
It landed heavier than any compliment I’d taken from a man twice her size.
“Yeah,” I said quietly. “You’d have done the same.”
“I did,” she said. “At the hospital.”
Fair.
We stood there, close enough that I could see the little scar just beneath her jawline, the one a tattoo hadn’t quite covered. Her gaze dropped once to my mouth before coming back up. Mine did something similar. Instinct. Gravity.
If the world had been kind for two seconds in a row, I might’ve closed that space.
Instead, the ceiling shook.
It wasn’t subtle. Dust sifted down from the floorboards above us. The bare bulb rattled on its chain. A split-second later, the distant crackle of gunfire filtered through concrete—muffled, but unmistakable. Someone shouted.The faint roar of engines, too loud and too many to be bikes.
