I press my back against the wall and watch Logan work.
The meeting breaks apart into movement — people dispersing to tasks, the war council dissolving into its separate operations. Nico is already on his phone before he clears the door. Gunner goes last, pausing in the doorway, and his pale eyes find me briefly. Not warmth, not hostility. Something neutral and noting. Then he's gone.
Logan crosses the room.
He pauses first — a half-second, barely visible, already somewhere else, I can see it in the set of his shoulders — and then he crosses to where I'm standing by the wall and puts his hand on my face.
His thumb at my jaw. Both of us still. He looks at me, and the war version recedes enough that I can see him underneath, the choice of it visible in the effort it costs.
"Go back to the penthouse," he says. Quiet. "Stay there."
"Okay."
"I don't know when—"
"I know. I’ll be fine. Go."
He looks at me for a moment. War version and the other version, both present, neither fully winning.
"Lock it," he says. "Both locks."
"I always do."
Something moves through his face. His thumb traces once along my jaw, unhurried, a motion that isn't for anyone but me, and then the hand drops and he's already turning back toward the desk.
I leave.
La Sirena lets me out through the side entrance onto a street that smells like exhaust and last night's rain. The afternoon light is at that low golden angle that makes Miami look like a painting of itself. I walk toward the car.
The drive back takes twenty minutes. It feels like crossing a border.
The elevator opens and I walk through the space and the morning is still there, exactly where we left it. His shirt on the floor near the bathroom door, where I dropped it to get dressed in a hurry. The breakfast containers on the counter, lids not quite closed, the smell of sofrito faint and cooling. The sketchbook open on the dining table, the half-finished page facing the ceiling.
Evidence of a morning that is already becoming memory.
I don't pick anything up. I stand in the middle of the room and let it all stay exactly where it is.
I sit on the couch and look at the bay.
The light is changing. The water goes from silver to gray to a deepening blue, the city's grid beginning to assert itself against the sky as the afternoon tips toward evening. I watch it happen and I name what I'm carrying.
It isn't the fear kink. I know what that feels like — the bright urgent animal thing, the body flooding with adrenaline, the sense of being electrifyingly present. That fear is clean. Almost mechanical. It does what it does and it leaves.
This is different.
This is fear for him. For the man forty floors down and several blocks east in an office that smells like cold coffee, running calculations about a dead man and a psychopath and a family that wants to dismantle everything Jorge spent forty years building. Fear that something will reach him there. Fear that when the war council finally ends and the tasks are allassigned, the thing that comes back to this penthouse might not be all of him.
For so long I felt nothing. Nothing left a mark. Nothing accumulated enough value to cost anything on departure.
The fear I'm feeling right now is the cost of something accumulated.
It means it matters. He matters.
I stand eventually. Move through the room without purpose, the way you move when you need your body doing something while your mind catches up. I pick up the breakfast containers and put them in the bin. I leave his shirt where it is. I end up at the dining table, and the sketchbook is still there, open, the half-finished page facing up.
I look at what's on it.
His hands. The shape of his knuckles before I wrapped them. Then after — the split skin, the swollen joints, my own careful gauze. On the next page, his face. Not the mask. The face underneath, drawn from the sliver of expression I caught when the elevator doors were closing and he hadn't had time to arrange himself yet. On the page after that, both together — the blank white oval laid over the man, transparent and superimposed, the two versions of him occupying the same space because they do. They always have.
