She's near the entrance.
Not inside. Not past the threshold. Close enough that the blast reached her, far enough that it didn't kill her. On the ground, crumpled against the building's exterior wall, completely still. The car must have arrived sooner than expected, or she found a faster route. It doesn't matter now. What matters is she's here and she's not moving.
I cross the distance.
My knees hit the pavement beside her. My hands go to her face — both of them, palms against her cheeks, tilting her head with careful pressure. Then her neck, two fingers searching.
There.
Faint. Fast. But there.
She's breathing — I see it now, the shallow rise and fall of her chest. Breathing. Alive.
The cut on her forehead is bleeding freely the way head wounds do, a dark line tracking down her temple into herhair. Her right arm is wrong — the angle displaced, something broken. Scrapes across both palms where she went down. Debris in her hair — dust, glass fragments, the small wreckage of the blast.
She was thrown. The wall stopped her from going further.
The relief crashes through me so hard my hands shake against her face. She's alive. She's breathing. Her pulse is under my fingers and it's fast and faint but it's there.
She doesn't open her eyes.
I stay where I am, my hands cupped around her face, her blood dark against my fingers. The sirens are getting closer. Gunner's voice somewhere to my left, giving instructions in that flat tone he uses when things have gone badly wrong.
The guilt arrives like something settling.
She was in the penthouse. Safe. The penthouse I bought because I didn't like the lock on her motel room door, because I needed her contained, close, accounted for. She was safe until I called her closer. Now she's bleeding against a wall with my handprints on her face, all because of retaliation from the Zayas for a hit I ordered.
She came because I asked her to. She's hurt because I wanted her here.
Have you slept.The warmth in her voice she didn't try to hide.
My war. My retaliation. My need to have her close after two days of absence — and she is on the pavement with her arm at a wrong angle, her blood on my hands, and there is no accounting that makes that different.
I'm still looking at her face when the understanding settles beside the guilt. Same weight, same register. Another fact entered into the ledger, irreversible.
I love her.
Not the arrangement. Not the fear response, not possession, not the obsession I kept framing as something manageable. Her. The woman who askedhave you sleptbecause she cared about the answer. Who held my shaking hands in the dark when my father died and said nothing, because she understood there was nothing useful to say. Who sat at the edge of my pool at 5 AM and put her feet in the water and simply watched me swim. Who wore my shirt in her kitchen and asked if she owned a pan and laughed — genuine and unplanned, that surprised bright sound — because I asked if she could draw me from the front. Who two days ago leaned toward me by a fraction, a choice, and saidI knowthe way she says everything: plainly, without performance.
Wren Ayton, who answered a forum post at 2 AM because she needed to feel something. Who stayed. Who keeps staying.
I love her, and she's bleeding in my arms because of me. The love doesn't cancel the guilt. It makes the guilt worse — because loving her means I have to live inside what I just did to her, and there is no box for that, no lid to close.
The responders arrive. Two of them, with the kit, the board, moving fast. One has a hand on my shoulder, saying something — I need to let them work.
My hands don't want to release her face.
I make them. I sit back on my heels and watch them work — the assessment, the stabilization, the careful movement of her onto the board. Her arm, immobilized. The cut at her temple, compressed. All of it handled fast. I watch with the helplessness of a man who solves everything and cannot solve this.
She's loaded into the ambulance before I've fully processed the sequence. I watch the doors close. I'm still on the pavement. Her blood on my hands, my shirt, my face where I held her. The burning car has been suppressed; smoke still rises into the flat white sky. Gunner is three feet away, watching me.
"Find who built that device," I say. My voice comes out level. "Bring me the name."
He nods. One movement.
Then I'm standing, and I'm moving.
I leave La Sirena.
