I don't know how long I stay on my hands and knees. Long enough for my breathing to become something functional. Then I sit back.
My phone is in the car.
Gunner will have sent something short —status, maybe just my name. The guardian keeping inventory of his people. Nico after that, the soldier needing to know where his commander is. He’ll ask me where the fuck I am. Jimmy is still in holding at La Sirena. I told Gunner to wait for me. Gunner is waiting for instructions that aren't coming, and the interrogation is paused. The empire is running without its manager for the first time in nine years.
I know all of this, but still I leave the phone in the car.
The spiral burns through its last fuel somewhere in the hour after the swim. The replay, the mirror, the doubt — it runs the circuit and runs the circuit and then something gives out. Not resolution. Not peace. Just the exhaustion of an engine run at redline until something snaps.
What's left is nothing. Flat. Empty. The waves coming in, the waves going out. The cold drying salt-stiff on my skin.
She was unguarded around me. That's the evidence I can't stop turning over. She let me see her cry. Let me see her grieve her mother in a strip club booth and hold nothing back. She trusted that I would stay and not use it.
I stayed. And then I used it.
The sky begins to change.
The black thins at the horizon line where water meets sky, gray coming in underneath. The sun is somewhere beyond the edge of the world, approaching. It will rise over the Gilded Lily and over La Sirena and over the penthouse I bought for her. The dawn doesn't know I exist. It is indifferent in the same total way the ocean was indifferent.
I am not indifferent.
I love her.
That's what remains when everything else has burned through. Not a decision — a fact, present in the wreckage the way a load-bearing wall is present when everything else is rubble. I've been carrying it since the car bombing outside La Sirena, since I stood over her bleeding.
I love the sound she makes when she laughs, surprised, at a question I didn't mean to make funny. Her left hand learning what her right hand knows, the brace forcing that slow patient retraining. The way she held my head in her lap when I was shaking and said nothing because she understood nothing useful could be said. How she came to Miami with one suitcase and answered a forum post and flew toward fear because she needed to feel something, and she stayed, and kept staying.
I love her.
And I am dangerous to her.
Both things are true simultaneously, and there is no configuration that makes them compatible. I can't be with her. I proved that tonight — my body running on its own logic, her fear feeding it, the kiss before consent, the freeze that followed. I can't be without her either. I've tried being without things I needed and I know how that goes: the pressure builds until something gives.
It wasn't you.Her words in the Gilded Lily, barely air. She believes this. She's too deep inside what I've made to see it clearly.
I can't be with her. I can't be without her.
The sun breaks the horizon.
The water goes from black to dark blue. The light is flat and early and it lands on everything without distinguishing between the things that deserve it and the things that don't.
29 - Wren
The suitcase is at my feet. The ticket is in my hand. I’ve been sitting on this plastic seat for twenty minutes, watching the departure board click through its destinations overhead.
Atlanta. Jacksonville. New Orleans. The letters flip and settle, flip and settle, each one a door I could walk through.
The station smells like diesel. I know this smell. I've lived in it, city to city, for five years. It's almost comforting, like a worn path — you know where to put your feet, you know how it ends.
Except my eyes are puffy in a way that keeps surprising me. I caught myself in the bathroom mirror when I arrived and didn't recognize my own face at first — swollen and red-rimmed, five years of stored grief finally choosing last night to cash out. I haven't cried like that in a long time. Maybe ever.
So I packed the replacement suitcase. It was one of the first things I bought with my fear-money, as though I always knew this would be how it ended. And I came here.
The familiar part is supposed to kick in now. The letting-go, the blank road opening ahead, the moment where the last city closes behind me like a book I've already read. I've done this enough times to know how it feels. You stand at the door and it swings shut clean, and you don't feel it close.
It isn't happening.
My chest is full of things that won't lie down — grief still raw from last night, fear that re-fires every time something bangs outside the station doors, the helplessness of watching Loganwalk away with his face closed. I sat in the penthouse until four in the morning. Nico's driver had brought me back, the building code worked the same as always, the elevator rising through all forty floors, and I stood at the window watching the bay go from black to gray to gold, waiting for Logan's key in the door. Called twice. Texted once. The silence on the other end was complete.
