"I didn't want you to."
He stood.
"Daddy."
He stopped.
"The Delling thing," she said. "Something happened. I can tell." Her eyes were half-closed but her instincts were still running. "You were going to tell me tomorrow."
He looked at her.
"It's okay," she said. "Tell me tomorrow. Just — tell me."
"I will," he said. “Do you want me to crawl into bed with you?”
She didn’t answer. She closed her eyes and was asleep before he left the room.
He stood in the doorway for a moment. Then he pulled the door closed and went down the hall and stood in his own room in the dark and thought about the weight of his hand on her head and the specific, irreversible quality of simply rubbing her head and playing with her hair, the way she'd gone still, and then soft, and then gradually, completely quiet.
He'd been in harder situations than this one.
None of them had ever required this particular kind of discipline.
CHAPTER 17
EMILY
She woke up knowing something had shifted.
Not dramatically. Not the way things shifted in books, with sudden clarity and orchestral swells. Just, differently weighted. Like a room where someone had moved the furniture slightly and everything was the same but the proportions had changed. You notice it but you might not acknowledge it.
She lay in the gray early morning light and stared at the ceiling and thought about the chair by the window and the weight of his hand playing with her hair and the single wordyesdelivered before she'd even finished the question.
Is that something you would?—
Yes.
She pressed her palms over her face and held them there.
She was in trouble. The specific, warm, terrifying kind of trouble that had nothing to do with Marcus Delling or trafficking networks or fake Facebook profiles and everything to do with a six foot tall, muscular man who calculated twenty-foot response radii and sourced strawberries from a local farmer’s market and played with her hair and brought her to orgasms without asking for anything in return.
She got up before she could think herself into anything complicated.
He was in the kitchen. Of course he was. She was starting to think he simply materialized there every morning, fully formed, with coffee already drunk.
"Sit down," he said, without turning from the stove. "I'll tell you about Delling."
She sat.
He turned around with two mugs, set one in front of her, and sat across the table and told her about the Kansas City ping, about Dozer, about the forty-eight-hour window. Straight and clean, no softening, exactly the way she'd asked him to tell her things.
She listened. Drank her coffee.
"He's not running," she said. "He's moving up the chain."
"Yes."
"So, if your contact catches him before he delivers himself?—"
