“I picked the right woman.” Rebel exhales like she’s been holding that line for years. No quip. No armor. Just a nod, she hides in my chest, and the smallest shudder as something in her lets go.
We stay quiet long enough to hear the building change gears. Someone rolling a jack in the garage, Sloane’s boots passing the door, the jukebox clicking to a new track. Life is carrying on in circles while we rest in the center.
“Carter?” she says after a while.
“Mm?”
“If I let you stay…” She stops, starts again. “If I let you be here, not just for the job, but for the ugly parts, the counting, the nights I’m not okay… You don’t get to leave when it’s inconvenient.”
“I don’t leave,” I say.
“You left the roof.”
“Yeah,” I admit. “And I’ve been trying to climb back ever since. I’ll spend the rest of my life not leaving.”
“That’s dramatic.”
“Like you’re surprised.”
She laughs into my throat, and this time it’s real. “Okay,” she says. Then, quieter, “Okay.”
I trace the line of her shoulder with my knuckles, careful of nothing except the need to be careful. The mask she wears with everyone else is off. No Treasurer. No enforcer. No ledger saint. Just Victoria sleep-starved, grief-heavy, alive anyway.
“Divine’s going to call,” I say eventually. “She’ll have a new route, a new node, a new way to knock the banker’s teeth out through a spreadsheet.”
“Probably,” she agrees.
“And Bones?”
“Is a problem for the part of me that isn’t lying in your arms,” she finishes, not angry, just tired.
“Copy that.” The cell on the crate nightstand buzzes once. We both look. Neither of us moves.
“Let it,” she says, and for one breath the room goes weightless, a planet without gravity. Free.
“Rebel,” I say, because I have to.
“Yeah?”
“You belong to your sisters. To this place. To the promise you made him. I know all that.”
She lifts her head, eyes steady. “And you belong here,” she answers, like she’s measuring the words as she spends them. “By my side. For as long as you keep saying it and meaning it.”
I kiss her once more, slow, certain, unhurried, not because we can’t have more, but because we already have what matters. When we break apart, she rests her forehead to mine again, breathless for good reasons this time.
The phone buzzes a second time, then a third. The world will crawl back through the door any second, wearing Divine’s voice and a map. It always does.
“For the record,” I say, reaching past her for the phone with my good hand, “I’m terrible at staying put.”
She smiles. “Good. I’m terrible at letting go.”
The screen lights our faces in thin blue. A message from Divine:NEW KEY. CALL WHEN ABLE.
I set the phone down without responding to it.
“Later,” Rebel says.
“Later,” I echo.
