Percy is already in the back of an ambulance, a different paramedic checking his ribs while he clutches the blanket like a lifeline.
Genevieve’s fingers thread through mine, careful around the split knuckles and the tape and the blood.
“Ready to go home, Champ?”
“Yeah, Half-Pint. Let’s go home.”
Chapter 46
Lance
It’s been three weeks since the warehouse.
Three weeks since the FBI hauled Art out of a pop-up cage fight in Southie and dismantled an operation that had been running for years. Three weeks since Art put his hands behind his back and let them take him. Three weeks since Genevieve ran across a parking lot and slammed into me hard enough to make my cracked ribs scream, and I held her anyway, because pain is temporary and she’s not.
Three weeks, and I still wake up at four a.m. expecting someone to bang on my door and tell me it’s fight night.
But nobody comes. The door stays closed. And Genevieve is beside me, asleep, her hair fanned across the pillow and one arm draped across Cavall, who has claimed the bed with the entitlement of a dog who thinks she’s his and not mine.
I slip from the mattress as quietly as possible, tracing Genevieve’s face with my fingers and pressing a kiss to her cheek.
She rustles, blinking up at me with sleepy eyes. “Nightmare?”
“Yeah. Go back to sleep.”
“Take Cav.”
It’s hard to leave her, because there’s always a fear that I won’t have her when I come back, but I breathe through the panic, and get dressed, to do the only thing that clears my head at four in the morning when the bad thoughts take over.
I run.
The trail through Verona County Park is empty at dawn. Frost clings to the underbrush and the sky is that bruised purple that comes right before the sun breaks the tree line. Cavall tears ahead of me, his black fur catching the first light, and I push the pace until my lungs burn and my legs ache and my head goes quiet.
The therapist Paxton arranged, a woman named Dr. Chavez who doesn’t take any of my shit, calls this hypervigilance. She says my body still thinks it’s in danger, and the running is how I process the cortisol that floods my system every morning when I wake up and the world hasn’t ended.
I told her the running was just because I like it.
She said, “That can also be true, Lance.”
I like her. Even when she makes me look at dark parts of myself I’d rather keep buried.
By the time I loop back to the cabin, Genevieve is on the porch with a mug of coffee and one of my sweatshirts swallowing her. It’s my favorite look on her. She watches me come up the path, flushed and dripping with sweat, and she tilts her head.
“Training today?”
“If you can keep up.”
“I could have dropped a man twice my size in a brownstone in Boston if I didn’t think he’d shoot my father. I think I can handle you.”
I grin. I’ve been doing that more lately, grinning, and it still feels foreign on my face, like a muscle I forgot I had. “That was adrenaline making you cocky. This is skill.”
“Same thing.”
“Absolutely not the same thing. Get dressed.”
She disappears inside, and I lean against the porch railing and drink the coffee she left for me. It’s perfect. She’s been making it for me every morning since we got back, muttering about how bad it is, and every morning I watch her sing off-key in our kitchen and make us fancy breakfast, and I count to seven and slot it away in my memory so she can be the one thing I remember for the rest of my life and after.
Cavall flops at my feet, tongue lolling.
