I dressed quickly: shirt, gear check out of habit, knife, sidearm. The familiar weight settled back across my body, and I let it. I moved to the door without looking back.
The air hit me cold and sharp the second I stepped onto the roof.
The sky hung low and heavy. I scanned the horizon, and it took me less than ten seconds to find it.
Lightning flickered in the distance.
Come on, come on, come on.
“Shit,”
I breathed, barely audible. It was tracking away from us, not toward us.
The storm we’d been counting on—the one that would have handed us cover, noise—drifted steadily southwest, dragging our best window with it. I watched the last of the distant flashes dissolve behind the skyline, forearms on the ledge, jaw tense.
We’d have to wait.
Stay ready. Stay sharp. Stay patient in a situation that rewarded none of those things for very long.
Waiting had always been the most dangerous part of any operation—not because of the threats it left time to develop, but because of what it did to the inside of a person. I understood how to hold a perimeter, how to read a skyline, manage a threat, and stay cold when everything around me wasn’t. What I didn’t know how to do, apparently, was stand on a rooftop alone and keep my mind from finding its way back through that door.
Back downstairs.
Back to her.
I dragged a hand down my face.
What the hell is wrong with you, Ward?
This wasn’t me. It had never been me. I’d spent my entire adult life keeping things uncomplicated, temporary, purely physical, controlled. Women came and went on terms I understood and could manage. I liked the door closing behind them. I liked the silence that followed. I’d built something functional out of that simplicity.
No attachments. No mess. No soft spots to exploit.
And yet here I stood on a rooftop in the middle of whatever this shitshow was, completely undone by a middle-aged mom.
Feelings made things complicated. They created liability, expectations that turned into pressure, pressure that turned into the exact kind of distraction that got people killed out here. I’d watched it happen to better men. I’d sworn I understood why.
And yet I couldn’t stop circling back to the way she’d fit against me afterward—trusting, completely and without reservation, like she’d decided my arms were the safest place she’d ever been. The way her tears had reached something I’d spent years making inaccessible—not only locked down but decommissioned, written off, removed from the inventory of things I still carried. And then it was there again, before I’d seen it coming.
I pushed off the ledge.
Get it together.
Because this—whatever it had become in that room—wasn’t just inconvenient. It endangered everyone I had a responsibility to protect. One slow decision out here, one second of hesitation, one moment where my mind landed on her instead of the threat in front of me—and Fiona ended up dead. Libby ended up dead. Lily ended up dead.
I couldn’t carry that. I wouldn’t.
My sister had trusted me with her life since before either of us knew what that meant. Libby and her daughter had been pulled into my orbit through no fault of their own, and they needed me sharp, not compromised, not distracted by something I had no business allowing right now.
I looked back out over the city.
Storm’s gone. We wait. We watch. We move when the conditions are right. Simple. That’s what this had to stay.
But even standing there with my eyes fixed on the darkening horizon, every part of me wanted to turn around, go back through that door, and make my way down to the only place I’d stopped feeling like I existed at the edge of something I couldn’t outrun.
I didn’t move.
But I wanted to.
