Page 52 of You, Only You

I crossed the distance in two strides, and the strike to his temple was the cleanest thing I'd done all night. He slumped sideways into unconsciousness, and the room finally, finally went still.

The backup generator kicked in with a thump that made us both flinch. Lights flooded the penthouse, harsh and clinical, and for a moment, we just stood there blinking at each other across the wreckage. Overturned furniture. Three unconscious men. Blood, some of it theirs, most of it mine, smeared across pale marble like a painting nobody asked for.

Lindsey lowered the gun. The steadiness left her hands all at once, the tremor arriving like something she'd been holding back by sheer will, and she set the weapon on the hallway table with a care that suggested she didn't trust herself to keep holding it.

"Will." Her voice was different now. Cracked at the seam. "Your arm."

I looked down. My sleeve was soaked through, darker than it should have been. The graze was deeper than I'd thought. Adrenaline had been doing a lot of heavy lifting.

"It's fine."

"It is literally the opposite of fine, you are bleeding on your own floor..."

Sirens. Far away but closing. The silent alarm had done its job, just ninety seconds too late to be useful.

"Later," I said. "We deal with this first."

What followed was an hour of the particular chaos that happens when your penthouse becomes a crime scene. Police filling the rooms with radios and cameras. FBI agents appearingwith Bates in the lead, his face a study in grim professionalism as he catalogued the damage. The intruders were cuffed and removed. One of them groaned. The one with the knee didn't. The paramedics cleaned my arm, declared the graze superficial in a tone that suggested their definition of superficial and mine were having a disagreement, and pushed for a hospital visit I declined.

Through all of it, I tracked Lindsey across the room the way you track a heartbeat on a monitor. She was giving a statement to a female agent, her voice even, her posture composed, her shoulders holding a fine tremor she probably thought nobody could see. She'd held a gun on a man. Hadn't hesitated. Hadn't flinched.

I kept circling back to that. The steadiness of her hands. The flat calm of her voice when she'd said don't. She shouldn't have needed to be that person tonight. I was supposed to have made sure she never needed to be that person.

Then the police left. The agents left. Bates paused at the door and looked at both of us the way a doctor looks at an X-ray.

"Safe house," he said. "Tomorrow. Both of you. I'll send the address."

"Fine."

The door closed. The lock engaged, the new one, the one that hadn't been bypassed, and the penthouse was quiet again. But a different quiet. The kind that comes after something has been broken and you're standing in the pieces trying to figure out which ones are sharp.

The place smelled like gunpowder and copper. The cleaning crew would earn their money this week.

I found myself sitting on the floor in the hallway outside her bedroom. I didn't remember deciding to sit. My legs had just stopped cooperating, the adrenaline vacating my system all at once and leaving nothing behind but a hollow, ringingexhaustion. I leaned my head against the wall and stared at the opposite baseboard and thought about nothing and everything at the same time.

Lindsey appeared. No announcement. She just lowered herself to the floor beside me, close enough that our shoulders touched, and sat.

We didn't look at each other. We stared at the wall like it held answers to questions we hadn't formed yet. I could hear her breathing. Could hear mine. After a while I realized they'd fallen into the same rhythm, and I didn't know when that had happened.

The shaking started in my hands and moved inward. My fingers, my forearms, my shoulders. I clenched my fists and the tremor just migrated somewhere else, like trying to hold water. The crash. Not the adrenaline crash, but the other one. The understanding of what I'd just done, what I was capable of, the speed and precision with which I'd taken three men apart in the dark. I'd been good at it. I'd been good at it and part of me hadn't wanted to stop, and that part was the thing I kept locked away from everyone, and now she was sitting next to me and there was blood on my hands, literally, and the room smelled like violence, and she was right there.

"Will." Her voice was very quiet. "Your hands."

I looked down. Knuckles split. Blood drying in the creases. The shaking was obvious now.

"They'll stop," I said. "Give it a minute."

"That's not what I meant."

I waited. For the inevitable. The step backward, the careful rearrangement of her face into something that meant I need some space. The moment she looked at me, really looked, and finally saw what everyone else saw when they got past the suits and the reputation. I'd braced for it with Nicole, years ago. Withmy mother, who'd found the notebooks and looked at me like a stranger had walked into her kitchen. It always came eventually.

The silence went on long enough that I started counting seconds, the way I counted everything, because counting was control and control was the only thing keeping me upright.

She moved.

Not away. She turned to face me, her body shifting on the cold floor, and her hands reached out and took mine. Both of them. Lifted them into her lap like they were something that needed holding rather than hiding. Her fingers, cool and steady now, wrapped around my wrecked knuckles, and her thumbs traced slow circles across the insides of my wrists.

She didn't say it's okay. She didn't say I understand. She didn't say anything that would have required me to respond with words I didn't have.