Page 158 of Only the Hunter

By the time the operative decides whether he wants to broker a deal, she’ll know exactly what to ask him and exactly what to offer.

This is what she does. This is who she is.

I don’t know why it took me this long to stop trying to protect her from being herself.

She sits back down. Not because she’s done—she’s not done, she’s already somewhere else in her head—but deliberately, the way she does things when she means them. Her shoulder is against my good arm.

“You stayed on comms,” she says.

“It was all I had left.” When she reported the intruder, everything in me narrowed to a single point: we thought we’d anticipated every angle. We hadn’t.

She doesn’t tell me it was enough.

She doesn’t offer comfort or absolution.

She just stays.

Ten seconds. Maybe fifteen.

Lets me feel the specific weight of her sitting here, alive and present. Unharmed.

That’s the answer.

Then she rises.

“I need to see that note,” she says. “And I need to be at the station before his lawyer arrives.”

“Jake will take you.”

“I know.” She looks at me. The particular way she looks at me that I’ve been cataloguing since Geneva and still can’t fully translate—something between trust and recognition, something that says she sees the discipline under the composure and isn’t afraid of it. “Come when you can.”

Not if. When.

As she turns away, her fingers press once against my mobile hand. Not goodbye. Just contact. Connection.

She brushes her lips against my forehead. Squeezes my good shoulder and looks me straight in the eye. “You do what they say.”

Her eyes glisten with emotion that she’s tapping down.

“Yes, ma’am.”

Her chest rises on an inhale, and she turns.

I watch her cross the sidewalk to where Jake is waiting. Straight spine, that slight forward tilt in her walk, the messenger bag she somehow retrieved from the townhome slung over one shoulder. A woman with somewhere to be and the absolute intention of getting there.

The medic tells me to lie back.

I do.

Then she’s gone.

I close my eyes.

She’s out there. She knows what she’s doing.

That’s enough.

Chapter 32