Page 42 of Zorro

Somewhere beneath the applause, she was breaking open again.

Not for Rob. Not for the legacy she had tried so hard to uphold.

But for the man who had once handed a child back to her with blistered fingers and said, He won’t stop crying when I hold him, but he goes still when I sing.

She remembered thinking. He shouldn’t know how to do that.

But maybe the real question, the one she had never dared to ask, was this…Am I even worthy of such a man?

A man she had wronged with judgment. With fear. With grief she’d weaponized to protect herself from needing him. She bolted from the wings, the dream twisting inside her like fire. The kiss she had stolen. The kiss he might remember. The kiss she wanted again and again.

Now the questions bloomed, terrifying and insistent. Can you have him? Do I deserve him?

A hand caught her arm. Everly flinched until she looked up and saw Helen Buckard.

The trauma nurse she’d worked beside in the Philippines. Someone she hadn’t expected to see here. Someone who had seen too much of Everly at her worst, and now, possibly, her most exposed.

“Are you all right?” Helen asked softly.

She was dragging her father from the crowd surrounding Zorro, his attention split, his eyes flicking after Everly with open concern.

“I’m fine,” Everly lied. Her voice cracked. “Thank you.”

Then she bolted her heart thundering, throat tight, aching with a kind of pain she knew she wouldn’t be able to scrub out this time.

This wasn’t the pain of loss. This was something else. Something deeper. A scar forming not from grief, but from the slow, terrifying realization that everything she believed…about Rob, about herself…might not survive what came next.

7

The cool marble floor beneath Bear’s sandals reflected the vaulted glass ceiling above like a mirage made of polished sea-light and dreams. Outside, the heat of Rio shimmered, a pulse of humidity rising from the stone like breath from the earth. Inside, the hotel lobby thrummed with glossy elegance and too many voices.

He stood still amid it all, hands at his sides, spine straight, the black cotton of his shirt absorbing the ambient light. The T-shirt was plain. Just the color of silence. His khaki shorts reached just past the knee, simple, functional, paired with leather sandals worn from long miles and restless walking. Flint sat at his side, ears pricked, eyes alert, coat gleaming like a shadow made flesh.

Bear didn’t speak. He rarely did when the air shifted.

A touch on his shoulder had him turning, and he froze. Bailee Thunderhawk stood there. Not many people caught him off guard, but Bailee disrupted his equilibrium. He didn’t know why, and that made her dangerous. Not to his body but to his careful balance. She uprooted him in ways he didn’t have words for.

Maybe it wasn’t him. Maybe it was her.

Something in her seemed unsettled, eyes like tempered silver. The echo of her was quiet where it should have reverberated. That dissonance tugged at him.

Her beauty wasn’t what caught him. It was the stillness. The way her presence struck like a memory you’d forgotten to honor. Heavy and unmoving as a thundercloud.

There was a kind of silence between them that felt less like absence and more like pressure.

Her braid was thick, dark as a crow's wing, the same he’d seen every deployment, every briefing. Her body, all lean precision, radiated focus, power, the will to endure.

But it was her spirit that kept him on edge.

Something in her seemed to be missing.

Her clothes were simple, soft cargo pants and a sleeveless shell, but they framed her like armor trimmed in grace. Not a single piece of tactical gear on her, and yet she radiated danger. Fierce, relentless, no mercy for their enemies.

Those eyes held steady without hesitation. No smile. Just that deep, still recognition, the kind Bear only ever felt in ceremony.

There was a weight to her presence, not loud or commanding, but steady. It pulled at something deep in Bear’s chest. She didn’t walk like someone looking for notice, but she carried silence like a second skin. In that quiet, he saw a reflection of something he recognized in himself. Not brokenness. Dislocation.

Bear had always believed that people didn’t have to share blood to share spirit. Sometimes you saw someone, and something in you reached without asking permission.

---