Page 22 of Wings
"Crystal."
I headed for the door, Thor's parting words following me out: "Remember, kid—the heart wants what it wants, but the patch demands what it demands. Don't confuse the two."
*
My apartment was a shithole, but it was my shithole. Second floor of a building that had given up on respectability sometime during the Reagan administration, close enough to the clubhouse that I could make it in ten minutes, far enough that I had space to breathe. I'd pushed the couch against the wall to clear floor space for PT, because the VA's gym had too many eyes and too many questions about how a twenty-three-year-old had ended up like me.
Push-up number forty-seven. The burn in my shoulders was good, clean, honest. My prostethic stood propped against the wall—I always took it off for floor work, the socket interfering with proper form.
Forty-eight. Forty-nine. The meeting with Duke played on repeat in my head. Ki's real name on his lips. The weight of responsibility settling on my shoulders like a sack full of stones.The way Thor had looked at me like he could see straight through my bullshit denial about not loving her.
Fifty. I held the position, arms shaking, sweat dripping onto the worn carpet. The burn spread from shoulders to core, drowning out the memory of Ki backing away from me in that garage. Almost.
My arms gave out at fifty-five, and I collapsed onto the floor. Heart hammering, breath coming in gasps.
The phone rang while I was still face-down, Duke's warnings echoing in my skull. The display showed Doc's name, and my stomach clenched. He never called unless shit was sideways.
"Yeah?" I managed, rolling onto my back.
"We got problems, kid." Doc's voice had that particular gravel that meant he was lighting his pipe, promise to quit be damned. "Hospital suspended Kiara pending investigation. Anonymous complaint about drug diversion."
I sat up so fast my vision sparked. "When?"
"This afternoon. She went in for a meeting at three, came out on administrative leave. They're investigating, could take weeks."
The pause stretched, filled with the sound of Doc taking a pull from his pipe. I could picture him in his kitchen, the one that still looked exactly like it had when his wife was alive, worrying at this new problem like a dog with a bone.
"Timing's suspicious as hell," he continued.
Because it happened the morning after our garage encounter. The morning after someone might have seen us together, might have made connections, might have decided to send a message.
"This is Serpent shit." The words came out hard, certain. "Has to be. They know about the pipeline, want to cut it off."
"Maybe. Or maybe someone saw something. Three years is a long time to keep a secret." Doc sighed, the sound of a man who'd seen too much to believe in coincidences but too much todiscount them either. "Point is, she's scared. Last thing we need is her running before this gets sorted."
"What do you want me to do?"
"Go check on her. Make sure she knows we’ve got her back.”
My heart pounded in my chest. "Right. You don’t think she’ll bolt?"
"Let’s hope not. I’ll send you the address and call if anything changes."
The line went dead. I finished attaching the prosthetic, muscle memory guiding me through the adjustments.
We protected the ones we loved. No matter what.
*
Her address wasn't hard to find. The building rose like a fortress on Maple Street, all reinforced glass and security keypads, the kind of place someone chose when they needed locks between them and the world. I'd seen the type before in base housing—military families who'd seen too much, needed too many barriers just to sleep at night.
I stood at the entry panel, fluorescent light washing everything gray, and tried to remember how to breathe. Forty-eight names on the directory, each with a call button that might as well have been a detonator. K. Mitchell, 4B. Such a small thing, her fake name on a metal plate, but it made my chest tight.
My finger hovered over the button. She'd made it clear she wanted nothing to do with me.
But after what had happened today, I felt a pull, an urge to protect her. Something I hadn't felt for many, many years.
I pressed the button before I could talk myself out of it.
