Page 150 of Carrick
She gave a small nod, barely even a movement, then lowered her gaze. Her fingers drifted down the front cover of the journal, tracing it once before she closed it carefully, like the act of letting it go required every ounce of her control. Honestly, I was surprised she didn’t argue, didn’t try to convince me to do it this very night.
“What if he doesn’t answer?” she asked, her voice quieter now—fragile around the edges, but still holding.
I didn’t lie.
“Then we figure out what comes next.”
She looked up, her eyes finding mine. “And if he’s already gone?”
That one landed differently. I felt it settle in my chest, heavy and cold. The kind of question you didn’t want to answer out loud, because speaking it made it real. I swallowed the ache that stirred in my chest and kept my voice steady.
“Then we figure that out too.”
Her jaw trembled, and she blinked hard, like she was trying to keep from splintering. “I don’t want to do this without you.”
“You won’t have to,” I told her, and it wasn’t just a promise—it was fact. There wasn’t a version of this where I walked away.
She opened her mouth like she had something else to say, but whatever it was didn’t come. Instead, she leaned forward and pressed her forehead to mine. The movement was slow, deliberate. Not a plea. Not a collapse. Just a quiet connection. Her breath mingled with mine in the space between us, and we stayed like that for a moment—skin to skin, thought to thought.
Not for comfort.
For grounding. For clarity. For the truth neither of us wanted to admit aloud.
A heartbeat passed.
Then another.
“I’m scared,” she whispered, her voice barely more than breath.
“Me too,” I said, because there was no point pretending. Not here. Not with her.
“And I hate this feeling. This… not knowing.”
“I know.” I did. Deeply.
“But I trust you.”
It struck with more force than anything else she’d said—not because it was loud or dramatic, but because it wasn’t. It was quiet and unguarded, the kind of truth that settles in the chest like a tremor just before the break. Fragile, yes—but not weak. And it meant more than any vow I could offer in return, more than any assurance spoken aloud. It was trust in its rarest form: not a request, but a surrender.
I kissed her—not to silence her, not even to claim her, though I wanted her with every breath in my body—but because she needed to feel the answer. She needed the weight of it, the unspoken promise buried in the press of my mouth to hers. She needed to know I was in this without condition, without escape hatch, without end.
There were no words after that. None needed. I pulled her with me, slow and steady, until we were folded into the bed together. Her body curled into mine like instinct, like memory, like something that had always known how to find its way back to me. I held her as if I could shield her from everything coming for us, as if my arms alone could be enough to hold off the world. Her scent clung to me—faint and familiar—carrying the tremble still hidden just beneath her skin, echoing the one in mine.
And for a while, we stayed like that—wrapped in silence, bound by breath and closeness, anchored in the fragile stillnesswe had carved for ourselves in the space between fear and the inevitable.
For a while, we were enough.
Even as the world outside began to sharpen its knives.
28
Carrick
The next daycrawled by like molasses in January, every hour thick with waiting.
Everyone had a mission but me. Jax disappeared into code, building tracer programs layered with enough firewalls and recursive loops to give even the Dom Krovi a migraine. Niko prepped contingency plans with the grim focus of a man who expected the world to go up in flames before sunset.
Sully rotated between weapons maintenance and baking blueberry muffins, his strange but effective form of stress relief perfuming the house with cinnamon and gun oil. Deacon vanished into the barn before sunrise and hadn’t been seen since, likely elbow-deep in work or in thought, silent and alone the way he liked it.
