Page 79 of You've Got The Love
One of the couch guys leans forward, split lip, eyes mean. “We’re back,” he says. “In London. Breathin’.”
“Whole?”Hawk asks.
The second guy rolls his shoulder like it hurts, but works. “Whole enough.”
“Show me the room,” Hawk says.
The view turns, shaky, across a bar top, a chalkboard with this week’s pool bracket, a back door with a bent hinge they still haven’t fixed. Hawk watches all of it like he’s checking a ledger.
“Good,” he says finally, and the word drops into the dock light like a coin in a glass.
He lowers the phone with a satisfied blink. “They’re home. Which means,” he adds, looking at me like I’m a curiosity he’s decided not to buy, “it’s your turn.”
Jack doesn’t look away from Hawk when he speaks. “Bring her.”
Hawk flicks two fingers. One of his men disappears into the warehouse. The door shuts on a dull hydraulic wheeze.
Time lengthens. Not a minute. Not a second. Just the stretch between one breath and the next, and then the one after that, and how empty they feel when you can’t hear her taking them too.
I make myself map the ground because if I don’t, I’ll move. The forklift ruts in the concrete. The coiled hose to my right. The three-pace gap from the shadow beside the stack of pallets to the edge of the light—someone could be in there if they were idiot enough to be in there. The glint off a bottle near the piling tells me the tide’s high enough to eat a body quick if it falls wrong. The line I’ll take if something goes bad: two steps forward, angle left?—
The door opens.
She steps out.
Amber.
Bound wrists. Gag. Hair pulled back roughly somewhere along the way. Chin up. Eyes locked on me like nothing else exists or ever did.
Every muscle in me tightens and then let’s go in the same instant, like a rope yanked and released.
“Untie her,” I say. I don’t raise my voice; I don’t want to cause any more shit than what we’re dealing with.
AReaperhesitates because he’s stupid or new. Hawk tilts his head. The plastic bites once, twice, and falls. The gag comes free. Strings of saliva and cloth taste be damned; she doesn’t wipe her mouth. She doesn’t look anywhere but at me.
Her lips are dry. Her face is pale. Her eyes—Christ—her eyes are steady and alive and so angry with fear that I want to put my hands through the night.
“Bas,” she rasps.
I’m already moving. Two steps, and she hits my chest like a breath I’ve been holding since birth. She sags when I close my arms, not because she’s weak—but because the job she gave her body is done now, and it finally lets her share it. Her fingers hook into the back of my jacket—skin to cloth to skin.Proof.
“I’ve got you,” I breathe into her hair. “You’re safe,liefje. I’ve got you.”
Her next breath shudders. I feel it. I file the sound away with the other things I’ll never let happen again.
“Trades not finished,” Hawk says, voice bored on purpose.
I don’t look at him. I angle my body so she’s behind my chest and arm, and my hip is between her and his men. Jack’s already stepped that half pace forward, which means death if anyone misreads it.
“You’ve got your proof,” Jack says. “You got your boys in London. We walk out with my daughter. Clean and quiet.”
Hawk looks at his nails like he’s weighing dirt. Then he takes one step, close enough I could count the stitches in his patch if I cared. The dock tightens around that movement like a noose.
“Almost clean,” he says, and his hand slides again. The gun is back, easy and fast and aimed. Not at me this time.
At her.
The world narrows to a black circle. The part of me that plans isn’t thinking; it’s doing. I pull her tighter behind me, shoulder turned, stance locked, hand open at my side where it needs to be to move through him if he breathes wrong.
