Page 32 of If You Go
A couple of the lads cough-laugh and then stop when she flicks a look. Brenden doesn’t flinch.
“Yes, ma’am,” he says, hands open. “I understand completely. I’ll sleep on the floor if I have to. But I won’t be leaving her side.” His eyes cut to mine, steady and unblinking. “Never again.”
I have a hundred questions about those two words. None of them are for right now.
“Right, so.” Bridget claps once, loud enough to make the line of staff jump. “Bring yer shite inside. We’ll sort rooms. There’s plenty o’ sheets in this house and more stew than sense.”
We cross the threshold. The black-and-white checkered floor is an old movie star of a room—grand ceiling, the chandelierI once hung Christmas ribbons from, the smell of lemon oil and history. The twin curving staircases gleam, carved banisters smooth under my palm as I take the right-hand flight. I don’t look back. I follow muscle memory down the gallery, past ancestral portraits and newer frames, to my door.
The handle is cool, familiar. I turn it. The room is a held breath.
Same wide bed, same bookshelf bowing under weight, same desk with a shallow scratch where Selene tried to cut a lime at fourteen and botched it. It smells like dust and linen and the paper-dry perfume of my old notebooks. For a second, I am twenty-one, broken, angry, being folded into this room like a wing being set, and I want to cry from relief and grief in the same breath.
Footsteps. I turn. Brenden fills the doorway like an eclipse.
I take two steps and fist his shirt and drag him down.
This kiss isn’t a spark. It’s a tide going out and then rushing in again, salt in my mouth, hands steady on his jaw. It’s steady and sure and slow enough to count the ways it could mean home. The room tilts; I don’t care. The panic in my ribs loosens like a knot relieved of duty.
I didn’t want a man. Didn’t want a relationship. Swore off marriage, kids, the whole storybook. I built a life with hard rules and good locks.
And I want to break at least one of those rules for him.
I’m his.
And—God help me—I think I want him to be mine.
CHAPTER TWELVE
THE NEXT FEWweeks blur together in the kind of calm that feels borrowed—like the world has pressed pause just long enough for us to breathe again. We arrived in early August, and the trees show proof that the end of September is nearing.
For the first time in what feels like years, there’s no running, no screaming, no explosions. Just the soft hum of the forest that surrounds the Compound and the distant crash of the river somewhere beyond the tree line.
Arnie took off two days after we got here. The forty-eight hours before that, he was basically welded to Hazel. Don’t think I saw either of them once, unless it was by accident—and even then, it was just her hair disappearing around a corner with him trailing behind. When he finally surfaced, he said he was heading back to Tacoma to get a jump on the intel trail. Gavin’s network left fingerprints all over the state, and Arnie’s the kindof bastard who can lift them clean with a keyboard and a cup of coffee.
He borrowed Corver’s car since we’ve got Gunnar’s truck for transport anyway, and drove north before the rest of us were awake. Said he’d hole up in his “office.” That’s what he calls the bunker he built under a fake business front—a full floor of servers, screens, and enough firewalls to keep God out if He came knocking. Every inch of it is wired into someone’s secrets. Each room runs a different operation—some he monitors, some he manipulates, and a few he’s already dismantled just to make a point.
Before he left, he tried to talk Hazel into going with him. She told him she wouldn’t leave Surry. I respect the hell out of that—her loyalty, her fight—but part of me wishes she’d gone anyway. Not because I want her gone. She’s good people. She brings light into this place. But if I could pull any of them out of the blast radius before Gavin’s ghost starts breathing again, I would. It’d take two names off myworry list. And I’m running out of room on that list as it is.
We’ve only checked in without construction foreman a few times, but he said that lock down is running smoothly. So we haven’t talked to him the past week. At least the business is working as it should.
Now, each morning I wake before everyone else. Habit. Years of staying alive by being first on my feet. The air is cool when I step out onto the back terrace, mist curling off the grass and rolling through the gardens. From here, I can see the first slice of sunlight breaking through the pines, painting the old stone walls gold. Somewhere below, I hear Bridget humming to herself in the kitchen—her accent floating up like a prayer.
By the time I wander back inside, Surry’s usually there. Her hair is always tied up in that messy knot that somehow still makes her look like sin itself. She’s wearing one of my shirtsmost mornings now, pretending it’sconvenience, pretending she doesn’t notice that I notice.
She does.
She just doesn’t want to admit how much she likes the way I look at her in it.
“Coffee?” she asks every morning, like it’s not already sitting in front of me, black and steaming.
“Only if you’re having some, Siren,” I answer, every single time. Because there is not a thing in this world I want to do without her anymore.
It makes her roll her eyes—but she smiles while she does it.
Joshua and Gunnar have taken over part of the back field, building some kind of outdoor gym out of wood and concrete blocks. I think they know that there is an indoor gym, but I won’t spoil their fun.
They train every afternoon until sweat glistens on their backs and the air smells like pine and iron. I think it started as a way to burn off nerves, but now it’s a ritual—controlled violence against the ghosts that won’t stop chasing us.
