Page 63 of Bearly Out Loud

At the door, she stopped. Turned. Dojin was standing in the living room, Reo and the operatives behind him, the loft spread out in its violated state—her kingdom, ransacked by Mercer’s people, still standing.

She looked at the cels on the wall. Hideo’s art. Untouched.

“They didn’t take the thing that mattered most.” Her voice was steady. Her eyes weren’t. “And they didn’t find what they came for. Which means we’re winning. They wouldn’t have broken into my home if we weren’t scaring them.”

Dojin watched her reframe the break-in into a tactical advantage in real time. Turn the violation into evidence of their progress. Stand in a ransacked apartment and find the strategy in the wreckage.

This woman.

He walked her to the hallway. Takumi was ahead with the carrier, heading for the stairs, giving them distance with the deliberate tact of a man who knew exactly when to disappear. Reo’s team was still inside, beginning the process of documenting everything for the legal file.

Nari paused at her door. The scratched lock plate caught the hallway light.

“Thank you.” She was looking at the scratches, not at him. “For coming.”

“Always.”

The word came out heavier than he’d intended. Weighted with more than one evening’s emergency.Alwaysas inevery time you call, I will come. Every door that opens wrong, I will be on the other side of it. Every threat that enters your space, I will stand between you and it, and the only question will be how fast I can get there.

She heard it. He saw her hear it—the slight stutter in her breathing, the tightening of her fingers on her bag strap, her eyes lifting from the lock to his face and staying.

“Always is a big word.”

“I know what it weighs.”

The hallway was narrow. Old building, pre-war dimensions, built for smaller people and smaller lives. He took up most of the width. She was against the doorframe, her bag on her shoulder, one sneaker propped against the wall behind her. Close enough that her scent reached him—familiar now, specific to her, lodged somewhere permanent.

She reached up. Her fingers found the side of his throat—just below his jaw—and pressed there. A small gesture—automatic, intimate, a woman who’d stopped thinking about whether she was allowed to touch a man and started touching him because her hands wanted to. His pulse kicked hard enough that she had to have felt it.

“Your pulse is faster than usual.”

“You’re taking my pulse.”

“I have excellent attention to detail. I’m a professional observer.” Her hand was still at the side of his neck. Her thumb rested against his throat, directly over his pulse point, and she was not moving it.

“Nari.”

“Your heart rate is elevated.”

“You’re standing in a narrow hallway with your thumb on my pulse. Elevated is an understatement.”

Her lips twitched. The smile broke through the exhaustion and the fear and the fury like sun through cloud cover—sudden, bright, gone too fast. “I’m a terrible person for flirting in front of a crime scene.”

“You’re an extraordinary person for flirting in front of a crime scene.”

She inhaled. Her fingers curled into his lapel—not pulling, not yet, but holding. Anchoring herself to him in the narrow hallway of her violated building with Takumi one flight down and Reo ten feet away and the entire situation impossible and irrelevant.

He leaned down. Not to kiss her. Slower than that. He pressed his forehead against hers. Held it there. Let his breath mix with hers in the four inches between their mouths. Her eyes were open. His were open. He could count her eyelashes from this distance. Could see the faint tremble in her lower lip that she’d been hiding all night.

“I’m scared.” Barely audible. The first honest confession of the evening—no sarcasm, no legal pad, no inventory of their failures. Her thumb moved against his pulse. “Not of Mercer. Of how fast I’m getting used to you being the first person I call.”

THIRTY-THREE

DOJIN

His hand came up. Cupped her jaw. His thumb traced the line of her cheekbone—gentle, deliberate, like handling a bee that landed on his palm. Not because she was fragile. Because she was important and close, and his hands had been aching to hold her face since he’d walked through her door.

“Get used to it.”