Page 24 of Protected By Razor

“Don’t apologise.” She drags a hand through her hair. “Okay. Okay. I hear you. I’m going to need to sit with it for a while. But I hear you.”

She picks up her bag. She looks at me for a long second.

“He’d better be good to you. He’d better be exactly as good to you as you deserve, because if he isn’t, I’m the one he’s going to answer to. Brother or not.”

“He will be.”

“Yeah.” Her voice softens. “Yeah. I actually think he will be.”

She leaves.

I close the door behind her. I stand with my back against it and slide down until I’m sitting on the floor in his t-shirt with my knees pulled up, and I breathe.

I made a scene. I meant it. Nothing terrible happened.

Kate is still my best friend. I’m still myself. I’m maybe more myself than I’ve ever been.

I sit on the floor and smile into my knees.

Razor comes back forty minutes later.

I don’t tell him about Kate. Not yet. I want to keep it to myself a little longer — what I said, how it felt, the new shape of me. I’ll tell him tonight. Tomorrow. Some time when the words aren’t still raw.

He’s on his phone when he comes through the door, and his face is set in the flat careful way it gets when something’s happening.

“Yeah,” he says into the phone. “Yeah. I’m here now. Twenty minutes.”

He hangs up. He looks at me.

“We’ve found them. Lock’s got eyes on the location. We go tonight.”

I stand up slowly.

“Okay.”

“You stay here. Doors locked. Phone on. You don’t open up for anyone. Only me.”

“Understood.”

He takes my face between his hands the way he did that first night, and he kisses me — hard, fast, something urgent and unfinished in it.

“I’ll be back.”

“You better be.”

His mouth twitches. “Yes ma’am.”

He’s gone.

The apartment is very quiet without him.

I try to read. I can’t. I check the locks twice. I check my phone. An hour passes. Ninety minutes.

I’m in the kitchen when I hear footsteps in the hallway outside my door.

More than one set. They stop outside my apartment.

Something thumps against the door. Not a knock. Something heavier. A shoulder, testing.