Page 21 of The Jackal

For a second, neither of us did a thing. Two people who'd built whole separate lives out of never being in the same place, standing forty feet apart in a fortress on a harbor, and the air between us pulled tight as a wire the way it always did. The way it only ever did with her.

Then—because she's Mags, because she has never once in her life done the careful thing when her heart had an opinion—she ran.

She crossed that courtyard at a dead run, full of stone and watching men, and she jumped. I caught her out of the air, because catching her was the only thing in the world worth doing right then. She wrapped around me and held on like I might be taken back.

I didn't care who saw.

I'm not a self-conscious man. I gave that up along with the fear. But I'm not blind, either, and I felt the amused weight of the other men's eyes settle on us as they passed—the grin men wear at the sight of one of their own gone soft in a courtyard.

A few of them I half knew, or thought I did. That was the strange part I didn't have time for: something in their faces tugged at me, a familiarity I couldn't run down, a name on the tip of the tongue that wouldn't come. But it slid right off me, because Mags was in my arms and nothing else was getting a vote.

I set her down. Made myself do it slow, both her feet back on the stone. I matched the smile she was already wearing, because I couldn't have stopped my own face if I'd tried.

My God, she looked good. Not made up, not done over. Just her, in the morning light, the way only she ever managed it—like the best news at the end of a long week. The time hadn't taken a thing from her. If anything, it'd set her, the way good things set.

"What are you doing here?" I asked.

It came out softer than I meant it.

She started talking, fast, the words tripping over each other—something about a dog, an inspection, a fence, a foster, a woman named Claire, the harbor road. I caught about one word in three. She heard herself somewhere in the middle of it, the way she always could, and her mouth shut and her cheeks went pink.

"It's okay," I told her. "Slow down. It's okay."

Around us, the morning kept moving without permission. The other men had gone on toward the house, peeling off in twos, and Brock among them threw me a look on his way up the steps—pointed two fingers at the big front doors, meaning inside, when you're done, take your time—and put a wink on the end of it that he and I would be having words about later.

There was a woman by Mags's dusty car. She hadn't gone in with the others. She stood with her arms loosely crossed and her head tipped, watching the two of us with a grin she wasn't bothering to hide, the open delight of a person who's just seen something better than they came expecting.

"So," she said. "This is Cash."

Mags turned to her, thrown. "You—how do you know⁠—"

"I didn't know you two knew each other." The woman's eyes moved between us, quick and bright and missing nothing, a journalist's attention behind all that warmth. "I would absolutely have led with that."

I didn't know what to do with the fact that she had my name. That she knew it, and knew Mags, and stood in the courtyard of whatever Dominion Hall was, looking entertained that the two of us had collided in it. For half a breath, the floor tilted a different direction and an old, cold thought walked through me—that this was a setup, that I'd been steered, that nothing about a black jet and a strange city and her standing in my brothers' fortress was an accident.

Then, I let it go.

I read the woman the way I read everyone, and there was no hand on a string in her. Nothing rehearsed. Only genuine surprise wearing a grin. This was a coincidence. A long, ugly, beautiful coincidence, the kind the universe deals you now and then to remind you it's still in the room. Nothing more. I made myself believe it, because the alternative was a hole I didn't have time to climb down into.

I looked back at Mags, and I remembered the message. The one I'd read three times and answered with nothing.

"I'm sorry," I said. "Your text. I saw it. I should've written back." The truth, or the part of it I could give her in a courtyard. "I'm in town for work. It came up fast."

Work. The word did something to her face. She glanced past me, toward the big doors where the last of the men were disappearing into the house—the hard, plain-clothed, quiet-eyed men I'd ridden in with, men whose whole bearing said the same thing mine did. I watched her put it together. I watched her see what I was, again, the way she'd seen it in Virginia Beach. A man who went where these men went. A man whose work flew him across oceans and walked him into fortresses and would, sooner or later, fly him back out of them.

Something in her went quiet. A sadness came down over the brightness, gentle, like a cloud crossing the sun.

I knew that sadness. I'd put it on her once before, in a parking lot, and called it the kindest thing I could do.

"Hey," I said.

She came back to me, her eyes lifting.

And here is where I did the thing I'd spent two nights and every good reason in the world telling myself I would not do.

"Since we're both here," I heard myself say, "how about dinner? You can show me your town."

I shouldn't have. I knew it as it left my mouth. Every careful wall I'd built in that hotel room, every line I'd typed and erased, every sound argument about a life she'd never understand and a door I wasn't going to drag her through—I'd meant all of it. I still did. And I asked her to dinner, anyway, because some pull older than my discipline reached up through the floor of me and asked it for me. A man who fears nothing turns out to be no match at all for the one thing he wants.