Page 68 of Make Them Pay

I hold on to that. I hold on to the memory of a man who picked wild mint for my water and drove around a town of two thousand people because their lives still mattered. A man who sat across from me with his palms up when I fell apart and later learned that staying close was the better answer. A man whose face opened for half a second in a diner years ago like a door that was usually locked. And a girl who stole fries because annoyed was better than invisible.

I hold on to that.

I sleep.

In the morning I tell him.

Not everything. Not the exact images from the dreams or the precise thoughts I had standing at the window with a glass of water and the weight of violence sitting in my chest. But enough. The broad shape of it. The nightmares came. I got up. I stood at the window. I came back.

He listens the way he listens to everything, completely, without interrupting, with the focused attention that used to feel like surveillance and now feels like the safest place I've ever stood.

When I finish he's quiet for a moment. We're sitting at the small kitchen table with coffee he made before I woke up, because that's what he does now. Makes coffee. It’s small and perfect. And it’s mine.

"I know," he says.

I look at him. "You know what?"

"About the nightmares. Last night wasn't the first time."

I set down my mug. "You've been awake."

"I'm a light sleeper." He pauses and drinks his coffee with the careful calm of someone choosing his next words the way he'd choose a tool for a specific job. "I didn't get up with you."

"I noticed."

He crosses the room and takes my hand. “I knew you needed space. You needed to process things without me hovering close by. I love you, but I also know you need space.”

I squeeze his hand. “I do need space sometimes, but I also need you, Render. All of you.”

He leans in and kisses me, and the kiss is everything. Every. Simple. Thing.

Dean calls that afternoon. Dinner at the farmhouse. The whole crew.

The drive takes forty minutes. Render drives. I watch the landscape change and think about what my life is shaping into.

The farmhouse glows in the early evening light. Warm windows. The porch with the rocking chairs. Cars in the gravel driveway that I recognize from the extraction: BRAVO's transport, the sedan Gage drove to Havenridge, Knight's motorcycle parked at the end of the row with the same precision he brings to everything.

Inside, the team’s already there. Seeing them all in one room, not as names on a map or voices in my ear, but as real people who eat and argue and take up space, changes something in my chest that I didn't know still needed changing.

Arrow’s in the kitchen cooking. Actually cooking, standing at the stove making something that involves garlic and olive oil with the focused attention of a man who's rediscovered that ordinary tasks still exist.

Gage is at the counter beside him, eating everything Arrow puts in front of him and offering commentary that sounds like criticism but is really just the familiar, abrasive warmth of a lifelong friendship.

"Your sauce needs salt."

"Then get the salt."

"I would, but you're guarding the stove like it owes you money."

"It does. I've invested emotional labor in this meal."

River sits next to Gage, laughing. Juno’s at the table, calm and steady, the organizer, the one who made sure everyone ate breakfast and did their homework when they were kids. She looks at me when I come in and something in her expression shifts. She’s got the look of a woman who lost her sister to violence and is watching another woman walk into the room where the people who fight that violence gather.

Knight’s in the doorway. He's always in the doorway. But his posture is different tonight. Softer. The vigilance is still there, just running at a lower frequency. His eyes find Lark every few seconds, and the finding is enough. She's there. She's safe.

Lark sits in the chair closest to him. She catches me watching and offers a small smile that says more about the last two weeks than any debrief could. We survived the same thing. We came out different. The smile is the acknowledgment of a shared membership in a club nobody volunteers to join.

Lark and I are the same in a lot of ways. We’re both the little sisters of brothers who never let us be a part of their world. Lark forced her way in. Me… I snuck in, doing my own coding and then getting kidnapped because of it.