Page 70 of Dozer

"I don't rush things that matter."

Her smile grows, tired but real. And for one dangerous second, I want to reach across the table and touch her. Not because she's shaken. Not because she needs reassurance. Because I want to. I keep waiting for the right moment, unsure if it’ll ever come.

Twenty minutes later, we try the contact number again. This time, he answers. Groggy. Confused. Entirely unaware anything is wrong. The package was received. Secured exactly where Kenzi asked him to keep it. As far as he was concerned there wasn’t a breach. No compromise. No explanation for how anyone could have known what she'd sent or where.

"He's fine," Kenzi says when she hangs up, relief and confusion tangled together in her voice. "The package is fine. Which means whoever sent that message either doesn't actually know where it is and is bluffing to see if we'll panic and move it somewhere less secure, or⁠—"

"Or they're watching you specifically," I finish.

She looks at me. "Closely enough to know you have a hidden asset without knowing exactly where it is yet."

"Which means I need to be more careful than I've been."

"We need to be more careful. Both of us."

I reach across the table before I can overthink it and cover her hand with mine. Her skin is warm. Her fingers tense for half a second beneath mine, then relax. The contact is simple. Barely anything. It still feels like the most deliberate thing I've done all night.

"You're not carrying this alone," I say. "Whatever that phone means, whoever's behind it, we handle it together, or we don't handle it at all."

She turns her hand beneath mine, palm meeting palm. And holds on.

"Okay," she says.

I meant to let go after a reasonable amount of time. I don't. Neither does she.

The phone sits dark on the table between us, seven words waiting somewhere in the back of my mind, but for a few seconds I don't care about the message. I care about the woman holding my hand.

That's new territory. And somehow, it scares me more than the people hunting us.

CHAPTER 23

Kenzi

We stay like that longer than either of us needs to justify it, hands together on a kitchen table in a safe house that isn't really safe, not fully, not with that message still sitting unanswered somewhere out there and eventually Dozer gets up to check the perimeter one more time before the night settles in properly.

His fingers leave mine slowly. I sit alone with the quiet and find, for once, that I don't want to fill it. He comes back a few minutes later, shuts the door softly behind him, and instead of taking the chair beside me, he sits across from me like he senses I need the space to say something without him close enough to catch me if I fall apart doing it.

"You told me something tonight," I say. "About her. About why you stopped letting people in."

"I did."

"I want to tell you mine. The whole thing. Not the piece I almost said in the hospital, or the piece that slipped out at the file cabinet. All of it."

He doesn't say anything. Just waits, the same patient stillness he's given me every other time I've almost handed him something real, and I find, looking at him, that I finally trust the waiting enough to fill it properly.

"My brother's name was Ryan," I say. "Ten years older than me. He used to joke and call me an oops baby. My parents had tried for forever to have another child before giving up and then I came along. He joined the Army the day he turned eighteen, which surprised exactly no one who knew him, because he'd wanted to be a soldier like our dad for as long as any of us could remember. When he was a teenager, our dad brought home a flag from his own deployment and folded it into Ryan's hands like it was something sacred." I swallow. "It was. Ryan treated it that way his whole life."

Dozer doesn't move and doesn't rush me. I notice he hasn’t given me one of those careful little nods people use when they're already planning what they're going to say next. He’s not listening to respond, he’s listening to hear the words I’m saying.

"He was Delta, worked with Hunter who became like a second big brother. In 2011 he deployed to Afghanistan, again. I was in college, thinking my biggest problem was where I would work after graduation and if I could get into the internship I wanted badly." I give a short, humorless laugh. "Funny how small your problems look in hindsight, when you didn't know yet what a real one felt like."

"You don't have to do the jokes right now," Dozer says quietly. "Not with me."

I look at him and I’m amazed at how well he's already learned that about me, how I wear humor as armor, the jokes as the thing I reach for right before the truth gets too heavy.

"Okay." I let the joke go, and just say it plainly."He died on a mission that went wrong in ways nobody ever fully explained to my family. Not really. Not beyond the careful language they use for families who ask too many questions. Hunter was there. Hunter carried him the last quarter mile back to extraction because Ryan wasn't going to make it, and Hunter wasn't going to leave him lying somewhere he could be left behind. Not even for a body that had already stopped being able to feel it."

The words sit between us. My voice doesn't break, yet. I'm almost proud of that, distantly, with the same forensic distance I give everything, cataloguing my own composure like a data point I can still trust. Telling him this story feels like an out of body experience. I can recite the words and somehow distance myself from them, as if they happened to someone else. Trauma is funny like that, I suppose.