Page 91 of Dozer

The medic tells me they need room. I let go because loving someone, apparently, includes knowing when holding on is helping and when it's getting in the way of the people trying to keep him alive. But only physically. Everything else stays exactly where it is.

I sit back and watch them work. I realize what I have found. We’re two people who know exactly how much can be lost and choose, somehow, to reach for each other anyway.

The evidence is out and the truth is alive. So is he. For now, those are the only facts I need.

The rest comes after. And there is going to be an after.

He promised me.

CHAPTER 30

Kenzi

Dozer comes out of surgery six hours later. Six hours. Three hundred and sixty minutes. Twenty-one thousand six hundred seconds, not that I count them, exactly, except apparently, I do because my brain is a deeply unhelpful place when it has nothing productive to dissect.

The bullet comes out clean from a spot that misses anything permanently vital by a margin the surgeon calls, with visible professional astonishment, "genuinely lucky."

I decide immediately that I hate the word lucky. Lucky is finding twenty dollars in an old coat pocket. Lucky is getting the last chocolate croissant at a coffee shop. Lucky is not a bullet entering a man's body and missing the things required to keep him alive by fractions of an inch. That's not luck. That's the universe terrifying the absolute hell out of me and then expecting gratitude afterward. And I am grateful. Really. But, I don’t call it luck.

I sit in a hospital hallway for every one of those six hours, still wearing clothes stiff with dried blood that isn't entirely his, and don't move until somebody tells me I can see him.

Ghost tries once. "You should change."

"No."

"You've got blood on you."

"I noticed."

"You've also been awake for⁠—"

"Ghost."

He looks at me for a second, then apparently recognizes something in my face that tells him pushing further would be hazardous to his health. "Coffee?"

"Yes."

He brings me one. I forget to drink it.

Hunter sits beside me for almost an hour without saying anything, which turns out to be exactly the correct amount of conversation. He hands me a bottle of water and makes me drink it. Nobody tells me Dozer is going to be fine until they know. I appreciate that. False reassurance has always irritated me. Tonight, I think it might break me.

So I wait.

And somewhere outside that hospital, while I'm staring at the same ugly beige tile and trying not to replay the moment I found Dozer on the museum floor, the world starts changing.

By the time I finally get a reliable signal on my phone, the story is everywhere. The headlines are filling all my social media feeds. Senator Whitmore Cole. Falsified pharmaceutical trials. Laundered funds. Illegal human experimentation hidden behind fraudulent consent forms. A private security contractor conducting black operations on American soil. Federal officials compromised across multiple agencies.

Cole's public statement hits the news. He’s calling it political persecution and claims that the evidence is fabricated. He claims that the private security organization is rogue and he’s not connected to it in any way. He’s believed for approximately eleven minutes before the first independent lab verifies our forensic package. Then another. Then the financial records start surfacing. Then someone inside his own network decides prison sounds considerably worse than cooperation and starts talking.

By nightfall, Senator Whitmore Cole is in federal custody. Two more names follow, then four. The arrests cascade the way arrests do once the first domino falls somewhere nobody can prop back up.

And still, sitting beside Dozer's hospital bed while a machine monitors every heartbeat I pretend I'm not listening to, none of it feels like victory yet.

Not completely.

Not while Dozer is laying in this bed.

Ryan's death isn't part of Cole's conspiracy. That grief belongs to something else. It’s an older wound. This case can't fix that, and to be honest, nothing can. But buried inside the falsified trial records, I find three families who were handed carefully sanitized versions of their loved ones' deaths. Three families who never knew the people they loved had been used in trials they hadn't properly consented to. They will now no doubt get lawyers and sue, and I hope they win every penny they sue for.