Page 63 of Warrior Security
I lay in the dark next to him and listened to his breathing slow and felt the warmth of his shoulder against mine. My brain wouldn’t shut off. It kept cycling through options—who I could call, what I could sell, whether there was anyone left to ask—and every path circled back to the same number and the same thirty days. I fell asleep searching for answers.
I woke up and didn’t know why.
The room was dark. The clock on the nightstand read 2:47. Then I heard it. Logan’s breathing, fast and shallow, each inhale catching before it could fill anything. His body was rigid beside me, the tension running through him and into the mattress.
I reached for his shoulder.
Tova was already moving.
She rose from the floor in silence, every movement calm and deliberate, already in purpose before she was fully on her feet. She jumped onto the bed and positioned herself across Logan’s chest with a precision that stopped my hand in the air, because I had designed every step of what she was doing.
Chin against his throat, pressed to the pulse point where she could read his heart rate through his skin. Full weight across his sternum. Breathing slow and deliberate, paced at the rate I’d spent months training into her to draw a panicking nervous system back down.
I pulled my hand back.
Logan’s jaw was clenched so hard the muscles in his neck stood rigid. His fists were knotted in the sheets, knuckles bloodless, and sweat darkened the hair at his temples. His chest heaved under Tova’s weight in shallow, fractured pulls that fought against the slow rhythm she was pressing into him.
Whatever lived behind his closed eyes was tearing through him, and the only thing between him and wherever the nightmare went was a dog I’d trained.
I hadn’t trained her for the man beside me; I’d trained her for a stranger I knew would eventually need her. And Tova was doing her job perfectly.
Logan’s grip on the sheets eased by degrees. His jaw softened. His breathing hitched once, caught between the nightmare’s rhythm and Tova’s, and then found hers. Slowand even, each breath deeper than the last, his body releasing whatever it had been braced against.
Tova held position until his breathing was steady. Then she shifted off his chest, stepped down from the bed, and settled on the floor without ceremony. Whatever she’d just done was already behind her.
Logan’s eyes opened. He stared at the ceiling for a long time. His hand reached down and found Tova’s head on the floor and rested there, his fingers pressing gently into her fur.
I touched his arm. His skin was damp and hot under my palm.
“Hey,” I said.
“Hey.” His voice was rough.
He didn’t say anything else. After a few minutes, his hand slipped from Tova’s head and his breathing went heavy with the kind of exhaustion that comes after a body has burned through everything it has. He slept.
I didn’t.
I lay in the dark and thought about the letter. I thought about the man beside me, who had just been dragged through something I couldn’t follow him into and brought back by a dog breathing on his chest. Who would wake up tomorrow and go to work and hold himself together the way he did every day, and who would do it again tomorrow night and the night after that.
I couldn’t add to his burden. He’d come so far from that man I’d met at the bulletin board inside Deja Brew just over a month ago. He’d found a measure of peace here. Shared that with me. Helped me when I didn’t know what to do with myself.
I slid out of bed and walked to the kitchen in the dark. The letter was propped against the coffeemaker next to his mug and mine. I picked it up, held it for a moment, and opened the junk drawer. I put the letter inside, next to takeout menus and theextra batteries and the screwdriver I kept meaning to put back in the toolbox, and I closed the drawer.
I stood there with my palms flat on the counter. I would tell him when I had some sort of plan. When I could hand him a problem and a direction forward instead of just the problem.
I walked back to the bedroom. Logan was breathing deep and even, one arm stretched across the space where I’d been. Tova was quiet on the floor.
I got into bed and lay next to the man I was a hair’s breadth from falling in love with and held the biggest thing I’d ever held completely alone.
Not because I had no one to tell, but because the person I wanted to tell had his own war to survive.
I wasn’t going to add to that.
Chapter 19
Logan
“Frank still hasn’t lost any weight,” Lark said, updating the chart on the kennel door. “Which means he’s either plateaued or he’s found a secret food source I haven’t located yet.”
