Chapter 9: The Move

## Emily

October 28th, 2021

Grey's apartment was on the fourth floor of a converted warehouse on the east side of the city, fifteen minutes from campus if you drove and thirty if you walked and approximately infinity if you were carrying two suitcases and a stuffed bear and trying not to cry.

I wasn't moving in. That's what I told myself while Grey carried the second suitcase up the stairs. That's what I told Ash on the phone while she made noises that oscillated between skepticism and barely contained excitement. That's what I told the mirror in Grey's bathroom while Sirius sat on the counter and judged me with her one-and-a-half ears.

"I'm not moving in," I said to the cat.

Sirius blinked. Slowly. Deliberately. The blink of a creature who had seen many things in her thirteen years and was not impressed by any of them, least of all my capacity for self-deception.

"It's temporary," I added. "The dorm had a plumbing issue."

The dorm did not have a plumbing issue. The dorm had a Jordan issue — specifically, Jordan had shown up outside the building at 2 AM, drunk, screaming my name, and throwing empty bottles at the entrance until campus security escorted him away. The incident report was filed. The restraining order was in process. But the dorm no longer felt safe, because safe was a feeling and feelings didn't care about incident reports.

Grey had said one word. "Come."

And I had.

Because the alternative was another night of staring at the ceiling, listening for footsteps, my hand wrapped around my phone with his number ready to dial. Because the alternative was the bathroom floor and the razor and the drift. Because the alternative was being alone, and I was so fucking tired of being alone.

His apartment was nothing like I expected.

I'd imagined something spare. Clinical. A man's apartment — leather couch, flat screen, the aesthetic of a person who used furniture as a function rather than a statement. Instead, I walked into a space that felt lived in. Warm. The walls were exposed brick, the floors dark hardwood, the furniture a mix of vintage and modern that shouldn't have worked together but did, the way contradictions in people sometimes did.

Books everywhere. Not arranged — accumulated. Stacked on the coffee table, piled on the nightstand, wedged between couch cushions, crammed into a floor-to-ceiling bookshelf that took up one entire wall of the living room. Philosophy, fiction, poetry, true crime, history, astrophysics. Dog-eared, annotated, loved in the specific way that readers loved their books — not as objects but as companions.

Paper roses in a bowl on the kitchen counter. Dozens of them. Different sizes, different paper — some white, some cream, some made from pages torn from books. A cemetery of flowers that had never been alive and would never die.

And the loft. His bedroom was above — accessible by a narrow industrial staircase — and the loft space opened over the living room with a railing that Sirius liked to walk along, because she was a cat and cats understood that the most elegant route between two points was the one most likely to cause cardiac arrest in the humans below.

"The couch pulls out," Grey said, setting my suitcase by the door. "Sheets are in the closet. Kitchen's yours — eat whatever you want, though I should warn you my culinary range consists of coffee, toast, and whatever Jeremy brings when he decides I'm not feeding myself."

"Where do you sleep?"

"The loft."

"Where does Sirius sleep?"

"Wherever Sirius wants. She's a cat. Democracy does not apply."

I looked around the apartment. At the books and the roses and the brick walls and the way the late afternoon light came through the industrial windows and painted everything in gold. At the cat on the bookshelf, grooming her remaining ear with the focused intensity of a surgeon. At the man standing in his kitchen, sleeves rolled, making coffee, as if having a twenty-three-year-old student in his apartment was the most normal thing in the world.

"Grey."

He looked up.

"Why are you doing this?"

He set the coffee pot down. Leaned against the counter. Crossed his arms — a posture I was learning to recognize as his thinking stance, the physical expression of a man arranging his words with the same precision he used to fold paper.

"Because you deserve a door that locks," he said. "Because the dorm wasn't enough and we both know it. Because I've spent three months watching you fight for your life with nothing but gummy worms and a stuffed bear and a stubbornness that would put most soldiers to shame, and the least I can do is give you a place where the fight gets a little easier."

"That's a very long answer."

"It's a very important question."

I held his gaze. Hazel, gold, steady. The wire in my chest was doing something new — not just humming but singing, a frequency that felt less like electricity and more like warmth, less like a warning and more like a welcome.

"Okay," I said.

"Okay?"

"Okay. I'll stay. But I'm paying rent."

"You're not paying rent."

"Then I'm buying groceries."

"You eat gummy worms."

"Then I'm buying gummy worms."

The corner of his mouth twitched. Almost-smile number forty-seven. I was keeping count. "Deal."

---

The first night, I didn't sleep.

Not because of fear. Not because of Jordan or nightmares or the cold dread that had been my constant companion for three years. I didn't sleep because the apartment was quiet — not the hostile quiet of Jordan's place, where silence was just the pause between explosions, but a real, genuine, deep-in-your-bones quiet that felt like being underwater without the drowning.

Sirius was on my chest. She'd claimed me approximately thirty seconds after I'd pulled the couch out and gotten under the covers — padded across the apartment in the dark, jumped up, circled twice, and collapsed on my sternum with the gravitational authority of a small, furry planet.

Her purr was a metronome. A heartbeat. A proof of life that vibrated through my ribs and settled into the part of my brain that managed fear.

Above me, in the loft, Grey was awake. I could hear his pen scratching. He wrote at night — not the academic writing, not the grading. Something else. Something personal. I'd caught glimpses of a leather notebook that he kept in his desk drawer, separate from everything else, handled with the same reverence I used for my mother's notebook.

I lay in the dark and listened to his pen and Sirius's purr and the distant sound of the city outside the windows — sirens, traffic, the ambient hum of a world that continued existing regardless of whether you participated in it — and for the first time in three years, the wire in my chest did something I didn't recognize.

It went quiet.

Not dead. Not the snapped-wire silence that had been my default since the night Charlie died. A different kind of quiet. The quiet of a machine at rest. The quiet of something that had been running on emergency power for so long that it had forgotten what normal felt like, and was now, tentatively, carefully, remembering.

I slept.

---

## Grey

October 29th, 2021

She slept for fourteen hours.

I know because I checked. Not obsessively — every two hours, which was reasonable surveillance protocol and had nothing to do with the fact that Emily Glass was asleep on my couch with my cat on her chest and her face soft and unguarded for the first time since I'd met her.

She looked different when she slept. Younger. The tension that lived in her jaw and her shoulders and the tight lines around her eyes dissolved, and what was left was the face of a woman who might have been happy once, before grief and violence and loneliness had reshaped her into something sharper.

I folded paper roses at the kitchen counter and watched her breathe and tried very hard not to think about what I was doing.

Because what I was doing was stupid. Monumentally, catastrophically, career-endingly stupid. She was my student. I was her professor. The power dynamic alone was a minefield, and the fact that I was also a member of an underground criminal organization currently surveilling a drug operation on the same campus where she attended classes added a layer of complication that would have made Machiavelli weep.

Malachi had called last night. He'd used his concerned voice, which was more dangerous than his angry voice because it meant he was actually worried.

"Greyson. She's living with you."

"It's temporary."

"Everything you've done regarding this girl has been 'temporary.' The coffee was temporary. The alcove was temporary. Moving her out of her brother's apartment was temporary. At what point does temporary become permanent?"

"When she's safe."

"She'll never be safe around you. You know that."

I did know that. Malachi was right — he was always right, which was the most infuriating thing about him. Emily was safer in my apartment than in Jordan's, but she wasn't safe. Not really. Not when Diamond's network was circling the campus and Remi was in my classroom and Eris had been leaving coded messages that suggested he knew more about my personal life than a drug dealer should.

She wasn't safe because I wasn't safe. I was a weapon in a suit. I carried three guns and a conscience that had been selectively deactivated for the purpose of doing the things Malachi needed done. I had killed people. Not many, but enough. Enough that the blood was permanent, soaked into my hands the way ink soaks into paper, and no amount of paper roses would wash it out.

Emily deserved better. Emily deserved a man without guns in his desk drawer and a passport in a name that wasn't his. She deserved a man whose idea of conflict resolution didn't involve Jeremy's background files and Malachi's network and the unspoken threat of violence that followed me like a shadow.

But Emily also deserved to sleep for fourteen hours without flinching.

And she was doing that. Right now. On my couch. With my cat.

So Malachi could take his concerned voice and his correct assessment and his decades of wisdom and he could wait. Because I wasn't giving this up. Not yet. Not until she was ready to stand on her own. Not until the wire in her chest — the one she thought I didn't know about, the one she described in her novel as a broken connection between herself and the world — was humming steadily enough to sustain her without me.

Then I'd step back. Then I'd be the professor again, appropriate and distant. Then I'd fold my feelings into paper and leave them in the dark like everything else I couldn't keep.

But not yet.

Jeremy texted at 7 AM. Eris meeting confirmed for Friday. He's using the abandoned lot on Meridian. Remi is expected. I have surveillance set up.

Grey: Keep me updated. And Jeremy — the girl is off limits. If Eris's people come anywhere near her, I want to know immediately.

Jeremy: Understood. Also — you should know that Jordan Glass filed a report with campus police claiming harassment. He's accusing you of threatening him.

Grey: Let him. The counter-documentation will bury him.

Jeremy: Already prepared. I also took the liberty of having his truck towed. It was in a no-parking zone.

Grey: Was it?

Jeremy: It is now.

I almost smiled. Jeremy was the best thing Malachi had ever given me — a brother by choice, loyal to the marrow, with a talent for bureaucratic warfare that rivaled his talent with a firearm.

At 10 AM, Emily woke up.

I heard her before I saw her — a sharp intake of breath, the rustle of sheets, the soft thud of Sirius jumping off her chest and landing with the offended dignity of a cat who had been involuntarily relocated. Then a sound I hadn't heard from her before.

Laughter.

Not a full laugh. Not yet. A half-laugh, a breath-laugh, the tentative sound of a person remembering how the mechanism worked. She was looking at the coffee table, where I'd arranged twelve paper roses in a circle while she slept, and in the center of the circle was a bag of sour gummy worms with a note that said: Breakfast of champions. -G

"You're insane," she called up to the loft.

"Probably," I called back. "Coffee's on the counter."

She appeared in the kitchen doorway wearing the oversized t-shirt she'd slept in — my t-shirt, actually, which she'd pulled from the clean laundry because she'd forgotten to pack pajamas, and the sight of her in my clothes with her hair tangled and her eyes soft and Sirius weaving between her ankles did something to my chest that I refused to name.

"I slept fourteen hours," she said, pouring coffee into the mug I'd left out — her mug now, cream and two sugars.

"You needed it."

"I haven't slept more than four hours in a row since Charlie died."

"I know."

She looked up at me. Over the railing. Through the morning light that came through the industrial windows and turned everything gold. "How do you know?"

"Because you have the eyes of someone who hasn't slept in three years. And because your novel — the pages you read in class — described insomnia with the specificity of someone who has memorized every pattern on their ceiling."

She held her coffee with both hands. Steam curled around her face. "You really pay attention."

"It's either a gift or a curse, depending on who you ask."

"Which is it for you?"

I looked at her. In my kitchen. In my shirt. With my cat and my coffee and a circle of paper roses on the table that I'd folded in the dark while she slept.

"Both," I said.

She smiled. Small. Careful. A thing built of equal parts warmth and wariness, like a fire lit in a room that had been cold for so long it had forgotten that fire was possible.

"I need to write today," she said. "The novel. I have thirty pages and I can feel the next thirty. My mom used to call it 'the hum' — when the story is ahead of you and you just have to keep your hands on the keyboard and let it pull."

"Use the alcove. I have a meeting at the university until noon, but the door is open."

"What kind of meeting?"

"The boring kind that involves other professors and a budget and the dean's opinion on creative writing as a discipline, which is approximately as valuable as his opinion on quantum physics."

She almost laughed again. That half-breath, that tentative exhale. Closer to the real thing this time.

"Emily."

"Yeah?"

"The novel is good. The pages you've written — they're not just good. They're necessary. The kind of writing that changes people. I've been teaching for years and I've read thousands of student works, and yours is the first one that made me forget I was reading."

She stared at me. Her eyes filled. She blinked fast — once, twice — and the tears didn't fall but they were there, suspended, waiting.

"My mom used to say that too," she whispered. "That good writing makes you forget you're reading."

"Your mom was right."

She set her coffee down. Crossed her arms. Uncrossed them. Looked at Sirius, who was sitting on the counter with the serene indifference of a creature who understood that all human emotion was temporary and breakfast was not.

"I'm going to feed this cat," Emily said. "And then I'm going to the alcove. And then I'm going to write thirty pages and they're going to be terrible and beautiful and real."

"Good."

"And Grey?"

"Yeah?"

"Thank you. For the roses. And the gummy worms. And the couch. And the fourteen hours." She paused. "And for whatever you said to Jordan that made him look like he was going to vomit."

"You're welcome for all of it. Especially the vomiting."

She fed Sirius. She went to the alcove. She wrote thirty-one pages.

And I went to my meeting and sat through two hours of bureaucratic tedium while thinking about a girl in my shirt with morning light on her face and her mother's words in her mouth, and I folded a paper rose under the table and put it in my pocket because my hands needed something to do that wasn't reaching for her.