Page 61 of Make Them Bleed

Arrow

By the time I lock the Riverside door behind me, the river has turned into a sheet of black glass and the wind coming off it has that metallic bite that sneaks under your hoodie and rearranges your introspection. We have a plan scrawled in dry-erase and digital breadcrumbs in five separate encrypted vaults. We also have a hole where trust used to sit. Both truths ride home with me like passengers I didn’t invite.

Our apartment is dark except for a low lamp in the living room and the soft glow of a laptop. Gage is on the couch with his boots off and two Pelican cases open like surgical trays. He’s building some Franken-rig for Render. It’s a camera body, a pancake lens, a directional mic the size of a pencil. His hands move with careful, monkish focus. He looks up as I shut the door with my foot.

“Hey, bat,” I say, dropping my backpack by the coat rack.

Gage’s mouth twitches. “Don’t call me bat. Bats have better PR.”

“How long you been home?”

He checks his watch without really looking at it. “Hour. Ozzy’s at Knight’s, pretending tacos are a religion. I figured you’d need a pair of eyes not attached to a feelings bomb.”

“Accurate.”

He watches me for a beat, sees the way my shoulders are sitting an inch higher than usual, and folds the laptop shut. “You sure about this?” he asks, and I know he means all of it: the plan, the soft-bait at Atlas, the hard edges, the Juno of it all.

“No,” I say, socking my hands into my hoodie pocket. “But we’re out of sure, and the clock’s been heckling us.”

He nods once, absorbing that like data. “I’ll sit the marina cams tonight. If the plate shows again, I want it before it hits the causeway.”

“Thanks.”

He doesn’t fill silence unless it needs filling. Tonight it does. He tips his head toward me. “How’s the… other thing?”

“You mean the part where the woman I love has one hand on my heart and the other on a flamethrower?”

“That one.”

I drop into the armchair across from him and scrub my palms over my face. “She found out about the spyware.”

Gage’s wince is quiet but comprehensive. “Told you not to cross that line.”

“I know.” The shame burns, steady and clean. “I was scared. I did the wrong smart thing.”

He considers. “People think the smart thing is the thing with the most code in it.”

“It usually is for me.”

“And how’d it go?”

“She’s hurt.” The word is a small, sharp stone in my mouth. “She shut things off. She asked for space. I’m trying to give it without… abandoning the perimeter.”

Gage taps the mic on the coffee table, a tiny sound. “Don’t defend it. Don’t justify. Be where she tells you, when she tells you. Keep your hands off her steering wheel.”

“That last part’s your kink, not mine,” I mutter, and he actually huffs a laugh.

“Arrow.” He leans forward, forearms on his knees, and looks at me the way he looks at a shot he wants. “Keep being there. If she asks for water, you bring water. If she asks for silence, you shut your mouth. If she asks for a wall, you become concrete. But let her decide the shape.”

I sit with that. It’s good advice, mostly because it tells me to do less and I am constitutionally bad at less. The floor creaks over by the bookcase—old building bones complaining about the cold. I let the sound pass through me and breathe into the hollow place behind my ribs.

“Render texted on my walk,” I say. “The burner ping was under the bridge by the rowing sheds. Nico’s LLC is Nicolas Armand. He’ll get us valet logs.”

Gage nods, installs a battery, checks a level. “I’ll pre-build a composite from your stills. If he breathes on a municipal lens, we’ll catch the fog.”

My phone buzzes face-down on the end table. I don’t need to see the name to know it’s her; the vibration goes a different frequency when it’s Juno. A Spidey-sense I didn’t consent to.

I thumb it open.