Page 19 of Riggs (The Maddox BRAVO Team #2)

Vanessa

The boutique smells like linen and lemon oil.

Sunlight pours through the front windows in fat rectangles, turning the silk dresses on the rack into lit glass.

Lina flits around me with pins between her lips, Brice is already bossing a ring light into an existential crisis, and Riggs stands where the room turns into a hallway—back to a pillar, eyes everywhere, hands idle only because he’s dangerous when they’re not.

I’m in the third look—soft green silk that drapes like it knows what it’s doing—when Brice claps for attention.

“Quick pivot,” he sings, headset askew. “Vanessa, the designer wants a ‘private reveal’ in the back fitting area, just you and me for an audio confessional before we roll the reels. Two minutes. Everyone else—reset the front for the street shots.”

Riggs’s gaze cuts to me. Private is not a word he likes. “No,” he says, before I can answer. “She doesn’t go anywhere alone.”

Brice pastes on a sympathetic smile. “Of course not alone. With me. This is from the client. They want to capture her reaction without a wall of people. It’s literally two minutes.” He offers his palms like peace offerings. “We need spontaneity. We need magic.”

Riggs doesn’t blink. “Magic can wait for security.”

Lina, trying to be helpful, chirps, “I’ll hover just outside the curtain?—”

“Fine.” Brice’s tone tightens. He leans in, voice dropping. “Vanessa, this is the designer’s request. If we don’t get it, we lose the hero post.”

I glance from Brice to Riggs. Brice looks harried in the way he always looks right before we hit something big and shiny.

Riggs looks like a wall. His eyes track the corridor to the back rooms, the manager folding tissue at the counter, the stack of shipping boxes by a swinging door. Something in my belly pinches.

“Two minutes,” I say to Riggs, trying to make it sound like no big deal. “Curtain open. Lina outside.”

He doesn’t like it. I can see it in the tick of his jaw. He angles to go with me anyway.

Brice steps to intercept, palms up, laugh fake. “Boys aren’t allowed in the sanctum ,” he says, hamming the word. “Designer’s rule. Mystic feminine energy and all that. Don’t worry—we’ll be in the first stall.” He touches his headset. “Lina, grab your mic. We’ll keep comms open.”

Riggs weighs—two minutes, my insistence, the client. He shifts an inch, then nods once to me, not to Brice. “Curtain stays open. Lina stays at the doorway. Two minutes means one. I’m ten feet away.”

“Copy,” I say softly.

Brice shepherds me toward the back. The fitting rooms are a little maze of velvet curtains instead of doors, mirrors everywhere. The air’s warmer from too many bodies and a steamer sighing somewhere. The corridor is empty. The security cam in the corner wears a Band-Aid of opaque tape. I stop.

“Why is that covered?” I ask.

Brice doesn’t miss a step. “Oh, it’s angled wrong. It always catches customers changing. The manager covers it when the rooms are in use. Privacy thing.”

It’s plausible. It still feels wrong. I make myself breathe. Four in. Hold. Four out. Hold.

Brice opens a curtain with a flourish. “Look three reveal,” he says brightly. “Give me wonder. Give me?—”

Something slides behind the next curtain. Not a person. A shadow unhooks itself and steps through the fabric like it owns the air.

“Kellan,” Brice says, that pleasant voice he uses with clients, only now it has something ugly coiled under it. “You have ninety seconds.”

My body fails to process the name. Then it doesn’t. My heart trips, skids, slams. Kellan steps fully into the small fitting alcove like we’re meeting for coffee. Cap. Messenger bag. A smile that never reached his eyes even when I liked it.

“Hi, V,” he says, soft, like this is a reunion and not a nightmare. “You look beautiful.”

I step back. The mirror catches my movement and multiplies it. The corridor is a thin slice of light beyond Kellan’s shoulder, and Lina’s voice floats from the front in a haze of laughter. Brice stays between me and the opening, blocking the spill of light with his shoulders.

“What are you doing,” I manage. My voice sounds wrong in the velvet-damp lay of the fitting room. “You can’t be here.”

Kellan’s gaze flicks to Brice, then back. “I can be wherever I want,” he says. “Anywhere with you.”

“Stop with all the dialogue,” Brice says, too dry. He taps his watch. “Hurry. He said two minutes.”

“Brice,” I whisper. The truth clicks together in my head, awful and neat. “You.”

He’s careful not to look sorry. He’s careful to look world-weary. “Nobody’s hurting you,” he says, and I realize with dead clarity that people only say that when that exact thing is on the table. “This is a nudge. A beat . The arc needed stakes. You’ll survive it and your numbers will?—”

“Shut up,” Kellan snaps without looking at him. The messenger bag slides off his shoulder and lands on the bench. He steps closer. “I missed you,” he says. “You went and got yourself a prop with a beard.”

Heat floods my face. Rage drowns fear for a beat and I cling to it like a lifeline. “He’s not a prop,” I say. I keep my voice low because Riggs is ten feet away, because the curtain is a membrane, because I have to survive the next sixty seconds. “He’s the man who will end you if you touch me.”

Kellan’s smile widens like I told him a joke. “Jealous is a good color on him,” he muses. “It’ll photograph well.”

My throat is raw. “You sent me notes.”

“It was romantic,” he says, and the word hits me like ice water. “We’re meant to be a we again. You forgot I write the moments. You perform them.”

Behind him, the corridor breathes. I hear someone roll a rack. I hear the steamer hiss. I don’t hear Riggs, which means he’s either listening hard or moving. Lina’s shadow crosses the hall. She’s there. Okay. Okay.

“Leave,” I say. “Leave now and I won’t—” I don’t even know what I’m threatening. “I won’t help put you in jail.”

Brice stares at the ceiling like it’s better than this conversation. “Ninety seconds,” he says, bored.

Kellan’s hand comes up, fast and controlled—how many times did he practice this, in mirrors, in hallways, while humming a movie score?

—and clamps over my mouth. I jerk. The world narrows to fingers, breath, the zipper sigh of the bag opening.

A strip of something cold and slick slaps my wrist. I realize too late it’s a zip tie.

I lunge to the side, heel aiming for his shin the way Riggs taught me.

I connect, and Kellan grunts, his face twisting.

Pride flickers and dies when the second zip tie bites and Brice’s hand—Brice, of all people—pins my shoulder for one terrible second.

“Stop,” I shout out.

Rage saves me again. I bite down hard on Kellan’s palm, blood dripping. He swears, and the world tilts. I choke a scream into the curtain. A laugh from the front covers it like someone left a faucet on.

“Lina!” I try. It comes out strangled. “L?—”

Kellan slaps a folded handkerchief between my teeth. “No,” he says. “We’re doing a reveal, babe. Surprise.”

Every lesson Riggs drilled into me unspools at once: name five things you see (green silk, silver pin, the seam of the curtain, Kellan’s scar from shaving, Brice’s watch), four you feel (zip tie bite, velvet heat, Kellan’s breath, my own pulse), three you hear (steamer, hanger clack, someone saying medium?

), two you smell (lemon oil, aftershave I used to know), one you taste (metal and mint).

Panic drops to a controllable hum. I can work with hum.

I make a choice. I step on the hem of my own dress, bend as if I’m stumbling, and my hand brushes the turquoise bracelet I bought at the stand yesterday. It snaps. Beads bounce—soft, a scatter like rain on a roof. I let them fall under the curtain. Lina will see. Riggs will know.

“Time,” Brice hisses. “Jesus, Kellan.”

Kellan loops an arm around me under the drape, crushes me to his side, and we’re out of the stall through a back slit of curtain.

The hall back here is narrower, darker, lit by a green EXIT sign and a failing overhead bulb.

The security camera over the back door is dead-eyed.

Someone taped a Post-it over the lens. It’s a smiley face drawn in Sharpie.

I kick. I thrash. I cut my wrist on an edge somewhere. I aim a head-butt at Kellan’s chin, and he jerks his jaw back just in time. He’s stronger than he looks, and the adrenaline makes him mean. “Don’t,” Brice says behind us, absurdly gentle. “Don’t hurt her.”

“I’m not hurting her,” Kellan says. “I’m saving her.”

“You’re…what?” For a second even Brice sounds appalled, like he didn’t sign up for this level of delusion.

Kellan shouldered the back door. Alley heat slaps my face.

The world is dumpsters and sage, a flash of sky, the echo of the shop’s music turned tinny.

A white van idles with the sliding door already half open.

I’m dragged. I dig my heels and catch concrete and then air.

I throw my weight wrong, on purpose. Kellan staggers, and we bounce off the door frame.

I grind my shoulder into rust and feel the sting break skin. Good.

“Kellan!” Brice hisses, panic at last. “Stop. We said?—”

“You said,” Kellan snaps. “I’m saying better.

” He muscles me inside. The van smells like pine cleaner and gasoline, like a motel that pretends.

My shoulder hits the floor, and my head bumps something soft—a blanket or a folded hoodie with a citrus detergent I almost recognize.

There’s a rosary swinging from the rearview.

A cracked air freshener shaped like a tree. My eyes go hot. I blink them clear.

“Drive,” Kellan barks at the guy behind the wheel, and the van lurches.