Page 22 of Riggs (The Maddox BRAVO Team #2)

Vanessa

Pine cleaner and gasoline. That’s what the room smells like—someone’s idea of clean poured over something that will always be dirty.

The turquoise roll-up door is half closed, slivering a stripe of hot daylight onto poured concrete.

A box fan clicks every third turn, blades wobbling like they’re negotiating.

Above me, a cheap rosary dangles from a nail and taps the cinderblock with a tiny wooden heartbeat.

I’m on the floor against a column, wrists zip-tied to a length of nylon rope looped around the post. The gag he shoved in my mouth tastes like mint and metal and old cologne.

My shoulder throbs from the van; every breath snags on the handkerchief.

I do it anyway. In for four. Hold for four.

Out for four. Hold for four. Riggs’s voice in my head makes the counts sound normal.

Kellan paces, hands carving the air like he’s storyboarding.

He ditched the cap. His hair is longer than when I knew him, and the eyes I once thought were soulful now just look…

shiny. The messenger bag sits open on a folding chair: spare zip ties, a cheap camera, the craft-store glue I’ve learned to hate.

“Okay,” he says, pulling his phone, the camera already open. “We’re going to do a little reset. You’ll thank me later when you see the edit. We lost you for a minute, but now we’re back to real . Audience wants real, V. Fear. Relief. Reunion. Lost and found. Classic.”

I work my tongue against the gag and glare. The driver leans against a wall and pretends to check his nails. He keeps the radio low enough to swallow the noise from the street. He looks bored.

Kellan squats in front of me, phone raised, the screen filling with my bruised mouth, my messed hair, the fury I can’t blink away. “There she is,” he murmurs. “God, I missed your light. Remember when we used to make magic on rooftops? Before handlers. Before your… wall.”

“His name is Riggs,” I try. It comes out muffled, ugly. My wrists burn where the zip ties bite. I work them against the plastic, not to escape—yet—but to mark my skin. Blood is a breadcrumb. He taught me that without saying it.

Kellan tips his head. “He’s a prop. Props come and go. We’re the story. We always were. You and me.”

I let my gaze wander, committing details to memory again in case I live on memory alone. But everything about this situation has my mind rolling in place. Like a hamster in a wheel. I try to remember details, but none of them are useful.

Kellan reaches out like he’s allowed and tucks a piece of hair behind my ear. I flinch so hard it hurts. He sighs, aggrieved. “Don’t be dramatic. We’re going to talk. I’ll post a teaser so they know it’s romantic and then we’ll?—”

I bark a laugh against the gag. Romantic. I want to spit. I want to bite. I want him to understand this isn’t right.

The door to the office cubby clacks and I jerk.

He’s strung a backdrop in there—cream muslin, a ring light plugged into a janky power strip, a stool like a confessional.

There’s a script on the desk. It starts, I forgot who I was without you, Kellan, in block letters cut from printer paper and glued to a card. My stomach turns.

“Brice said—” I start, uselessly, then stop. I don’t want to give Kellan any more names to swing at.

“Brice is soft,” he says, contempt sliding in where charm used to live. “He wanted an incident . I’m giving you an arc . He’ll thank me when he’s trending.”

He lifts the phone again. The lens stares. I stare back, full of hate, and refuse to cry. If he posts anything, he’ll post my anger. Not my fear. My fear belongs to me and to no one else. I keep breathing. In. Hold. Out. Hold.

A tiny change sweeps the room—a pressure shift, a silence that thickens. It’s almost like time stands still. The driver flicks his eyes to Kellan and straightens without meaning to.

“Time,” Kellan mutters, standing. “Let’s begin. Say what I wrote, and I’ll?—”

A voice cuts through the room, calm as a straight line. “Mr. Stevens,” it calls, bored and official. “APD. Let’s talk before this gets ugly.”

My heart slams once, hard. The police. Heat rushes up the back of my neck, a solvent for fear. I don’t blink. I’m afraid if I blink I’ll miss it.

Kellan’s smile cracks, and the shine in his eyes turns brittle. He grabs the rope, yanks it higher on the column like he can somehow hide me better by making me smaller. “They don’t know we’re here,” he hisses to the driver. “It’s a bluff.”

Another voice—steady, low—threads in from under the roll-up. “Vanessa,” it says, just for me. “I’m here.”

Everything in me holds and then lets go. The room tilts toward true north. “Riggs,” I try to say, and the gag turns it into a broken vowel. He hears me anyway. I know he does. I can feel his yes in my chest.

“Step back from the woman,” Turner says, conversational, like he’s ordering tacos. “Show me your hands. Let’s not do this the hard way.”

Kellan rips the handkerchief from my mouth like he’s performing some act of mercy. “Don’t say his name,” he snarls. “Do you know how many nights I?—”

“Every night a choice,” I rasp. My voice is scratchy and raw like sandpaper. “You made this. You don’t get to call it love.”

He stares at me like I’ve spoken a language he refuses to learn. His hand twitches like he wants to touch me again. The driver hisses, “Bro,” and starts to edge toward the office.

“Don’t,” a third voice says, close and flinty, and I glimpse a big man’s shadow slide at the roll-up’s edge. Lalo. The driver freezes, instinct winning over stupidity.

“Mr. Stevens,” Turner continues, closer now, patience thinning but not gone, “last chance.”

Kellan goes very still. He looks at the phone in his hand, at me, at the slit of light, and you can see him building three different cuts in his head. In none of them does he lose. He takes a breath like an actor finding his mark, grips the rope with both hands, and?—

Men move—shadows resolving into Lalo, Turner, and Riggs, my Riggs , filling the doorway in a charcoal shirt and a face that will never, ever be a prop. He doesn’t look wild. He looks… quiet. The kind of quiet that makes stupid men stop moving.

“Hands,” Turner says, voice clipped. “Now.”

Kellan bolts for performance—jerks the rope, drags at me like he can pull me into his cut.

He doesn’t get far. Riggs is already there, silent fast, intercepting the rope with one hand and taking Kellan’s wrist with the other, twisting just enough to make bone talk without tearing ligaments.

It’s a precise correction, not a fight. Kellan yelps, drops the phone, and it skitters under the folding chair and dies facedown.

“What the fuck,” the driver whines to no one brave enough to be him, and Lalo peels him off the door with a control hold that looks like a hug and ends in zip ties.

“Good,” Turner says dryly, stepping in with cuffs. “Let’s discuss your sudden passion for arts and crafts in a room with glass and a lock.”

Kellan is still talking. He doesn’t hear himself. “She loves me—this is—this is—” He’s looking for the word when Lalo, bless him, supplies one: “Over.”

The rope falls slack. The zip ties bite harder for a second with the jolt, and I suck air I don’t have and then it’s there—his hands, sure and gentle, at my wrists.

He has a tool I don’t see, and I hear the plastic whisper and then I’m free and the blood rushes back hot.

He’s already checking my shoulder, scanning for breaks, for discoloration, for the kind of damage that hides.

He’s breathing shallow, like he’s the one who ran here.

“You’re okay,” he says. It’s not a question but he waits on it like one.

“I’m okay,” I tell him, and the moment I say it, I am more okay than I was. I tip my forehead to his and close my eyes because I can. “I tried to remember every detail.”

“I know. You did so good,” he says, and the sound he makes on good is not a laugh and not a sob but it’s something I’ve never heard from him.

“Bracelet in the stall. Blood on the van. Heel under the mat in there.” He nods toward the dark mouth of the sliding door, already past it and refusing to look. “You did perfect.”

“Always do,” I whisper, and the room blurs. Turner’s people are in now—plainclothes, competent, no sirens, no cameras—pulling Kellan upright, mirandizing over his rant, moving the driver without bruises and without kindness.

Riggs cups my face and tilts it up. His eyes are dark, steady, wrecked around the edges. “I’m sorry I was late,” he says, and I hate that he means it.

“You’re right on time,” I tell him, because he is.

He breathes out. His thumb catches a tear at my cheek I didn’t feel fall. He looks at me like he’s checking fifty little things and then he just… lets himself look. The quiet inside him shifts. Something opens. Something decides.

“I love you,” he says.

It lands like shade after hours in the sun.

Like water. Like the word I didn’t let Kellan use turned right-side up and handed to me clean.

It isn’t performative. It isn’t a brand.

It’s a vow in a room that smells like pine and gasoline.

I feel it everywhere the rope cut and everywhere it didn’t.

Tears come easy then. I don’t hide them. He’s earned them.

“Say it again,” I ask, because I want it in my bones.

“I love you,” he says, softer this time, like the heat in the room might scald it. “I love you. I’m here.”

“I love you too,” I tell him, and it’s the easiest truth I’ve ever said.

He pulls me in, slow and careful, and I fold into him like I’ve been saving the shape for this exact second.

He smells like pine trees and sweat and the kind of fear that leaves when love walks in.

His heart beats steady against my cheek, and I make mine match.

I think I’ve been doing that since Seattle.

Turner appears in my peripheral with a tablet for my statement and a gentleness he hides like a contraband. “Ms. Mercado,” he says, “medics are on their way. We’ll keep this off the blotter for as long as the universe allows. You’ve got a good man here,” he says, nodding at Riggs.

“I know,” I say, voice rough, and Riggs huffs against my hair.

Lalo lifts the rosary off the nail and hands it to Turner with a face like c’mon . The driver goes one way, Kellan goes another, still talking to a camera that isn’t there.

Riggs tucks his chin to my temple. “We’re going home,” he says into my hair.

“Where’s that?” I ask, because I want to hear him say it.

“Where you sleep,” he says. “Where I keep watch. Anywhere the door wedges and the coffee’s bad and you laugh at me for how seriously I take light bulbs.”

I smile, wet and stupid. “That sounds perfect.”

“It will be,” he says, and kisses me—quiet, sure, not for anyone but us. No cameras. No crowd. Just us.