Page 27 of Sawyer (The Maddox BRAVO Team #1)

Camille

Hospitals measure time in drips and beeps.

Back at the house, time is paint drying—slow at the edges, fast where you need it to last. Since they discharged me, I keep catching myself staring at ordinary things like they’re evidence: a bread knife lying too close to the counter’s edge, the way a shadow slices a doorway, the exact click of a lock I’ve heard a thousand times.

My brain tags everything threat/not threat , the way Sawyer taught me, except now the sorting happens without permission.

Sawyer gives me space. He’s here, yet not, like a star you can find even when you don’t look at it directly.

He’ll linger in the hall until my breath evens, then vanish to answer a call.

He walks the perimeter at dusk with Riggs, murmuring into his throat mic, and at sunrise I sometimes catch him on the veranda, coffee cooling by his boot while he scans the drive.

He’s a constant background hum that makes the rest of the sounds sort themselves out.

I’m not ready to let him back into the sphere where he was before. He knows it, accepts the distance like a man holding a weight at arm’s length because the person beneath it asked him to.

So I paint.

The first canvas back is ugly on purpose—charcoal slashed with sickly green, aluminum gray smeared with the yellow of streetlights I didn’t see but felt under my skin.

I paint the ridges of a cargo van floor with the ribbed side of a palette knife, the way sound thudded through my jaw.

Then, in the upper corner, almost invisible, I pull a single stroke of titanium white, thin as a breath.

Sawyer’s line. The first time he drew it, I thought: protection disguised as motion.

Now it looks like a promise I held with my teeth.

Vanessa comes by on day two with Tupperware of arroz con pollo and a bag full of brightly colored scrunchies “for hospital-hair days you escaped but still deserve to accessorize.” She perches on my studio stool and watches me paint until the urge to fill silence makes her burst.

“He should be in here,” she declares after exactly twelve minutes, meaning Sawyer.

“He is,” I say, gesturing to the line. “In a way.”

Vanessa squints at the canvas, then at me. “You’re doing that thing where you make metaphors so potent they turn into people.”

“People made them first.” I dab white into gray until the edge blooms. “He’s giving me room.”

“Which you want,” she says gently, not a question. Vanessa can turn her voice into a blanket when she wants. “How’s your dad?”

The breath leaves me like I’ve been punched. I keep my hand steady anyway. “He’s… talking to anyone with a badge and a subpoena. He apologized.” My mouth twists. “He keeps trying to find the words that don’t exist.”

“You’ll find yours when you’re ready,” she says. “In the meantime, I brought gossip: Hartley has Vale by the portfolio.”

That pulls my head up. “What happened?”

She grins wolfish. “Your soldier boy and his boss pulled strings in places that don’t have strings, and suddenly the United States of Attorney People are very interested in a certain storytelling venture.

Vale tried to fly to Vegas; the men in windbreakers met him at the jet.

Kestrel Risk dissolved in a press release yesterday morning.

Their co-owner is singing like an aria.”

I smear blue into the ugly. “Rourke?”

“Arrested in Lighthouse Point.” Her tone flattens. “Resisted. Guess who resisted back.”

A tremor shoots through me, half fear, half heat that shouldn’t belong with fear and does anyway when it’s Sawyer we’re talking about. “Is he?—”

“Alive,” she says. “Bruised. Charged with kidnapping, attempted aggravated assault, use of an explosive device at a public event?—”

I nod.

“—and a bunch of words that sound like lawyers flexing,” she finishes. “He has an arraignment tomorrow.”

Rage tastes metallic under my tongue. I rinse my brush in turp and go back to work. “And the van?”

“Impounded.” She shudders. “Saw a photo on a detective’s tablet. Ugly inside. I wanted to drive a fist through things, and you know I don’t punch.”

That night, Sawyer updates me without pushing, standing in the doorway with his shoulder on the frame like he doesn’t trust his hands near my paint.

“Vale’s devices gave us more than his lawyers want to admit,” he says.

“We found threads to the shell company, notes on Kestrel, and messages to a burner—the one Rourke carried. Hartley’s ADA is building a conspiracy case that ties their ‘story arc’ to the escalation.

Kestrel’s co-owner is cooperating for a deal. ”

“And my father?” I ask, even though I don’t want to.

“Not charged.” His voice is careful, neutral like a nurse’s hands.

“Cooperating witness. He signed an affidavit detailing the scheme and his termination point. He’s stepping aside from the roadshow, maybe the CEO seat for a while.

He set up a fund for victims of stalking and manufactured harassment—yes, it’s PR, but it also helps. He asked if he could see you.”

I breathe once. “Not yet.”

Sawyer nods. Neither pleased nor disappointed. Simply noting a waypoint. “Understood.”

We fall into a rhythm that belongs to triage and repair.

Mornings I paint, afternoons I meet with Detective Hartley to answer questions I can answer without making my pulse sprint.

“You don’t have to look at the photos,” Hartley says, and I don’t, not the bloody details or the angle of the hinge where the door met my shin.

I do ask to see the orange triangle sticker.

I stare at its torn corner for too long, letting my eyes memorize its peel.

Every villain’s choice is this dumb, I tell myself: something small they didn’t think would matter.

That helps and makes me furious in equal measure.

We find the inside assist too, and that one perforates something soft I didn’t know was still intact.

It wasn’t my father’s assistant—bless her iron spine—but a junior account exec at the PR firm who’d been tasked with “monitoring my channels.” She sent Vale a spreadsheet labeled INTEL—CAM PERS CONTACTS the week before the gala: friends, vendors, staff, my father’s patterns, and—buried halfway down like a nail under a rug—my cell.

“Optimization,” her email said. “In case we need nimble plays.” Nimble plays.

I almost throw the printout across Hartley’s interview room, but I hand it back instead and watch the ADA put a neat paperclip on it like she’s tacking a butterfly, as if that stops the wings from ever having flapped.

At night I climb into a bed that feels too big and too loud with memory.

I dream about van doors and then, sometimes, about a thin white line that never lets the red touch me.

When I wake at two or four, the hall light is a soft gold sliver under my door, and Sawyer’s shadow sits with it like a patient dog.

I don’t ask him in. He doesn’t press. My fingers ache to curl in his shirt anyway.

On the fourth day, Hartley calls while I’m rinsing brushes. “We’ve set the arraignments,” he says. “Rourke today, Vale tomorrow morning. The judge is old school; he likes personal impact statements at bail. No pressure.”

“I’m not ready,” I say, throat thick. “This can’t be about cameras again.”

“It’s not,” Hartley says. “Your presence—silent—speaks to risk. A nod, a shake of the head. Or nothing at all. Your call.”

I hang up and find Sawyer already at the doorway, as always, reading my face the way bomb techs read shadows. “You don’t have to go,” he says.

“I know,” I say. “I think I need to see their faces once without masks.”

At the courthouse, the air tastes like old paper, and voices pool under the marble ceiling like low thunder.

I sit between Vanessa and Rae; Sawyer stands at the end of our pew, a pillar in a suit that makes him look like a better building.

When they bring Rourke in, shackled, he scans the room and then drops his gaze mid-sweep when he hits me.

I think: Look at me. He doesn’t. He stares at a water stain on the floor like it’s a map out.

His lawyer talks about roots and jobs and the presumption of innocence.

The ADA asks for remand without bail. I don’t stand.

I don’t cry. When the judge denies bail, a breath I didn’t realize I’d strapped down unbuckles.

Vale the next morning is all polish cracked at the edges.

He arrives with a haircut, a pale navy suit, and the flustered entitlement of a man who’s only ever been first on the golf tee.

He scans for cameras and finds eyes. Mine.

He jerks, and looks away. The ADA talks about money as leverage and crime.

The judge listens with a face that belongs on coins.

Bail is set like a number you need to choke on to learn a lesson.

Vale nods as if he can pay any number. Later, I hear the freeze order hit his accounts, and the weight of that nod crushes him.