Now the chair looked abandoned, its leather cushions holding the impression of someone who might never return.
I pressed my palms against my thighs, feeling the pistol's weight redistribute as I moved. The sensation triggered memory fragments from Afghanistan—the particular heaviness of loaded magazines and how gear pressed against your body during long patrols through hostile territory.
I inhaled sharply, chest rising and falling in rapid, shallow pulls. I forced myself to count backward from twenty, a technique drilled into me during combat stress training. Numbers provided structure when chaos threatened to overwhelm the brain.
Twenty. Nineteen. Eighteen.
The red digits advanced a few more minutes: 10:52 PM.
Sixty-eight minutes until I learned whether love could overcome professional violence. Until I discovered whether I had enough strength to save the man I couldn't lose.
I checked the pistol's safety one final time and then headed for the door.
Halfway down the stairwell, my chest seized. Not the familiar grip of combat stress—this was something else entirely. Raw terror that had nothing to do with my own mortality and everything to do with the blinding flash of truth. I loved Dorian.
I gripped the handrail and forced myself to stop. The painted metal bit into my palm, cold and merciless, while the stairwell tilted around me like the world was coming unhinged.
He can't die.
But that wasn't the thought that was killing me.
The thought that was killing me was this: By allowing him into my apartment, I had given Dorian the power to destroy me, and I had done it gladly. Willingly. I had handed him every piece of myself that mattered, and now those pieces were zip-tied to a chair in some windowless warehouse, bleeding.
I'd lost people before: Dad to the fire, men in my unit to IEDs, and I thought I lost Farid. But I had never understood—could never have understood—the difference between losing someone important and losing the person who had become the other half of me.
When Dad died, I grieved for what was taken. When Farid died in my arms, I grieved for what I couldn't save.
But if Dorian died, I would grieve for what I had chosen to become—a man who depended on someone else to be whole.
Sweat gathered along my hairline despite the building's late fall chill. The stairwell's concrete walls seemed to be contracting, pressing closer against me.
Get your shit together.
Combat breathing. Four counts in through the nose, hold for four, out through the mouth for four. Repeat until the world stops tilting sideways. The technique had carried me through mortar attacks and IED aftermath.
Four in. Hold. Four out.
The stairwell stabilized around me. My heartbeat decelerated from sprint to sustainable. The sweat cooled against my skin.
Every nightmare scenario raced through my mind as I composed myself: Hoyle's people torturing Dorian to death for information he didn't possess, Federal agents arriving to find two corpses instead of a successful rescue, and Ma getting a phone call in the middle of the night, her voice breaking as someone explained why neither her son nor the man he loved would be coming home.
Yet, beneath the horror, something else emerged. Clarity. Purpose. The same certainty that had driven me toward burning buildings and overturned vehicles throughout my career.
I'd rather die beside him than live not knowing I tried.
I could survive losing Dorian if I'd given everything to save him. I couldn't survive spending the rest of my life wondering what might have happened if I'd been braver and faster.
Death was nothing compared to that particular brand of regret.
I released the handrail and continued toward the exit. Each step carried me further from safety and closer to whatever waited in the Federal Building. My heartbeat was steady now, controlled. The panic had burned itself out, leaving behind something harder and more useful.
The lobby's glass doors reflected my image as I approached. No one would guess I carried enough firepower to start a war or enough evidence to end one. I looked ordinary, unremarkable.
Perfect.
I pushed into the autumn air, where my truck waited beneath a flickering streetlight. The engine turned over on the first attempt, settling into the reliable rumble that had carried me through three years of emergency calls.
"Ma…" I said aloud. "If this goes bad… I'm sorry. I found someone who made me want to stay. Someone who made me more than a job. And if I don't come back… just know I didn't run."
