Page 28 of The Maverick

The words hung between them longer than they should have.

‘You walked.’

Vanessa stared at him, stomach twisted, throat dry. She’d spent years building a version of the truth that painted her departure as inevitable. He remained intensely focused on his mission. Too rigid. Too impossible to need without losing herself.

But now, sitting in the quiet of his kitchen, plates still warm from breakfast and his eyes steady on hers, that version cracked.

“You thought I left you?” she asked, voice rough.

“I didn’t think,” he said. “You did.”

She blinked. “I left because you stopped showing up.”

“No,” he said calmly. “You left after one fight. One awful week. You didn’t ask me to stay. You didn’t ask if I was coming back. You just packed up, wrote your goodbye in an email, and disappeared.”

She opened her mouth, but no words came. The memory was too clear. The call he didn’t return. The message he didn’t answer. Her heart had been already cracking, and she’d told herself if he would not fight for her, she’d fight for herself.

But now—hearing it in his voice, quiet and steady, no anger behind it—it didn’t feel like justification anymore. It felt like regret.

“I didn’t think you wanted me to,” she said.

He arched a brow. “You didn’t ask.”

She looked away. That was the problem, wasn’t it? She didn’t ask. She didn’t risk the answer.

“I thought needing you made me weak.”

His hand came down on the table between them, palm flat, strong.

“Needing me makes you human,” he said. “Letting me stand between you and danger doesn’t mean you’re incapable. It means you’re not alone.”

Her breath caught. Not because the words were poetic, but because they were so damn simple. No games. No grand declarations. Just fact.

She wasn’t sure what she would have said next, if the knock hadn’t come.

Not a knock, exactly. More like a soft impact, too light to echo, too deliberate to ignore. Her gaze darted to the front door. Hawke’s did too.

He stood without a word. Vanessa followed him to the entryway, barefoot and silent. He gave her one look—stay there—and opened the door.

There, resting dead center on the welcome mat, was a pale gray envelope. No stamp. No name. No marking except the clean, narrow script printed across the front:

Vanessa.

She stepped forward, but Hawke blocked her with one arm.

“Don’t go through the door, and don’t touch it,” he said, voice clipped.

“I wasn’t going to?—”

He snorted. “You were.”

Fair. She’d already moved halfway into his space without realizing it.

He crouched, eyes scanning the porch, the railings, the space beyond the columns. His perimeter alarms hadn’t gone off. She knew because he checked them every hour. The cameras hadn’t pinged—there would’ve been a silent alert to his phone. That meant someone had made it past both systems without detection.

“How?” she whispered.

His eyes scanned the tree line. “Either they found a blind spot… or they know how I think.”

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