.

The room is milky with shadow when Karen blinks her eyes open, just light enough for her to trace the outline of Frank next to her. He must have kicked off the blankets sometime in the night—her gaze tracks the gentle slope of his chest, then drifts lower. He’s wearing boxers, but the rest of him is bare.

Karen tugs the comforter around her. Winter is still weeks away, but she can already feel it settling into the bones of her poorly-insulated apartment, leaking up through the floorboards and the worn weather stripping beneath her door. The cold reminds her of Vermont, dredges up old, brittle memories, but Frank sleeps better in it. She suspects he dreads the heat the same way she does the cold—it exhumes all the ugliness he’d rather leave buried, Afghanistan and Kandahar. Sand and blood.

That’s the only reason she hasn’t cranked the furnace. Instead, she’d pulled all her spare blankets from the closet last week and relocated them to the bed.

You cold? Frank had teased, the glint in his eyes turning molten when she replied, Why, you want to warm me up?

As it turns out, he did.

.

She’s late.

Frank’s eyes dart to his phone. Screen’s dark, same as it was when he glanced at it a minute ago. No missed calls, no texts. He swigs his coffee, more to swallow down the muted panic in his throat than anything else.

“Fresh cup for your friend, honey?”

Frank looks up. The waitress—Jo, her name tag reads—is nodding at the mug of coffee he ordered for Karen when he got here.

His eyes linger on it a moment before he shakes his head. “I’m good, ma’am. She’s, uh—she’s on her way.”

Frank must look as keyed-up as he feels, because Jo offers him a gentle smile. “You got it,” she says. “Just holler when she gets here, okay?”

Then she’s walking off. Probably assumes he got stood up by a date, and hell—he almost wishes that’s what this was. At least he could shrug that off, carry on with his day instead of sitting across from an empty booth, chest slowly going tight with dread.

Frank pushes back from the table, forces himself to breathe. Maybe something came up at work—a deadline got pushed up or a source backed out last-minute and Ellison’s got her holed up at the office doing damage control—

His hand twitches for his phone. They’ve been meeting for lunch pretty regularly for the past month or so, but Karen always shoots him a text the day before to confirm. He scans her last message in their thread—Tomorrow still good? Same place as last week?—and something in his chest twinges. Maybe it’s an occupational hazard, or maybe it’s just her way of making sure he won’t bail—either way, Frank can’t blame her. He’s far from atoning for the way he left things that day at the hospital. It’s a small miracle she let him back into her life at all.

Frank’s eyes flick to the time at the top of the screen. It’s going on twenty past the hour. Hell with it—maybe he’s being paranoid, but his gut says something’s off. He hits the call button next to her name.

It goes straight to voicemail.

.

The next time she sees him, he’s bleeding.

Okay, maybe not actively, but the jagged line of stitches etched above his ear looks like it’s seconds away from ripping open. Beth takes in the nasty bruise blooming along his jawline, the cut splitting his bottom lip.

“Um,” she says.

Rio smirks. “What’s up?”

“I—” she sputters, because he’s just standing there with that stupid, smug expression, like it’s the most normal thing in the world to drop by the showroom after hours looking like—that. “You—what happened?”

“Not your division, darlin’.”

He says it lightly enough, but Beth reads the undercurrent of warning in his voice like a neon sign. He wants her to drop it.

Well. She’s not feeling very incentivized to give him what he wants at the moment.