She watched the Explorers drive off with the precious cargo, standing on the front porch of Stevenson’s small ranch house.

Rage curled around her heart. The promise for violence beat like a drum in her blood.

She was furious. And patient. She would wait. Then she would turn his home into the most dangerous place he would ever walk into. Like he had done to his own children.

“Sawyer, come inside,” Elijah called to her from the living room. She turned and walked through the front door. They left the door on the floor, broken off its hinges. A sign. Something he would want to investigate. He wouldn’t be able to resist coming inside to find out what had happened.

“Anything to drink in here?” she asked, watching Elijah go through his bag. He pulled out a couple sets of handcuffs, backups to the set he carried on his belt.

“Check the kitchen?” Elijah answered, frowning at her. “And here. You aren’t legally allowed to do this, but I trust you not to put them on me and run.” He tossed something at her, and she caught it without a thought. The cool metal was noticeable. She looked down to her hand to see her own set of handcuffs to carry.

“Thanks,” she mumbled, hanging them from her belt. She stepped into the kitchen and found a glass, filled it with water, and took a couple swallows.

They stood in silence for a moment until Elijah frowned at her again.

“Why me? I would have been better with the children than someone like Vincent or Zander.”

“Because you also have a bone to pick with Stevenson,” Sawyer answered him, giving him a cruel smile. She wasn’t feeling very nice. She chose him, hoping he wouldn’t try to hold her back. Zander, for all his rage and temper, needed to stay with the children to heal them. She wouldn’t need a healer for this. Not unless she busted open a knuckle on Stevenson’s face.

“Ah.” Elijah sighed.

“Yup,” Sawyer huffed, still smiling as she took another drink. She gave him a small toast in silence. “I needed someone to stay, so I chose you. Let’s hope you hate this guy as much as I now do. Because he’ll be leaving to go to a hospital when I’m done. If he’s not in a body bag.”

“I understand,” Elijah said calmly.

“Can you?” she said and purred dangerously. Elijah had no idea what she was feeling, none.

“I have a bone to pick with the sheriff because he knows who I am,” Elijah told her mildly. “He knows why I can’t and won’t go home.”

“And why’s that, Cowboy?”

“Because I put four guys in critical condition by setting their houses on fire after they killed my boyfriend when I was seventeen. They had beaten him to death, so I nearly killed them.”

Sawyer coughed out the water she was in the middle of swallowing. She kept coughing as she nearly dropped the glass onto the counter. A couple thumps to her back meant Elijah must have realized he shocked the shit out of her.

“They weren’t Magi. No charges were pressed against me out here in the middle of nowhere. Local law enforcement wasn’t going to fuck with me,” Elijah continued, sounding serene. “So, yes, Sawyer. I do understand. Better than you think.”

“Who?” she choked out, hitting her own chest with a fist as she tried to clear the water.

“I told you my dad kicked me out for sleeping with a guy? Him. His name was Taylor. He was non-Magi, too, like his killers. The local law enforcement didn’t want to press charges, so I took it into my own hands.”

She looked up at him. She was beginning to realize she knew very little about the cowboy, the jolly giant with a constant hard-on.

“Do what you need to do, Sawyer.” Elijah sighed, looking down at her. “I’m not going to stop you. I do need to put handcuffs on him though, so don’t break his arms into angles I can’t manage.”

“Jesus, Elijah,” she mumbled a bit airily as her lungs stopped hurting. “Why haven’t you ever told me this?”

“I don’t like to talk about it,” Elijah said, shrugging. “There are deep prejudices out here. This kind of stuff… it happens. I grew up in it.”

“Yeah…” Sawyer said slowly, leaning against the kitchen counter. She figured they could be waiting for hours, so she watched Elijah pick up her glass and refill it. Then she decided to start questioning him. “How do you keep going on so happily? I mean, I can put one foot in front of the other but… I’m not always happy like you.”

“I wasn’t, when it happened,” Elijah informed her, not looking her way. “Then I met Vincent in training and realized that everyone has something wrong with them, something they would rather hide, bury, or forget holding them down. He was a Castello trying to get on the right side of the law. I was a big burly kid who was cast aside by my community, ridiculed, and had lost something important to me. We both went to the IMPO looking to change the world for the better from vastly different backgrounds. Maybe in this job, we could change the way things worked, so no one else had it happen to them.”

“And that made you happier?”

“No, but in time, I realized I couldn’t bring him back. I couldn’t come out here and raise the dead. And I found happiness elsewhere. The team. My friendships with them. My pride in the work I do, in the field or in my workshop.”

“Do you regret it?” She continued asking him questions, hoping to get deeper inside his head.

“Not for a damn minute,” Elijah growled. Sawyer saw the fire light in his eyes.

He really did understand, she realized.

“That’s one difference between me and you, Sawyer,” Elijah finally said. “I don’t regret it. Any of it.”

“Excuse me?” Sawyer snorted. “I don’t regret anything-”

“You regret every minute of everything you ever did as Shadow,” Elijah cut her off. “It’s in the slump of your shoulders, as if you’re weighed down by the guilt. It’s in the hard set of your jaw, as if you’re waiting for another blow to land.” She winced. He was right. “And you shouldn’t.”

“Yes, I should,” Sawyer snapped, not missing that last part. “I killed people, Elijah. Brutally.”

“And just like this, you did it for someone else,” Elijah whispered. “What’s so different between what’s happening here, or in New York, and what you did for Axel?”

Sawyer glared at him. Everything was different. She was helping a mad man ascend to become one of the wealthiest and dangerous criminal masterminds on the planet. Here and in New York, it was simple. She chased away the bad guy, not helped him.

“Axel wasn’t some victim-”

“Henry and Midnight were,” Elijah snapped back at her. Sawyer seethed. He did not just go there with her.

“Don’t even begin to think you kn-”

“You didn’t do it for Axel, so stop holding that title and beating yourself up for it. You know you didn’t do it for him.” Elijah pressed, stepping back into her space. “You weren’t Axel’s Shadow. You were Henry’s and Midnight’s. And while you never killed Axel himself, you killed others, just to protect him and your animal bond. That’s who you are, Sawyer, and you shouldn’t regret that. You shouldn’t feel guilty about it or ashamed of it. If anything, we should all be looking up to you like a goddamn hero, willing to go to the darkest of places to do good.”

Her chest hurt, and she rubbed the scar on her chest with her right hand. She closed her eyes for a moment. He was saying something she’d heard before. Charlie tried to say it to her, several times. But she hadn’t believed it. She was a monster and all she could do was hope to be good, try to be better. She would strive for that, as she had for the last four years.

“If Vincent and I are good enough for the IMPO, then you are, too,” Elijah hissed out, getting closer to her. “Sawyer, stop feeling guilty.”

“I am guilty,” Sawyer mumbled.

“The only thing you’re guilty of is having too big a heart,” Elijah growled softly. Sawyer realized he was suddenly much closer. She opened her eyes and found those hazel ones looking down into hers. She was backed up into the counter and Elijah’s hands stretched to the countertop on either side of her. “A heart that’s willing to kill for love. A heart willing to take the damage so others don’t need to.”

“Let’s not get into talking about my heart.” Sawyer growled. “It causes enough problems.”

“Doesn’t it?” Elijah chuckled. “You seem to give away pieces of it like candy on Halloween. Charlie, the kids in New York, the kids here, Zander, Jasper, and Vincent. I’m certain you’ve even thrown a piece at Quinn, doing what you did for him. But, this guilt that rides you… Sawyer, you don’t think you deserve love back, do you? You throw away your heart on a whim to others, but… you don’t want a piece of theirs back, do you?”

Sawyer let the question go unanswered as Elijah’s eyes searched her face. The answer was clear.

She didn’t.

Sawyer didn’t want others to love her. She didn’t deserve them. She wasn’t good enough for Jasper and, in turn, Zander. Those two would always come as pair, she knew it. She wasn’t even good enough to be a night of pleasure and memories, and ghosts for Vincent, considering she had tried to kill him afterwards. She didn’t deserve the friend that Elijah was, the one who always saw the good, who took people in no matter what was wrong with them or how the world judged them.

She didn’t want to break their hearts. She didn’t want to hurt them. She didn’t want to fail them like she had Henry. She couldn’t take another failure like that. She couldn’t take the love of someone else and fail them again.

“You do deserve it,” Elijah whispered, and Sawyer watched him lean down further. Another inch, and their lips would touch. She should shove him away. She didn’t want to, though. “Why did you feel so adamant about helping Quinn?”

“Because I knew I could,” Sawyer answered with a half-truth.

“Because you want to earn it,” Elijah corrected her. “You want to do anything you can that’s good, so you can one day feel like you earned this or someone’s love.”

“Yes,” Sawyer snapped. Damn him. “You’re right, Elijah. Is that what you want to hear? I’ll go out of my way to do good things, so I can feel, even for a moment, that I deserve what I have. Any of it.” She pushed him away. He wanted to call her back, so she was going to give him what he wanted. The truth. “You all went against the fucking WMC to keep me out of prison, even just fucking alive. Why? I haven’t done anything for you all to earn that. You’ve put me in your debt, and before I’ve had a chance to try and earn it here, doing the job, half of you are trying to convince me to give relationships a chance.”

“Sawyer,” Elijah tried to keep talking, holding a hand up to quiet her, but she waved her own hand at him to shut him up.

“So, yeah. I learned Quinn was having a hard time with learning how to read, and I decided, right then and there, that I could do something truly good for him. For all of you. Something that has nothing to do with violence, and blood, or criminal activities. Something good I could give him.” Sawyer began to rant. “Because, maybe if I do that enough, I’ll go to sleep at night thinking I deserve this. This chance at a better future. Your friendship. Jasper and Zander’s love. Vincent’s…” She began to shake her head and closed her eyes, thinking about it.

Vincent’s love. When had he gotten on her list of men she knew she cared for? The moment she got possessive that night in bed? The moment he admitted to her that he knew what it meant to be used by Axel to kill for him?

“And I even screwed up trying to do something good for Vincent,” she said weakly, thinking about it. “I tried to give him a piece of his nephew and ended up screwing him. I nearly fucking killed him, Elijah. I tried to. I don’t… I don’t deserve him. Or Jasper, who’s too good for this world. Or Zander, who’s never let anything hold him back, always ready to charge into the thick of it, regardless of the consequences. I don’t deserve the steadfast friendship you’ve given me.”

“And Quinn?” he asked softly.

“Quinn. I think he’s the one of you I’m perfectly fine with.” Sawyer chuckled softly.

“You’re perfectly fine with me,” Elijah reminded her, getting back in her space. She watched something like indecision pass over his face. “As for the guys? Sawyer, things take time, but you deserve them. You deserve all of it. You never needed to do anything to prove yourself to us. We already know how much good is in you. The bad things you’ve done for all the right reasons? We know. There’s nothing to be ashamed of, nothing to work back from. You aren’t in a deficit of some sort to us. There are only two things holding your past against you. The WMC and you. Those are the eyes you need redemption in, not ours. Not the team’s.”

She didn’t say anything, swallowing another lump in her throat. She felt a hand touch her cheek. Elijah kissed her forehead gently.

She wasn’t in a deficit with them. She took Elijah’s words and held them close to her heart. They didn’t hold it against her. Why could she trust those words from Elijah more than anyone else? Was it his easy-going Southern nature? She didn’t know, but from him, those words meant so much.

“No one holds my past against me. We don’t hold Vincent’s past against him. We judge on the here and now. Sawyer, you’re doing fine,” Elijah mumbled gently to her. “I’m sorry if we’ve ever given the impression that that’s not the case. Let me know if I do it again, or anyone else. I’ll knock fucking heads around.”

“You could just give me permission to knock heads around,” Sawyer chuckled, feeling lighter.

“Knock them around, then.” Elijah laughed, hugging her.

“Sweet,” Sawyer said childishly, pumping a fist.

“So, what’s your plan for this?” Elijah asked, letting her walk away. Sawyer turned and smiled at him.

“Make sure he knows it can never happen again,” Sawyer told him with that dangerous grin. “Remind him there are scarier monsters out there than he tried to be to his children.”

“Well, that much I figured,” Elijah said slowly with a nod. “I meant, what is your actual plan?”

Sawyer thought about that.

“He gets here, I kick the shit out of him, you arrest him, then we wait for the guys to get back.” Sawyer shrugged. It wasn’t that complicated.