There was no saving the hospital. Anatoly Nguyen’s demolition skills had begun the building’s collapse from the ground up. Nguyen had timed the location of the explosions on purpose to allow for escape. Most of the patients had been evacuated in time, and Nina knew what that meant. He might still go to prison because of what he’d done, even though it had been forced upon him by Jordie Dev, but something inside Nguyen had resisted long enough to do his best to make sure everyone had least had a chance. The way she’d resisted hurting Ewan as much as she could have.

Jordie hadn’t made it out alive, or least his body had not yet been recovered. Nina had seen enough terror viddies to know what that meant. He could turn up at any time, twice as evil.

Nina had made sure Ewan got set up with oxygen, fluids, and whatever else the EMTs were doing with him in the back of one of the ambulances in the parking lot. Of her fellow soldiers, so far only Anatoly and Haven had shown up. Both had been discovered in the parking lot in the throes of battling each other. Presumably to the death, although Nina wasn’t sure anyone else knew that. They’d been taken into protective custody—not by local or even federal cops but by NorthAm soldiers. They’d also taken Nina, and she hadn’t fought against them. The truth was going to shake out soon about what roles, exactly, they’d all played.

It was what Jordie had wanted. To first make them ruin as much as they could before pitting them against each other until every single remaining enhanced soldier was dead. It would be a long time before any of them recovered from this, but they would, Nina thought. She would, anyway.

Sitting in the back of an armored transpo, Nina weighed her aches, pains, and wounds against the effort of complaining. For now, she was tired enough that simply leaning back against the seats and closing her eyes was the most effort she could make. When the door opened, it startled her enough to put her into a defensive position that she fully expected to be taken as a threat by whatever soldier was outside.

It was Al. Behind her, Ewan. Both of them smudged with smoke, looking exhausted. Nina wanted to weep at the sight of her friend, safe, and her . . . well, she had to call him her former lover, didn’t she? Because who knew what they were to each other now, or what they would ever be to each other again.

“Get out,” Al said without preamble. “Bank Account here got you sprung.”

Nina hesitated. “What about the others?”

“They’re being taken to another hospital to be treated, but they’re not going be released,” Ewan said.

“And I am?”

Al was already reaching for Nina’s hand to help her out of the vehicle. “They’re not engaged to Ewan Donahue.”

“I’m not engaged to Ewan Donahue,” Nina countered as she stepped out with a grimace and a sigh at how stiff and sore her entire body had become.

“You were,” Ewan said quietly and took her other arm to help Al keep Nina steady.

Nina held firm to keep them both from tugging her along. She was capable of walking on her own, even if every step was agony. “I shouldn’t be treated any differently than Haven and Anatoly. And what about the others? What about you, Al?”

“I didn’t even get the final surgery,” Al said. “At the last minute, that little prick pulled the approval. I wasn’t one of you. But they found Jewel. She’s hurt worse than you all. They’ve already flown her somewhere for surgery. Not sure she’ll make it.” Al shrugged.

“They destroyed the hospital. People died,” Ewan said. “You didn’t have anything to do with that.”

“Nobody else knows that.”

Ewan shook his head. “I know it, and I spoke for you.”

“And because you have money and influence, they just believe you? If there’s going to be a trial, I should be on it, too,” Nina told him. “Nobody knows that I didn’t go along with what Jordie wanted. As far as anyone can tell, I’m as guilty as the others.”

“Except you aren’t,” Ewan said. “You didn’t have anything to do with destroying the hospital. You didn’t kill anyone.”

“I killed Jordie,” Nina said.

Al’s expression twisted. “Nobody is sure he’s even dead. Let your boyfriend take you home, Nina. Let him pay for private docs to fix you up. Let him keep you safe.”

Nina shook her head. She wasn’t thinking clearly, she knew that. Still, she balked as they tried to urge her toward a transpo she recognized as Ewan’s private vehicle.

“I might have killed you, Ewan,” she said.

He shook his head. “But you didn’t. You can’t be held accountable for what you might have done.”

“According to you, I shouldn’t even be held accountable for what I did do.”

Ewan said nothing. Al rolled her eyes and looked pissed, but she didn’t say anything. Nina shook her head.

“I can’t go with you,” she said. “Not right now. I need time and space to think. I’m going to be questioned about what happened. I need to be questioned, Ewan. I need some room to get it all out of my head. I’m sorry.”

“They’ll arrest you,” Al said. “You could go to jail for a long time while this gets worked out. Even if eventually you go free, that’s a helluva price to pay for something you had no choice in.”

Nina nodded. “I know.”

Al made a low, derisive noise and tossed up her hands. “I’m out. This whole business is a clusterfuck of epic proportions. Donahue, you know where to find me.”

Al spun on her heel and headed off across the parking lot. Nobody stopped her. Nina watched her walk away for a long minute before turning to look at Ewan.

Ewan’s expression had gone neutral, his voice carefully bland. “You’d rather face prison than go with me?”

“You can’t buy your way out of everything that happens,” Nina said. “You can’t buy my love or my loyalty, either. Whatever is going to happen to me because of this is something I need to face.”

“You didn’t do anything wrong!”

“If you buy me out of trouble, I’ll spend the rest of my life trying to prove that I didn’t,” she said. Her head ached, but her heart hurt more. “Ewan . . . I love you. If you love me, you’ll give me some room to figure all of this out.”

Ewan nodded and took a few steps away from her. His stoic expression crumpled as he turned from her. He didn’t look back as he said, “Fine. Go. Just remember that when you need me, I’m here.”

She knew he would be. Nina watched him stalk away from her toward his private transpo. Ewan walked as though he’d been stabbed in the guts. Based on her own emotions right now, that was probably how he felt.

“Hey, you! What are you doing?” The NorthAm soldier who’d stuck her in the armored transpo had come up behind her.

Nina simply put her hands up. “Nothing.”

“Get back in there until we figure out what in the void is going on.”

She nodded, making no protest but a groan at the way it hurt to climb into the vehicle. The door closed behind her. She looked out the window and waited to find out what was going to happen to her.

* * *

Katrina Dev was dead. Her son was also presumed to be dead, although his body had never been found. Ewan couldn’t bring himself to mourn either one of them, especially since they’d left behind a mess of tangled legal issues surrounding the updates Jordie had programmed under his mother’s auspices. Fortunately, Ewan’s own team had managed to write code for programming that was going to work, long-term, for the remaining enhanced, and it didn’t rely on anything Jordie had done, so there was no legal reason it couldn’t be used.

Ewan had thrown himself into work. He’d been out of programming and tech for a long number of years, but now he found himself drawn back to it, if for no other reason than he already had more money than he could reasonably spend, and the making of money had never been what interested him.

He wanted to help people.

Oh, Ewan knew how the viddy stories talked about him. The Benevolent Billionaire. Spending his credits on developing products designed not to make him more money, but to benefit the underprivileged, downtrodden, destitute. He’d been involved with charities for a long time, but now every report on him seemed to focus on all his good deeds.

None of it was going to bring Nina back to him, but he wasn’t doing any of it to impress her. He was doing all of this to make a difference in the world. And Nina, the love of his life? Well, she would come back to him, or she would not, and the only thing Ewan could do about that was to be ready for when she did.

He hadn’t thought much to himself about how long it would take him to accept that she wasn’t going to. He’d already been in the places where he believed they were over. Now, it was enough to go day by day, intent on working toward the greater good. There was the chance that one day he would wake up and years would have passed and Nina would not have returned. Until that time, though, Ewan was going to keep on moving forward.

He wasn’t going to give up hope.

* * *

It would have been close to impossible for Nina to keep herself from seeing him. Ewan was in all the newscasts. On all the gossip reports. He was once again a golden child of the media, and unless Nina had hidden herself away from the world entirely, she was going to have to face the sight of Ewan Donahue somewhere, somehow, sometime.

There were still and would always be missing pieces of Nina’s mind. Unfortunately, no matter how much she tried, Nina had been unable to forget about him. Not for the past three months, not for a week, a day, not even a minute.

The programming Jordie Dev had corrupted for his own insane desires had been torn apart so Ewan’s team could make it right. The remaining enhanced had been cleared of all criminal charges because of Jordie’s manipulation. Nina had experienced the way public view could turn, but so far, it was widely accepted that they’d been victims, not perpetrators.

Nina didn’t like being seen as a victim. She’d refused all the viddy interviews and the multitude of offers to become a spokesperson for a number of charities as well as the use of her likeness to endorse a wild variety of products, everything from shampoo to shoes. She didn’t need the money. She didn’t want the attention. She wanted to be left alone, to rest and heal.

Ewan had left her alone.

She’d told him she wanted room and space and time, and he’d provided it in abundance. He’d also given her far more than that. Nina had accepted the fresh sum of funds in her bank balance, realizing that to argue with him about it would achieve nothing, and at least this way, she didn’t need to worry about finding work. Not for now. Really, not ever. Even after she’d donated an enormous sum to help the families of those who’d been killed in the hospital destruction, Nina had enough to live on for as long as she needed.

He had not done it to control her. She might have thought that in an earlier time, but now Nina knew Ewan only wanted to protect and take care of her. So she spent the money as she saw fit, and she gleaned the media for sight of him even though she could not bring herself to pick up her personal comm and ping him. Instead, she tortured herself by watching every viddy report, reading every gossip story. She scanned the media for any signs of him out on the town with another woman, telling herself she would not blame him for dating and knowing that she would.

So far, all the stories about Ewan featured him solo, and most were focused on his work, not his personal life. He and his team had gone back to the origins of the tech. The original tech that was meant to help people with dementia had been taken and twisted, but Ewan had been successful in pushing forward new tech that was making medical breakthroughs for the same problems he’d first wanted to solve. Because of everything that had happened and the legislation he’d pushed through, the government would be unable to force him to give it up for use in the military—all the new tech was going for civilian use only, and most of it would be free to qualifying patients, courtesy of Donahue Enterprises.

Nina was proud of him.

She didn’t have the right to be. She’d had nothing to do with what he and his team had accomplished. Nina also didn’t have the right to be jealous of Ewan’s life without her, because she’d made this choice. She’d left him on the island, she’d done it again in that hospital parking lot, and if she was going to be brutally honest with herself, she’d also done it a few times before that. She’d left him, over and over, each time because she felt as though she had to. Every time she had returned, the next time she ended their relationship had been worse.

If you left someone again and again, how could that be called love?

Just remember that when you need me, I’m here.

She believed him without a doubt. She went to sleep every night with his face in her mind; she woke every morning thinking of his voice. Yet so far, she’d been unable to bring herself to reach out to him, and the more time that passed, the more convinced Nina was becoming that she was never going to see him again.

“It’s called closure,” Al said to her now as she tipped the bottle of wine to refill both their glasses.

Nina rolled her eyes. “Closure. Uh-huh.”

“Yeah. You know. Where you confront your feelings and then talk to him about them, maybe get an apology or something.”

“He already said he was sorry a lot of times,” Nina said.

“You didn’t accept his apology?”

Nina shook her head. “It’s not about accepting the apology. It’s about being able to move past everything, to face the future together. It’s not about believing that he’s sorry, or even saying the same, myself. It’s about believing that neither one of us is going to keep making the same mistakes and causing the same hurts again and again.”

“And you don’t think you’ll both change? Or haven’t already?” Al sliced into a thick slab of beef and tucked it into her mouth with a sigh of contentment.

Nina had ordered the catered meal to her apartment, the best of everything Ewan’s money could buy, but although the food smelled good, she was weirdly not hungry. She had been without an appetite since the moment she’d watched Ewan walking away from her.

Al noticed. She pointed her fork at Nina’s plate. “If you’re not going to eat that, I will. The question, though, is why aren’t you going to eat it?”

Nina shrugged and debated pushing the plate across the table. She did, after a moment. Even if Al ate Nina’s meal, there was always more.

“I don’t need to, I guess. I haven’t been as active lately. I’m turning into a couch spud.”

“I hear that. I haven’t had my psych clearance yet, which means I can’t take any new jobs. Honestly, I figured I was done with all that, at least until they told me I wasn’t allowed to do it anymore. Have you thought about going back to work?” Al patted her flat belly lightly.

“For ProtectCorps?” The question startled Nina. “No.”

“Did Leona call you?”

“Yes, a bunch of times, but she hasn’t asked me to come back to work. She just wanted to check in with me.” Nina paused, then added, “It took me a few minutes to remember who she was, the first time. I didn’t tell her that, though.”

Al laughed and took another bite of meat. She chased it with some wine and sat back in the chair to study Nina. Her expression softened.

“How is all that?”

“It’s fine. Once the memories started coming back, they kept coming back. There will always be things I don’t remember, but that’s probably not a bad thing. I’m not having the blank-outs anymore. That’s what counts, in the long run.”

Nina sipped her wine and forced herself to reach over to the plate she’d given up to Al. She cut into the thick slab of meat on her plate and took a bite. Tasteless. Nauseating. She stopped herself from spitting into the napkin, but only barely.

“And your sister?” Al pulled Nina’s plate toward her with a pointed look.

“The only reason she’s not in prison is because I pled on her behalf. She has kids,” Nina said in response to Al’s disgruntled expression.

Al shook her head and gave Nina a sour look. “You forgave the woman who got your ass kidnapped by a bunch of lunatics determined to rip your head apart, yet here you are drinking wine with me on a Saturday night, instead of snuggled up somewhere sexy with your hot boss.”

“He’s not my boss anymore.” Nina laughed, but ruefully.

“All the more reason for you to work this stuff out.” Al leaned back in her chair and pushed the plate away from her with a sigh that said she wanted to eat more. “Listen. If you’re not going to get back together with him, you still need closure. It’s the only way you’ll be able to move on.”

Nina rolled her eyes. “Al, c’mon. Since when did you get so philosophical?”

“In my old age.” Al grinned and buffed her short nails against her shirt front before digging back into the food. She spoke around a mouthful. “But I’m serious.”

The idea of seeing Ewan again, in person and not on a viddy screen, pushed waves of tingling anxiety through her. Al’s enhancements would let her sense Nina’s stress, probably. There wasn’t anything Nina could do about it.

“It’s been months. Not a word from him in all that time.”

“Sounds like he’s being respectful of your wishes. I mean,” Al paused to give Nina a look, “did you want him to chase you? I didn’t think you were the sort of woman to play games like that.”

“I didn’t want him to chase me,” Nina said flatly. “I guess maybe I just didn’t want him to give me up so easily.”

“I hate to break the news to you, lady, but you can’t really have it both ways.” Al finished what was on her plate and moved to Nina’s to chomp another piece of beef.

Al was right, but that didn’t stop Nina from frowning. “Remind me again why I’m taking relationship advice from you?”

“Because I’ll give it to you straight? I mean as straight as I can get, which we both know is generally not the term anyone who’s met me would use to describe me,” Al said with a grin. She sat back again with a sigh, this time to raise her glass. She eyed Nina. “He loves you, Nina. And you love him. I’ve never been much for that romance business myself, but you two almost make me believe it could work.”

“There’s so much between us. I’m not sure we can ever get past it. Maybe Ewan and I aren’t meant to be together.”

“Love doesn’t just stop because you want it to, Nina.”

Nina shuddered and closed her eyes, embarrassed to weep in front of Al but unable to stop herself from giving in to the flood of emotions. She pressed her fingertips to her eyes hard enough to cause bursts of color. “I used to want this so desperately, you know? To feel again. To remember things. And now that I can, Al, it all hurts so damned much.”

“Would you want to go back to the way it was before?” Al’s quiet words helped push away Nina’s tears.

She opened her eyes. “No.”

“Do you regret meeting him?”

“No,” Nina said after a hesitation.

“Do you wish you’d never loved him?”

Nina had felt that way, but not anymore. “No.”

“Far be it from me to tell you what to do with your life, but if you don’t just freaking go see him, I’m going to have to kick your ass.”

Nina blinked. Al sounded serious. Looked serious, too.

“I will fight you,” Al continued. “Rough you up. Knock some sense into you.”

Nina laughed. “Yeah? You want to go a round with me?”

“I could take you.” Al gave a small smile.

Impulsively, Nina reached across the table to take her friend’s hand. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.” Al squeezed Nina’s fingers. “Now, what about dessert?”