Chapter 137 -
Dr. Vera had put Jordan in the room at the end of the lower east corridor: private, clean, and close to the medical supplies. He was awake when Nia knocked. Sitting up against the headboard, his shoulder wrapped tight, his face carrying the exhaustion of a person who had not slept despite being in a bed .He looked at her in the doorway.
"You don't have to be here," he said.
"I know," she said. "I wanted to come."
He didn't argue. She pulled the chair close to the bed and sat down. On the bedside table there was water, two small orange pill bottles, and a photograph she hadn't expected. Small, slightly creased at one corner. She could see enough of it from where she sat to know it was Alex.
Jordan followed her eyes to it.
"Dr. Vera let me keep it," he said. "She's a decent woman."
"She is indeed," Nia said.
They sat in the quiet of the room for a moment.
"You came to ask about him," Jordan said.
"I came to see how you were."
"I'm fine. My shoulder hurts, but I'll live." He looked at the photograph. "But yes. You came to ask about him."
"If you want to tell me," she said. "You don't have to."
Jordan was quiet for a moment, then he reached over and picked up the photograph and looked at it properly, the way someone looks at a thing they've memorized and are checking against the memory.
"We met three years ago," he said. "Before Santiago had him. Alex was working small collections for a local outfit, nothing serious, trying to keep money coming in because he'd lost his job and he was too proud to ask anyone for help. Not you, not his friends, nobody. He'd rather work for dangerous people than admit he was struggling."
He paused. "I was running a route for Santiago. We met at a pickup point. He said something stupid and I said something worse and somehow that turned into coffee and then into six months of coffee and then into something I didn't have a name for, because I'd never let anything get that far before. I wasn't built for it. I'd spent my whole adult life being useful to people who didn't ask questions, and Alex asked every question he could think of and then invented new ones."
Jordan looked at the window. "He made it impossible to keep the distance I was used to keeping."
"He never told me," Nia said.
"He didn't tell anyone," Jordan said.
"He was going to. He kept saying he was waiting for the right time. I used to tell him there was no right time, you just said things and let people react." He set the photograph back down. "Santiago recruited him eight months in. Told him it was short-term work, clean, good money. Alex thought it was a way to get us both clear of Pearlbot entirely. He was saving."
Jordan's jaw tightened.
"Santiago had him for a year before I knew what it actually was. And by then Alex was in too deep to leave without Santiago deciding he was a liability."
"Did he want to leave?" Nia said.
"Every single day," Jordan said. "He used to call me late at night and talk about the coastal town we were going to move to. He had the whole thing planned. The apartment, the neighborhood, whether we'd have a cat." He stopped. "He talked about you sometimes."
Nia went still.
"Not the way you might think," Jordan said quickly. "Not complicated. He was just guilty. He said you were a good person and you'd done nothing wrong and he'd ended it badly and he never explained properly and he thought about that. He said you deserved someone who showed up the way you always showed up for other people. He knew he hadn't been that person in a long time. The guilt about it sat on him."
Nia looked at her hands.
"I was angry at him," she said. "When I found out he was dead. Not sad at first but angry, which made me feel terrible."
"That's not terrible. That's honest," Jordan said. "He made choices that hurt people. He knew it. The last six months of his life he was mostly angry at himself. He asked Santiago once to let him walk away. Offered to disappear, keep quiet, never speak to anyone about any of it. Santiago said yes."
His voice flattened. "He said yes, and then he gave the order the same night."
"I'm sorry," Nia said. It felt inadequate and she said it anyway because the alternative was silence.
Jordan looked at her. "You don't have anything to be sorry for."
"I'm sorry he's gone," she said. "And I'm sorry you lost him that way. Without warning, without being able to say anything." She held his gaze. "That's a particular kind of terrible. I know what that particular kind is."
Something shifted in Jordan's face. Not quite breaking but close.
"I believe he liked you," Jordan said. "The real version of you. The one who shows up in warehouses and presses panic buttons." He almost smiled. "He had terrible taste in everything except people."
Nia looked at the photograph on the bedside table. Alex sat at some outdoor table somewhere, the way he had looked in the early months when she had thought that was just who he was.
"What will you do when you're recovered?"
"I don't know," Jordan said. "I gave Leo everything I had on Santiago's operation. Contacts, accounts, routes. I have nothing left to trade and I'm not sure what that makes me to this organization."
"Leo keeps his word," she said. "He told you you'd be protected. That stands."
"You trust that?"
"Yes," she said. "Completely."
Jordan looked at her for a moment.
"You've changed," he said. "From the woman on the phone two weeks ago."
"I know," she said.
"Is that a good thing?"
She thought about it honestly. About the garden that afternoon, and Leo's hand over hers, and the particular weight of choosing something with full information and nothing holding her in place.
"Yes," she said. "I suppose so."
Jordan nodded. He leaned his head back against the headboard and closed his eyes.
"Then go be that," he said. "I'll be fine."
She left him in the clean quiet room with the photograph on the bedside table and the winter light through the window.
In the corridor, she stood against the wall for a moment, holding everything the last hour had given her, the fuller shape of Alex, the parts that made him make more sense, the grief for a version of him she hadn't known existed.
She had loved him in the way of someone who didn't have the whole story. That wasn't her fault and it wasn't entirely his. He had been afraid and she had been patient and neither had been enough. That was simply what it was.
She took a deep breath, then she went to find Leo.