“Why didn’t you tell me?” he asked suddenly, his voice low. The question that had been hanging between them all day unspoken until now.
Her fingers tightened around the glass. “What would you have done if I had?”
Callum was silent for a long moment. “I would’ve killed them.”
“Exactly.” She turned to face him, meeting his eyes. “You would have gotten yourself put on that platform. And I couldn’t risk losing you too.”
“You were a child,” he said, the words catching in his throat. “Achild, Lira. And I was supposed to protect you. We all were supposed to protect you.”
“Protect me?” A harsh laugh escaped her. “That was never your job, Callum. That was my father’s duty. My mother’s duty. And they failed.”
His face twisted with something like guilt, and she realized he was blaming himself for not seeing, for not knowing. For not saving her from a horror that had occurred before they’d even become close.
“Don’t,” she said, her voice sharpening. “I don’t have the energy to console your male shame.” She paused then sighed, her tone softening slightly. “Don’t take on guilt that isn’t yours to carry. You have your own nightmares from surviving in this place.”
“I’m sorry,” he breathed. “All these years, I thought I was protecting you from the ugly realities of the Heart, from the violence and corruption. I thought you needed sheltering from the things I did, the choices I made.” His hands clenched into fists on his thighs. “And all along, you were the one protecting me.”
Lira set her glass down. “Is that why you kept me at a distance all these years? Why you never told me about your work for the rebellion? Because you thought I needed protection from the truth?”
“Yes,” he admitted after a pause. “That and . . . I didn’t want you to have to choose. Between me and your family. Between me and your duty to the Heart.”
She stared at him, anger flaring sudden and hot in her chest. “I thought I’d found a man I could trust,” she said, each word precise andcutting. “Someone who saw me as an equal, not just a Serel daughter to be used or protected. And now I learn that you’ve been hiding half your life from me, making decisions about what I could handle, what I should know.” She shook her head. “I’m angry, Callum. I’m fucking furious.”
“At me?” he asked, his eyes never leaving hers.
“At everyone,” she replied. “At the fucking world we live in.” Her voice hardened. “And yes, at you. For thinking I was too fragile to handle your truth.”
“I never thought you—” he started to protest, but she cut him off.
“Didn’t you?” She stood, moving away from him, needing space as the words poured out. “You’ve treated me like glass from the moment we met. Always so careful, so controlled around me. Never letting me see the man who was capable of torturing Marcus Webb this morning, who disposes of bodies without thinking twice.” She turned back to face him. “Did you think I’d run screaming? Did you think I was so naive to what you do in your clubs?”
Callum rose to his feet, his own anger beginning to show. “Do you think I wanted to hide my true self from you? That I enjoyed a second of it?” He stepped closer. “I was trying to give you one fucking corner of this city that wasn’t soaked in blood and betrayal, Lira. One relationship that wasn’t built on violence and fear.”
“So instead you built it on lies.” The words burst from her, louder than she’d intended. “I never wanted to be the precious, perfect thing you kept on a shelf, untouched by the dirt of your real life.”
“And I never wanted to be the man who added to your nightmares!” he shouted back, his control finally slipping. “Do you have any idea what it does to me, knowing what happened to you? Knowing I’ve spent years in this apartment with you, talking to you, wanting you, and never suspecting the pain you were carrying?”
The raw honesty in his voice stopped her. She stared at him, seeing the anguish in his eyes, the self loathing. They stood facing each other across the room, two people who had spent years circling a truth neither had been brave enough to name.
“I don’t care,” she said finally. “I don’t give a damn about the violence in your life, Callum. I don’t care what you’ve done, who you’ve hurt, how many men you’ve tortured or killed.”
She moved toward him, each step deliberate.
“I don’t care if Greyson would be angry, if my father would forbid it. I don’t care about any of it.” Her eyes never left his. “Because I love you. I have loved you for years, through every moment you thought you were protecting me, through every secret you kept, through every touch you held back because you thought it was for the better.”
Callum’s jaw clenched at her words, almost as if he couldn’t believe she was saying them. That she still felt the same way after all these years.
Lira had never stopped loving him. Not for a single second. Her heart, her body, hersoulhad ached for him. Had mourned for the love lost to a man that was too afraid to love her back.
She was close enough to touch him now, but she didn’t. Not yet. Not until she’d said everything she’s been waiting to voice for five years.
“I’m not some fragile, breakable thing. I don’t want to be touched like I might shatter at any moment,” she continued, the words flowing now. “I’m a woman in a system designed to grind us down into nothing, to strip us of our worth and dignity and rights. I’ve survived that system and it didn’t make me weak or submissive, it made meangry. So fucking angry that sometimes I can barely breathe through it.” She paused for only a breath and straightened her shoulders. “Women are the backbone, the foundation, the immovable force that still does not falter when men stand on our spines to grab power. So no, Callum, I am not fragile. The cracks in my soul aren’t broken places. They are veinscemented together with rage. And it will take more than the hands of men to kill my spirit, to break my will.”
She finally reached for him, her fingers curling around his wrist, feeling his pulse race beneath her touch. “I don’t need your protection. I need your honesty. I need your trust. I need all of you—the ruthless club owner, the kind man I know you to be, the rebel informant, all of it.”
The silence that followed felt electric, charged with a potential that had been building between them for years. Callum’s eyes traveled over her face as if seeing her for the first time—really seeing her, not the mask she wore for the Heart, not the girl that he needed to protect, but the woman who had survived and grown stronger in her scars.
Callum’s hand came up slowly, hesitantly, to cup her cheek. The touch was different now—not careful, not controlled, but honest in its vulnerability.
