“They also see the way you look at me,” I said, throat tight.
“I can’t promise them this is safe,” he said. “Because it isn’t. Not yet. Maybe not ever.”
“Levi,” I murmured.
He stepped closer, close enough that the heat of him pressed against the cold.
“I can’t promise them safety,” he repeated. “But I can promise you this—if you stay with me, I will spend every breath I have making sure whatever hits us hits me first. I will put my body, my name, my family’s resources between you and anything that tries to take you away. Not because I think you can’t handle yourself. But because I can’t handle a world where you’re not in it.”
The world narrowed to his face. His words. The faint scent of soap and woodsmoke on his jacket.
He took something out of his pocket and held it out between us.
For a second, I thought it was the compass. Then the starlight caught metal, and my brain finally caught up.
It was a ring.
Simple. Elegant. A thin band of gold with a single stone, not too big, set low and practical, like it was meant to survive the real world and not just photos.
My vision blurred.
“I bought this the day we ran into each other at the hotel,” he said. “Before the van. Before Victoria. Before Byron told us just how deep all this goes. I’ve been carrying it around like some kind of talisman while we put fires out. I’m done waiting for the perfect moment. There isn’t one. There’s just this. You. Me. A dangerous world and a cold lake and your parents pretending they’re not watching from the kitchen window.”
I made a small, helpless sound. I couldn’t help it. His voice, his face, the way his hand shook just slightly—it all crashed into me at once.
“Amelia Emerson,” he said, and my name in his mouth felt like a vow. “I love you. I love your brain and your stubbornness and the way you chase the truth even when it scares you. I love that you walked into my father’s war room and changed the entire conversation.”
I laughed, wet and shaky.
He took a breath.
“Marry me,” he said. “Be my home. Let me be yours. We’ll hunker down at Dominion Hall for as long as we have to, build our own place when we can, and fight whatever we have to fight in between. Just … do it with me.”
There it was.
The question I’d been circling.
Do you want this?
Not the fantasy version. Not the clean, easy one.
This. A man with blood on his hands and love in his eyes. A life built in the crosshairs. A family that came with yachts andwar rooms and people who’d go to war for each other. A job that now meant steering an entire newsroom through a minefield.
I thought of my parents inside, hands wrapped around coffee mugs. The worry in my mother’s eyes, the acceptance in my father’s. They were scared. They would always be a little scared.
I was, too.
But when I pictured my future, my mind didn’t go to award ceremonies or bylines. It went to Levi lying on some future sofa, half-asleep with a book on his chest. To him carrying groceries into a kitchen we chose together. To him sitting across from my parents at this same table ten years from now, arguing about hockey and politics and whose turn it was to do the dishes.
“Yes,” I whispered.
Relief crashed across his face so quickly it almost hurt to watch. The hard lines softened, his shoulders dropping like he’d been carrying a weight I couldn’t see.
“Yeah?” he said, a little hoarse. “That’s a yes?”
“Obviously it’s a yes,” I said, tears spilling over now. “Did you really think I got on a plane with you to bring you home just to friend-zone you on the shore of my childhood lake?”
He laughed—a real, rough, delighted sound—and picked up my left hand with careful, callused fingers. The ring slid on easily, like my body had been waiting for it without telling me.
