She holds my eyes. “And after that?” she asks.
“After that,” I say, “you do not leave easily. Not because I lock a door. Because once you are inside, leaving puts others in danger. You will know where women sleep. You will know which basement door sticks. You will know the name of a child whose father will spend the rest of his life trying to find her.” I do not soften it. “If you want easy, say no now.”
She doesn’t blink. People romanticize bravery as a leap. It looks more like a breath.
“Take me,” she says.
Heat moves under my sternum like a hand I didn’t put there. Desire is part of it. Pride is part. The knowledge that I am doing the thing I promised myself I would avoid doing—the thing where I make someone I want into someone I have to risk—is the part that keeps me from smiling.
“Tomorrow morning,” I say. “Eight. Coffee first. You won’t finish it.”
“Bossy,” she says, and the edge is back because we both need it.
“Prepared,” I say. “Bring your sketchbook. Not for them. For you.”
She reaches for the file. I put my hand on it a second time and do not move. “You do not take that out of this wing,” I say. “You want to read it, you read it here. You want to close it, you close it here. You lose it out there, and I answer to ghosts.”
Her fingers tighten. “I hate you when you talk like that,” she says.
“I built my voice for rooms where people die if you use the wrong tone,” I say. “You can hate the instrument. You don’t get to argue with the pitch.”
She lifts the file and hugs it to her chest anyway, eyes daring me to stop her. I let her. I am already breaking the rules for her in a hundred small ways, and the hypocrisy of pretending I’m not would make me less rather than more dangerous. “Ten minutes,” I say. “Wear something to cover your eyes. They know how to read trauma. They don’t know how to keep it from salting your sleep.”
She nods, and it is my turn to steady something in my body that wants to reach for her. She turns toward the door. She pauses at the glass and looks back.
“What happened last night,” she says, low, “in that room. That was my choice.” She waits until I hold her eyes—until I show her that I am listening, which is the only currency she values from me when I am not touching her. “It doesn’t buy you the right to name me in public again without asking. Not because I’m ashamed. Because if you put a word on me, I want to choose it with you.”
Something at the base of my skull unwinds one click. “Agreed,” I say. No spinning. No lawyer’s clause. “You pick the word. I handle the danger.”
“We handle both,” she says.
We. A small word. A series of knives for a different man. For me it lands like a salve I don’t want to admit I’m already addicted to.
She leaves. The door softly closes. I watch her move through the outer wing like someone who learned to navigate houses by reading adults’ breaths before they entered a room. She has my file hugged to her ribs like a borrowed organ. I let myself experience the exact amount of pride that won’t get anyone killed.
She just stepped over the line. Now she’s in my world for real.
And in my world, the things you love and the things you save are often the same until the day you are asked to choose.
Chapter 42 – Aurora
I find him waiting where the corridor dead-ends into what I always thought was a linen closet. He’s dressed down for once:dark henley, black slacks, no jacket, no tie. No silver cuff links or watch to catch the light. He looks younger like this, more dangerous too, as if the armor I’ve been fighting was the uniform, not the man.
“If you’re sure,” he says.
“I’m here,” I answer, and my voice doesn’t shake even though my stomach is a fist, and my palms are damp inside the sleeves of the blazer I stole from his closet. Under it, I’m wearing his shirt.
He presses his hand to the seam of wood. A keypad the color of bone reveals itself where there was nothing a second ago. He covers the numbers with his body while he types, like it’s instinct. There’s a soft click. The panel slides aside so quietly it feels like a breath drawn through teeth, and behind it is a narrow stairwell I’ve never seen.
I swallow, and he notices. “It’s a stairwell,” he says gently, as if what scares me is the descent and not the decision to take it.
“I know what stairs are.”
He nods and starts down first. I follow half a step behind, not because I don’t trust him—it’s too late for that—but because I want to watch his back as it moves through this narrow space. The tendons in his neck flex when he turns his head to make sure I’m coming. The scar I saw in the gym is hidden under cotton today, but I can feel the map of it, the way it curves, the way the skin around it tenses and releases when his breath changes. I could draw it from memory. I don’t know what that means about me except that I am already too far in to pretend I’m not.
The stairwell doglegs left and right twice, deepening the sense that we’re slipping between layers of the house no onelabels on any floor plan. When we finally reach the bottom, there’s a small landing with another panel. He touches it the same way and this door slides open, too, into a corridor that absolutely does not belong to the old Victorian above our heads.
I expected concrete or steel. The clink of keys on some ring that would make me want to climb back up the stairs two at a time. Instead the hallway is long and warm under soft lighting that makes the blonde wood glow. The walls to my right are reinforced glass, not bars, and behind them I see rooms that look like classrooms and studios and a dentist’s office if the dentist bought all their furniture from a Swedish company and paid extra to make it feel human. The air smells faintly of lavender and paint. Machines hum, but it doesn’t sound medical. It sounds like a giant is sleeping somewhere close and breathing evenly.
