I’m drying my hands on a rag when I feel him before I see him. That’s what it’s like with Cassian now. A change in the air pressure.
He’s in the doorway, jacket in one hand, the other braced high like he needs the frame to arrest his motion or else he’ll keep going and won’t stop. He doesn’t speak right away. Fine lines of concentration bracket his mouth like he’s rehearsing how not to order me and failing.
“Come with me,” he says finally, voice pitched low, so it lands next to my ear and not in the space over my head. “I need to breathe.”
Two hours ago I was thinking about packing every canvas that matters and walking out. I still could. Lila would answer on the second ring. Nadia would pick up before the first finished. Caldwell’s nameless people would text from a new burner with a new lie and call it rescue. The contract would follow me like a shadow you can’t shake under any light.
“Where?” I ask. The difference between his office and the rest of the world is measured in whether I keep my spine straight or let it try resting for five minutes.
“Someplace that isn’t here,” he says. He waits. He’s gotten better at letting me decide to move toward him instead of baiting me to prove that I will.
I set the rag down, take my phone, and follow. We pass the corkboard where Vera pins the daily schedule like a quilt and the locked cabinet that holds blades, solvents, and a dozen other ordinary things that become knives when someone’s panic arrives without knocking. He doesn’t touch me or walk too close. He slides his jacket over his shoulder with one finger in a way that is purely functional and annoyingly cinematic.
The private garage smells like clean engine and cold air. The matte black SUV looks like it could outrun a small war. He doesn’t gesture for a driver because there isn’t one. Either he sent him home or he needed to do this alone enough to dismiss the rule book. He opens the passenger door and waits as if this is an ordinary date and not a fault line. I get in without making a joke I’ll regret. He goes around to his side and slides behind the wheel with that unshowy competence men born to money fake and boys who built their hands out of work are simply given.
We don’t speak as we pull out. The garage door clanks and lifts; winter light slides across his knuckles on the wheel, thetendons standing out as he takes the ramp at an angle to avoid a pothole he probably ordered fixed three times. The gate hums, the gravel spits under the tires, the pines part. He doesn’t take the main road along the bay. He goes west, toward the woods, where the trees thin and the ground rises until the Sanctuary is a notion and not a building.
The radio is low, something instrumental that knows when not to be noticed. His left hand rides at twelve o’clock. The right rests on the gear lever like he’s listening to it. The heater ticks. My breath fogs the window for the first ten minutes, then stops when the car warms and the glass remembers how to be clear.
“When it gets too loud in my head, I drive,” he says eventually, eyes still on the road. It sounds like a confession. “I used to run until my lungs bit. My knees had things to say about that.”
“What do your knees say now?” It comes out softer than I meant. Maybe because I’m stealing a look at his profile: the scar at his hairline, the day-old stubble, the way he swallows like he’s counting needs he’s not going to allow today. That, or my voice hasn’t decided whether to be angry or grateful and takes the middle path where it won’t crack.
“That they prefer machinery to dirt,” he says. The smallest corner of his mouth ticks. We take a turn that isn’t marked, then another that looks like it’s about to stop being a road and remembers at the last second. Branches skitter the roof. Light flickers in the spaces between trunks as if the woods are breathing and we’re just moving through their chest.
“Where are we going?” I ask.
He glances at me briefly, then back out at the line where the pavement narrows. “An overlook,” he says. “There’s a river that looks like it forgot it was supposed to be quiet. It helps.”
The SUV climbs. The air changes when a car knows it’s going higher. The trees break, and the light goes honey-colored in that late-afternoon way that makes you mourn even as you look because it will be gone in twenty minutes.
He pulls off onto a dirt shoulder a hundred yards before the end of the paved road, then keeps going another fifty onto a track that will look like deer made it the second we leave. The overlook is a scrap of grass chewed into the side of a low cliff, the river a long curl of silver and slate below, the far bank scribbled with scrub pine and a handful of desperate birches that decided to live anyway. The wind picks up just enough to make the small hairs at the back of my neck stand.
He turns the engine off and we sit there in the sudden quiet as the ticking under the hood slows and stops. Through the open window I can hear the river and, underneath it, a distant crow. I want to count this as proof he isn’t a machine.
“We don’t have long,” he announces. The day only ever gives you the hours it wants, not the ones you negotiate. He gets out. I follow, the cold catching my bare ankles.
He doesn’t go far. He sits on the hood, one foot braced on the bumper, the other planted. Hands loose on his thighs, jacket still in the backseat, throat open to the air. He looks younger when he isn’t armoring himself with small formalities. It makes something in my chest try to soften and I tell it not to. It softens anyway. He squints at the water as if he can will it to go somewhere else. I stand beside him, close enough to feel the warmth off the car and to smell him.
“You just…leave,” I stutter. “No seven-step security ballet. No escort.”
“Sometimes if I don’t move when the thought arrives, it turns into a weight,” he says, still watching the river. “Then I have to drag it instead of use it.”
“And you needed to move,” I say.
“And I needed you,” he says. The wind steals it from the space between us almost immediately, which is good because if the air had time to show me the shapes the syllables made I might react out loud.
He looks at the horizon with the expression of a man who has never had the thing he wants offered to him without conditions and doesn’t quite know where to put his hands. “When I was nineteen,” he says, “there was a basement in a church where we pretended the world could not find us. We kept an old cot down there with a cheap foam pad and a blanket with carnations all over it. The blanket smelled like mildew, women’s shampoo, and metal. I would sit on the stairs and listen to them breathe and try to figure out which sound was the one that meant the walls were working. I learned then that power keeps you alive because solutions do not. Solutions are temporary. Power is a habit.”
“You grew up in a basement,” I say, even though I know that isn’t the whole story, and he shakes his head once like he’s brushing off an old hand.
“I grew up in rooms where doors broke easily,” he says. “So I built ones that didn’t. That’s a long way of saying I will choose wrong if I forget I am not the only one who has to live with my choices.”
“That’s the first apology I’ve heard you give without a lawyer trapped inside it,” I observe. He laughs once, a quiet sound that makes something low in me ease.
“I am sorry,” he says. The words land on my skin and sink instead of skating. “I am trying to be a man who can be both what I built and what you see when you stop flinching.”
“I’m not flinching,” I argue, even though sometimes I flinch at kindness more than cruelty because it is rarer and feels like a trick.
