“If you ever want to talk to someone who won’t run you through the Cassian Ward Guilt-and-Glory machine,” Reid says lightly, “my door, my phone, my texts are open. I won’t tell him unless you want me to.”
“Appreciated,” I say, and the word tastes like an unripe fruit—almost sweet, mostly bitter.
He blows across the lid of his cup, gaze sliding to the path behind me. “We’ve got a site visit today,” he says, like he just remembered. “Nothing dramatic. A donor property that’s converting to a small intake clinic out by the coast. Cass wants to take a look before we start the build-out.”
“Cassian told me nothing about it.” It comes out flat. The part of me that wants him to be perfect is offended; the part that has learned he can’t be is not surprised.
“He’s been… preoccupied.” Reid’s tone makes it a joke and a kindness. “I was going to suggest he bring you.” He shrugs.“Might help to see what the Sanctuaries look like before they’re Sanctuaries.”
I watch him over the rim of the cup. “Would it be safe?”
“Safer than staying on the grounds with your own brain chewing on itself,” he says, then winces like he went too far and can’t take it back. “Kidding. Mostly. We’d go low-profile. No logos or calling attention to anything. I’d be there. He’d be there. In and out.”
There’s a moment where I picture it too perfectly: the drive along the coast, windows cracked to let salt air in, Cassian in the driver’s seat, Reid behind us tapping something into his tablet that looks like logistics and feels like order. A shell of a building with potential standing on a bluff, empty rooms waiting for paint and plants and people. Me in those rooms, taking measurements with my eyes.
“I’ll think about it,” I say, because it is both the truth and a way to avoid giving away the decision I can feel forming.
“Do,” he says. He checks his watch. “I should grab the ten-minute check-in with the crew. Want me to walk you back?”
“No.” I lift the cup. “I’m going to finish this out here.”
Reid nods. His gaze flicks toward the small dome camera mounted a few feet down the path on the garden wall. The lens is fogged with mist. The tiniest motor sound hums and the camera tilts a fraction, like a sleepy eye adjusting. He gives a small smile and looks back at me. “Text me if you need anything.”
He says it like a friend and leaves. When he’s far enough that I can’t pretend to read his posture like a language, I exhale hard and fast. My palms are damp around the cup lid.
The coffee inside has gone from hot to tolerable. I drink, not for taste but to give my hands something to do. The caffeine hits quick.
A leaf drops off the hedge into the path and skitters. I jump like it’s a footstep.
Enough.
I can’t keep bouncing between certainty and panic like a ball in the world’s worst game. If Cassian won’t tell me everything, I need to start seeing things for myself. Out there. On a site that isn’t curated for me, in rooms that don’t already know me by name. He’s not going to like that I want to go. Good. I’m tired of asking permission from men who think protecting me means hiding me.
Mist curls around my boots. My phone warms in my pocket like a small animal. I put my hands in my lap to keep from taking it out and yank my own thread.
I brush mist off my thighs and turn toward the main building. If I’m walking into a trap, I at least want to choose the door.
Chapter 55 – Cassian
The suite door clicks shut behind me and the first thing I notice is not the light, the coffee I didn’t drink, or the ache between my eyes. It’s her. Aurora is perched on the arm of the chair by the window, one ankle hooked behind the other, hair still damp from the morning air. She looks like she slept on a couch and then out-walked a storm. Her phone is in her hand, but her attention is on me, chin lifted, and eyes steady.
“We need to talk.”
My stomach tightens before my brain has time to bury the reflex. The image from the studio stutters through me anyway: paint on her skin, the cold flat of steel against her throat because she wanted the sensation, not the cut. My hands remember too much. Guilt pulls a long thread through my chest.
I hang my key card on the hook by the door, make myself cross the room like I didn’t spend the last six hours on calls that laid out a map of new fires. “Talk,” I encourage. “I’m listening.”
She doesn’t waste time circling. “I want to go out,” she says. “Not for dinner or for show. A site. A real one. You keep telling me what the Sanctuaries are. I want to see them in the bones. I can’t paint cages without seeing what’s inside them.”
The phrasing hits in two places at once. The artist who labels spaces in shapes I don’t see until she draws them. The girl who thinks I’ve put her behind glass and is almost right. I lean a hip against the console table and buy two seconds with a neutral question. “Where did you have in mind?”
“Reid mentioned a property on the coast.” She doesn’t blink when she says his name, and that’s a test too. “A donor site converting to intake. He said you plan to look at it before the build-out. I want to come.”
I don’t look away. “Reid told you that?”
“He passed by while I was out in the garden. He said it might help me ‘see what the Sanctuaries really do.” Her mouth twitches. “His phrasing.”
I file the detail and the tone. Reid’s habit of playing benevolent interpreter for my intentions is useful, until it isn’t. “You’ve seen part of it,” I say. “The lower level here.”
