“I never painted it again.” I wipe at my face with the back of my wrist and smear a grey streak along my cheek that probably looks like I’m trying to war-paint myself and failing. “Until now.”
The room waits. He lets it. When he speaks, his voice has lost some edges I didn’t know were still there.
“Then you paint it here,” he says. “No one will cover it.”
The first emotion to flip in my chest at that sentence is a strange grief. The second is something almost like relief, then anger at relief because I don’t want to need his permission or his protection to paint what is mine. The third is the one that scares me: trust.
He shifts to sit with his back against the wall, like he plans to stay long enough for the floor to mark him. His knee bumps mine. I lean sideways until my shoulder finds him. It’s not a calculated movement. It happens because my body decided we’re done arguing with comfort for the next sixty seconds. He doesn’t make a sound to claim the moment. His hand rests on the floor near mine, not touching. He is warm.
There is a smear of my paint on his palm. I look at it until the shaking in me finishes its last small loop and leaves. It’s my color on his skin. I inhale and don’t see that stairwell for the first time since I walked in here. North light through big windows. Wet garden outside, leaves shining like they’re brand new. Oil and solvent and salt on the air. Present.
“You keep saving me,” I say, and as soon as I do, the bell rings in my head—too much, too fast, the kind of sentence that sounds like a leash. I close my mouth on the apology I was going to offer the room to take it back, because apologizing for needing help is a habit I refuse to feed in front of him.
“Maybe you’re saving me.” He says it as if the words surprise him and he’s decided not to correct them. It lands in me like heat finding cold. I turn my head to look at him. He’s staring at the painting, not at me, jaw tight like remembering still costs him interest he can’t refuse to pay. The pieces of him click in my hands and make a shape I want to keep.
For the first time since I crossed the gate, I realize I’m not just inside Cassian’s world. He is inside mine. The canvas says so. The floor says so. The quiet in my chest says so.
I don’t know what that will cost yet. I just know I’ll pay it on my terms.
Chapter 37 – Cassian
Reid’s voice is a dry metronome in my ear while the evening light turns the harbor into a sheet of hammered brass beyond my office windows.
“They’ve narrowed the ping to within ten miles of the north compound,” he says. “Caldwell’s aides are fishing. They think Ms. Hale is our weak point.”
“She isn’t.” I keep my tone flat, and steady.
Reid exhales. Papers whisper. “Then we have to make her look untouchable.”
The word lands with an old familiarity. Untouchable is why I built walls, why I buried cameras in crown moldings, why every gate on this property has a twin that only my team can see. It’s also what my hands forgot last night with her back to my wall and her breath catching against my mouth. Two truths. One man.
“Give me your picture,” I say.
“Caldwell’s digital team ran a cluster analysis on her press mentions from the show. They’re seeding a story that she’s ‘gone dark’ after receiving unregulated funding. Their freelancers are scraping geo off old photos, cross-referencing traffic cams. They’ll triangulate if we keep her still.”
Still is the one thing she isn’t. I rub the ridge of the scar under my ribs, a habit I pick up when choices multiply. “If they’re watching for absence, we hand them presence,” I say. “We put her somewhere they can’t argue with.”
“You want to show her.”
“I want to mislead them.” I look at the garment bag draped over the back of a chair, a deep wine silk dress, the color of a good claret and dried blood, tailored exactly to the measurements I pretended I didn’t take in the salon when she stood under my hands in light that forgives nothing. “The WhiteCross Gala is tonight. Press wall, donors, cameras, a hundred clocks telling the same time. She walks in with me, leaves with me, smiles when she chooses, and comes back here.”
Reid hesitates. “It cuts both ways. Caldwell’s people will be there. So will the senator himself if the schedule holds. If he sees her, he’ll try to make a move. Aides. Photographers. A question with teeth.”
“Then he gets a picture he doesn’t know how to use.” I watch a skiff thread the mouth of the harbor like a needle in a stubborn seam, the line it leaves glowing in the low sun. “He wants a hidden witness. We’ll give him a woman who goes where she wants and leaves when I tell her.”
“I’ll double the ballroom perimeter and run an advance walk in twenty.” Reid’s voice shifts into verbs—my favorite gear. “West loading dock for your car, east service hall for hers as decoy, snipers on the mezzanine if the threat board ticks.”
“No snipers.” I turn from the window. “This is charity, not war. There are children with their names attached to expensive centerpieces. We keep our teeth inside our mouths and our hands on our people.”
Reid clears his throat. “Mara wants confirmation on the donor seating. If you bring Hale, the board will put her at your table.”
“Good.” I pick up the garment bag. The zipper teeth are cold against my knuckles. “Let them see exactly where she sits.”
Reid pauses long enough to make it a question. “You’re sure about this, Cassian?”
I’m not sure about anything except the timber of her voice when she saidI came to youand the way my chest changed shape around it. But I don’t run organizations on confession.
“I’m sure we stop dancing to Caldwell’s music.” I hang up and slip the phone into my jacket pocket.
