Love laid down,the pastor had said at the wedding. Sacrifice. Anchored in something greater than yourselves.
He’d always thought that meant dying for someone.
Maybe it also meantstayingfor them when every instinct screamed to run.
He didn’t know what he was walking back into or if Norah would ever forgive him. He didn’t know if coming back would cost him his career, his freedom, or his life.
He just knew one thing with absolute, immovable certainty.
He was done choosing the path that let him walk away from Norah Winslow.
And he was done pretending that control belonged to him instead of the Father he kept trying to outrun.
The emotion gathering in his gut was sharp and clear. He wasn’t in control of the outcome. But he knew what obedience looked like tonight.
He was going back for her.
Marshall shifted in his seat, threw the SUV into a hard U-turn across the empty lanes, and pointed the nose back toward the city.
CHAPTER 24
NORAH
Hale’s handwas still at her back. Steadying her.
“You did fine,” he said quietly. “These things are...unpleasant. But you handled yourself. Take a moment, and I’ll see you inside.”
She couldn’t make her mouth form a response.
He left her at the turn toward the restrooms, his footsteps already shifting back into the smooth confident stride everyone in the ballroom recognized.
Norah slipped into the powder room and locked herself in the farthest stall. She braced her hands on the cool metal walls and tried to breathe. She’d just watched a man die because of a spreadsheet trail she’d followed.
She’d even been praised for it. She’d simply nodded along like a bobblehead doll while a woman who ordered executions with a lifted finger called her useful.
She stared at her shaking hands, her eyes catching on the faint smudge of mascara on her knuckles. Then trailing down her dress to the tiny flecks of something shiny near the hem of her dress.
Her mind tried to reach for numbers. For patterns. For something she could quantify. All she found was a yawningblank. Shock spread through her, quiet and total. She didn’t know who to trust. She didn’t know what she’d just become.
All she knew was that there was no going back to pretending she didn’t know what kind of world she was standing in. And if Ksenia Sidarov had decided Norah Winslow was valuable, then she was no longer just an analyst.
She was an asset. Or a liability.
And liabilities, she now knew, were handled quietly and with brutal efficiency.
Her feet moved without prompting toward the ballroom, pretending as though the last ten minutes had been nothing more than a private donor update. Behind the doors she had just passed through, a man’s body was cooling on a marble floor. Out here, music swelled, violins arcing upward, donors laughed too loudly, champagne chimed against glass.
It felt obscene.
The grand ballroom opened before her like a stage she was suddenly expected to perform on. Morris was smiling graciously for photos. Senators mingled in tight knots of power and polish. The chandeliers glittered like nothing in the world had gone wrong.
Norah moved among them in a daze, her steps perfectly even, her expression arranged in the polite, neutral grace she’d learned at Summit. But inside, everything tilted sideways. She kept seeing it—the sharp crack of the gunshot, Harrington’s shocked, slack-jawed face, the way Sidarov had lifted one single finger and a man ceased to exist. No anger. No flourish. Just a decision.
And Hale had not flinched.
Not once.
Her heartbeat pulsed unevenly against her throat, shallow and fast. Someone greeted her—she smiled. Another asked her how she knew Hale—she murmured something warm andpracticed. Someone complimented the gala, and she nodded as though she agreed.
