I met her eyes, seeing my reflection in them.
"And now it turns out the powers from St. Paul's are very much still in business. Maybe even more powerful thanbefore. Someone took over after the headmaster died. Rebuilt. Expanded."
Understanding dawned on her face.
"It was them," I said. "Who ransacked your apartment. Who got me arrested. Merrick—the guy who found me on the street—he's one of them. Always was. He's testing me. Trying to pull me back in. Or punish me for leaving."
She was quiet for a moment, processing. Then she asked the question I'd been dreading.
"What are you going to do?" she said. "About them? About your friends?"
I went cold. Serious.
The weight that had been lifting settled back onto my shoulders, but this time it felt different. Lighter. Like I'd finally shared the burden instead of carrying it alone.
"I'm going to find the assholes," I said, my voice flat and certain. "And I'm going to do what I should've done a long time ago. Finish it. Properly this time."
I watched her face, waiting for fear. For hesitation. For her to realize what being with me really meant.
She didn't flinch.
"Good," she said simply.
And in that moment, I loved her even more.
26
MILA
The room felt different after he finished telling me everything.
Not quieter—if anything, it was fuller. Dense with meaning. As if the air itself had absorbed his words and was now holding them carefully, reverently, afraid to let them fall.
Connor sat on the edge of the bed, forearms braced on his thighs, head bowed slightly. Not in shame. In stillness. The kind that comes when you’ve emptied yourself of something heavy and don’t yet know what shape you’ll take without it.
I watched him for a moment without speaking.
I could see the tension in the set of his shoulders, the way his hands flexed once and then stilled, like his body was waiting for instruction his mind no longer trusted. He wasn’t looking at me. He was giving me space. Giving me the choice.
I understood, in that suspended moment, how easily another woman might have walked away. How the truth he’d just laid bare could register as too heavy, too sharp, too much to carry. I could imagine the reflex—to label him damaged, dangerous in a way that felt incompatible with peace. To tell herself thatlove wasn’t meant to come with this kind of gravity. That she deserved something simpler. Safer.
I knew the language of that choice well. I had spoken it fluently for most of my life.
But here and now, watching him offer me space instead of persuasion, choice instead of defense, I felt something steady settle further into me.
This wasn’t chaos. This wasn’t recklessness. This was a man who had survived something brutal and still chosen conscience over collapse. Who had learned restraint the hard way and practiced it.
What I saw in him wasn’t damage. It was depth. Not brokenness, but weight—earned and carried with intention. The kind of weight that doesn’t crush you if you know how to stand beside it.
I didn’t feel pulled toward him out of savior instinct or fascination with darkness. I felt aligned. Like something in me recognized the cost of becoming whole and respected the price he’d paid to do it.
And I knew, with a clarity that surprised me, that I wasn’t frightened away by the magnitude of his truth. I was here because I saw him—not the story, not the violence, not the shadow—but the man beneath it all.
It struck me then—quietly, profoundly—that this might be the bravest thing he’d done yet.
Not the surviving.
Not the fighting.
