"I killed him," I said, each word deliberate. Clear. "Merrick. I ... I emptied the magazine into his face until there was nothing left."
I waited for her to cringe. To pull away. To look at me with horror or disgust or fear. To see me for what I really was—a killer, a weapon, someone too damaged and violent to deserve the kind of love she was offering.
Someone who belonged in the darkness, not the light.
But she didn't.
Instead, she cradled my face in both hands and kissed me. Soft. Certain. Like she was choosing me all over again despite—or maybe because of—what I'd just told her.
"It's going to be okay," she whispered against my mouth. "You're a good man, Connor. A good man."
And that?—
That cut through the darkness completely.
This woman. This amazing, beautiful, impossibly brave woman saw me. All of me. The violence and the grief and the broken pieces and the parts I'd tried to bury so deep no one would ever find them.
And she was still here.
Still choosing me.
Still holding my face like I was something precious instead of something ruined.
I knew in that moment—with a certainty that felt like gravity—that there was nothing, absolutely nothing, I wouldn't do for her.
No distance I wouldn't cross. No danger I wouldn't face. No sacrifice I wouldn't make.
She had become the center of everything that mattered.
"Everything's going to be okay," I repeated, testing the words in my mouth. Trying to believe them the way she seemed to. "You really think so?"
"I know so," she said.
She pulled me into her arms again, and this time I let myself collapse into her completely. Let myself be held without trying to hold myself together. Let myself feel the full weight of everything I'd been carrying.
The grief. The rage. The guilt. The shame. The bone-deep exhaustion of being a weapon instead of a person.
All of it.
And she didn't buckle under it. Didn't break or bend or tell me it was too much.
She just held me.
And I held her back, my face buried in her neck, breathing in the scent of her—something clean and warm that had nothing to do with violence or death or the smell of cordite and blood that I couldn't seem to wash away.
Despite the pain—despite the horror of what I'd learned, what I'd done, what I'd become—I realized there was nowhere else I would rather be than right here.
In this room. In her arms. Wrapped in this sanctuary she'd built around us with nothing but her presence and her willingness to see me and choose me, anyway.
It was a refuge spun from love and trust and the kind of bravery most people never had to access.
A place where broken things could exist without needing to be fixed immediately.
Where a man could fall apart and know he'd be held together by something stronger than himself.
And for the first time since pulling that trigger, I felt something other than emptiness.
I felt held.
