“Hey,” he said softly, his voice the only thing anchoring me. “Look at me.”
I did.
The anger in his eyes startled me—not wild, but contained, lethal in its restraint.
“This isn’t about you,” he said. “This is about someone trying to scare you.”
“It worked,” I whispered.
He shook his head. “No. You’re upset. That’s not the same thing.”
Tears blurred my vision before I could stop them. “Those photos were important. They were proof I was changing. That I wasn’t just passing through.”
He cupped my face carefully, like I was something precious and breakable. “No one can take that from you.”
“I know,” I said, though my chest ached. “But I want my life back. I want to go to the residency. I want to see Amaya and Élodie and Luc. I don’t want to disappear because someone else decided I should be afraid.”
His expression shifted—respect, fierce and unmistakable.
“Okay,” he said. “We do it your way.”
But his body betrayed the calm in his voice. His shoulders were rigid, his hands flexing at his sides like he was holding himself back from tearing the apartment apart piece by piece, looking for fingerprints, shadows, anything he’d missed. His gaze kept moving—windows, doorframe, the hallway—already running scenarios I didn’t want to imagine.
“You’ll stay?” I asked quietly. “In my life, I mean.”
The question felt small the moment it left my mouth. Like I was asking for something I already knew the answer to but needed to hear, anyway.
He turned to me fully then, and whatever he saw on my face changed him.
“I’m not going anywhere.”
I blinked. “Connor?—”
He crossed the distance between us in two strides.
“This isn’t Paris being charmingly dangerous,” he said, voice low and absolute. “This is someone making a point.”
Amaya’s voice echoed in my head—Paris is dangerous. Even beauty is dangerous.
I’d smiled when she said it. Treated it like a metaphor. Like a romantic exaggeration meant to sound European and wise.
I hadn’t thought it would look like this.
“I thought Amaya was just trying to scare me into being careful when she said Paris was dangerous,” I said, my voice unsteady. “I didn’t think?—”
“I know,” he cut in, softer now. “You weren’t reckless. You were living.”
That was what cracked me.
I hadn’t come to Paris to hide. I’d come to become. And someone had noticed. Not my face. Not my body. My momentum.
Connor lifted his hand then, finally touching me—two fingers under my chin, tilting my face up until I had no choice but to look at him.
“I don’t leave you when the world decides to test you,” he said. “I stay.”
My throat tightened. “For how long?”
“As long as you want me.”
