“You’re evil.” I shake my head. “I should have never taken up the job under you. Worst decision of my life.”
He presses his palm against his chest in faux hurt. “You hurt me. I think it was the best decision you made.”
I roll my eyes, biting back the smile our banter always puts on my face. “As if.”
He leans closer, lowering his voice.
“I think you liked me before you admitted it.”
“Please.” I wave a hand. “I tolerated you. Barely.”
“You patched me up in the middle of a gunfight.”
“That was pragmatism.”
He gives me a long, slow look.
“And Istanbul?”
I shrug. “I still tolerated you.”
He huffs a laugh, tipping his head back. The moonlight paints his throat, his jaw, the softened edges of a man who used to be sculpted solely for violence. He looks almost unreal like this, like an artist sketched gentleness over the shadows.
“I think about that night sometimes,” he says. “The masquerade. You stood there with your mask slipping, chin lifted, broadcasting the entire auction to Interpol like it was nothing.”
“It wasn’t nothing.” My voice falters. “I was terrified.”
“You didn’t look it.”
“That’s because you had my back.”
His eyes soften as they take me in.
“Harper,” he says quietly, “you saved me long before Vienna. Long before the estate burned. Long before Inessa was dragged away.”
“I didn’t—”
“You did.” His gaze pins me gently but firmly. “You’re the one who showed me I didn’t have to become what raised me. You’re the one who convinced me that the violence I carried wasn’t the only language I could speak.”
I blink away the sting behind my eyes. “I wasn’t trying to change you.”
“I know,” he says. “That’s why it worked.”
The wind picks up slightly, ruffling the leaves of the plant I nearly killed last week. Damian rescued it with the seriousness of a man defusing a bomb.
I set my mug down. “What about you?” I ask. “What would you tell the version of me who hadn’t slept in three days and thought everyone was out to kill her?”
Damian stands slowly, walks to my chair, and crouches beside me. His hand cups my cheek with the kind of care I never expected to be the recipient of.
“I’d tell her she makes it out,” he says. “And that she finds a life so bright she’ll squint at first.”
I swallow. “It still feels unreal.”
“It’s real,” he murmurs. “It’s ours.”
For a moment, I let my forehead rest against his. A habit formed in darker days, kept in brighter ones.
Then, because the weight of the moment is too much for my heart, I clear my throat and say, “Did you ever imagine you’d be assembling a crib at three in the morning?”
