He hangs up. The finality of it echoes in the sun-drenched room. He has just burned his last bridge, and he did it with me as his witness.
He walks back to the bed, a King who has willingly abdicated his throne for a different kind of kingdom.
“You just gave it all away,” I whisper, my mind struggling to comprehend the sheer scale of what he’s just done.
“It was all noise,” he says, sitting beside me. “Distractions.” He takes my hand, his fingers lacing through mine. “Now, there’s only a signal.”
I look at our joined hands, then up at his face. The fierce, possessive fire in his eyes is no longer terrifying. It’s familiar. It’s home.
“You’re the signal,” I say, my voice quiet but sure.
A slow, triumphant smile spreads across his face. He brings my hand to his lips and kisses my knuckles, sealing the final, unspoken term of our new reality. The storm outside is over, the storm inside is quiet. There is only him.
Epilogue
Six Months Later
Kinsley
The light in our Toronto penthouse is different. It’s not the hazy, golden humidity of a Tennessee summer. It’s a cool, clean white that spills across the polished concrete floors, aquiet, peaceful light that feels like the first deep breath after a lifetime of running.
I’m curled on a sprawling grey sofa that overlooks the city, a textbook on advanced organic chemistry open in my lap. For the last hour, I’ve been lost not in formulas but in the sheer size of the hockey jersey I’m wearing.
His name—MONROE—is stretched across my shoulders. The blue and white jersey is ridiculously big on me, the sleeves falling past my hands, the hem brushing my knees. It smells like him. It feels like being wrapped in his presence, a constant, tangible reminder that I am safe. That the storm inside me is finally quiet.
Six months ago I was a nursing student, preparing for a life of managed chaos, of triaging wounds and soothing fevers. It was a fitting path for the girl I used to be, the one whose own mind was a constant, low-grade emergency.
But I’m not that girl anymore.
West didn’t just change my world; he gave me the tools to understand it on a fundamental level. “Nursing is about reacting to chaos,” he’d said one night, watching me stare blankly at my old textbooks. “Your mind isn’t meant for reaction, it’s meant for understanding.” The next day, David, with the same quiet, irrefutable efficiency he applies to everything, handled my transfer and change of major. Now, I study the elegant, predictable rules of molecular bonds. I find peace in formulas, in the beautiful, irrefutable logic of how things combine, break apart, and become something new. He didn’t just give me peace; he gave me the formula for it.
The front door clicks open, and a rush of cold winter air breaks my concentration. My heart doesn’t jump. It settles. He’s home.
West fills the doorway, his 6’4” frame seeming even larger in the spacious apartment. He drops his hockey bag by the door, the scuffed leather a stark contrast to the ghosts of the bespokesuits he used to wear. His hair is damp from the post-practice shower, and his face, flushed with the cold, breaks into a slow smile when he sees me.
He looks more powerful now than he ever did as a Monroe heir. The ice is his kingdom, a place of brutal, elegant simplicity where strength and focus are the only currency. The media calls him the “Billion Dollar Bodycheck,” the rebel prince who abdicated an empire for the love of the game. They write articles filled with breathless speculation about the mysterious tragedy and the woman who was on his arm that night. They don’t know that he didn’t give up a kingdom. He burned it down to build a better one, right here.
He crosses the room in a few long strides, bypassing the kitchen, the television, everything as he comes straight to me. He leans down, bracing his hands on the back of the sofa and kisses me; a slow, deep kiss that is a greeting, a question, and an answer all at once. It tastes of cold air and the mint on his breath.
“Hi,” he murmurs against my lips.
“Hi,” I whisper back. “Good practice?”
“Productive.” His gaze drops to the textbook in my lap. “Studying hard, my brilliant chemist?”
“Trying to.”
“I love watching your mind work,” he says, his voice a low, intimate rumble. He straightens up and pulls me to my feet, wrapping me in his arms. I melt against him, my head finding its perfect place in the hollow of his shoulder. He’s still cold from the outside, but his body is a furnace. I breathe in the scent of him—clean sweat, cold air, and home.
“I told you that you’d always look good in my colors,” he groans against my ear.
“That's why I wear it.”
“You feel it, don’t you?” he whispers into my hair.
“Feel what?”
“The quiet.”
