After everything—the interrogations, the silence, the violence and the sex and the endless, exhausting push-pull—he’s not asking for names or intel or operational details.
He’s asking if I loved him.
And I can’t lie about this. Not now. Not with death yawning beneath me and his eyes boring into mine and the terrible weight of everything I’ve done pressing down on my chest.
“Yes,” I choke out, my throat burning against his palm. “It was real.Youwere real. The only real thing I’ve ever had.”
His expression wavers but his grip tightens.
“I don’t believe you.”
“It’s the truth!” I eke out.
“I don’t know what truth means anymore!”
“Then drop me!” The words tear out of me, raw, rough, and barely audible. “If you don’t believe me, if you’re never going to believe me, then just fucking drop me! I can’t—I can’t do this anymore, Nate. I can’t keep defending something I know I destroyed. I loved you. Iloveyou. And I ruined it. I ruined us.And if you want me dead for that, then fine.Fine. At least I won’t have to live with what I did.”
It’s a Hail Mary, but it’s the truth.
The wind screams past us.
His hand trembles around my throat.
And then?—
He lets go.
I fall.
The world inverts—sky below, city above, everything spinning and tumbling as gravity takes hold. The wind is a living thing, tearing at my clothes, my hair, my lungs as I try to scream but can’t find the air.
I fall and I fall.
And I fall.
This is it.
This is how I die.
Because I fell in love with the wrong person and broke him so badly he broke me back.
The ground rushes up. The cars grow larger. The people?—
Something slams into me from the side.
Arms. Impossibly hard, strong arms wrapping around my waist, around my chest, yanking me out of free-fall so violently my neck snaps back, whatever air left inside me has been knocked clean from my lungs. The world spins again—down becomes up, up becomes sideways—and then we’re flying, the city wheeling beneath us as he carries me away from death.
I can’t breathe.
I can’t think.
I can only hold on to him—fisting my hands in his suit, pressing my face against his enforced chest—and shake.
“I’ve got you, darlin’.” His voice is raw and rough. “I’ve got you.”
We’re hovering now. Somewhere in the middle of the skyline, suspended between earth and heaven, wrapped around each other like two magnets.
“You—” I try to speak but for a moment my voice won’t work. “You dropped me. You actually?—”
