He takes another step, close enough that I can smell the rain still clinging to him—wet leather, gun oil, and adrenaline. The floorboards creak under his boots, like the house itself wants to back away.
“I saw the way you looked at her after we got back,” he says. “Like she was something you could absolve. You don’t even like people, Saint. Why her?”
Why her.
The words find their mark and stick there, somewhere deep, somewhere I haven’t touched in years.
“Maybe because she bleeds honesty,” I answer, swirling the whiskey in my glass. “You circle her like a wolf waiting for her to bare her throat. But she never does, does she? She just keeps watching you—learning, surviving. It’s… impressive.”
His mouth twists. “That’s not what it looked like behind that warehouse.”
Ah. There it is. The wound.
I stand slowly, setting my drink down with a quiet clink. “You’re angry because you wanted to be the one she kissed.”
He moves before I can blink—hand slamming against the wall beside my head, the other gripping my shirt. The whiskey breath between us is sharp, edged with fury.
“I’m angry,” he growls, “because you’re reckless. Because Rook trusts you to be the one who doesn’t break.”
“Trust is overrated,” I say, voice calm despite the pulse thundering in my throat.
His breath hits my cheek—rough, hot. “You’re going to stay away from her.”
I tilt my head, study him the way I would a loaded gun. “If that’s what you need to believe.”
The silence stretches. Tight. Wire-thin. Then he releases me, stepping back with a sound that’s half disgust, half restraint. “You think you’re so damn holy,” he spits. “Like you’re above the rest of us.”
“Not holy,” I murmur, reaching for my drink again. “Just forgiven less often.”
He pauses at the door, hand on the frame, shoulders tense. “You’re going to regret it, Saint. Whatever this is—you’ll choke on it. Just like the fucking rest of us.”
“Maybe,” I say, smiling faintly. “But at least it’ll taste likeher.”
The door slams, and the echo vibrates through the room long after he’s gone. The whiskey burns as it goes down, hot and bitter. I lean back in the chair, tracing the map’s routes with a finger, the ones that lead back to Damien—and maybe, to her.
Wraith doesn’t understand. None of them do.
I didn’t kiss her to save her.
I kissed her because, for the first time in years, I felt something.
And that—more than the Syndicate, more than Damien, more than the ghosts that haunt this house—is what will ruin me.
The door’s echo is still vibrating through the study when I decide.
It isn’t a conscious choice. It’s instinct. Rebellion. Sin responding to invitation.
Wraith told me to stay away from her.
Which, of course, means I won’t.
I leave the study without bothering to turn off the lamp. The hallway is dark, the old lights low and ambered, casting long shadows across the walls. The house has that cathedral hush again—the kind that makes you whisper even when you’re alone. Rain rattles against the windows, restless and hungry, and I can feel her somewhere above me like a pulse.
Second floor. Third door on the right.
I don’t knock.
I open it quietly, controlled, the way I was taught to enter rooms that might break me.
