But even as hope sparks in my chest, I watch it die. Nadiyah's face smooths back into that terrible calm. Whatever door cracked open has closed again, and the click of it shutting feels like something breaking inside me.
I tried to reach her. I meant every word I said. And it isn't enough.
"Understanding doesn't bring him back." Her voice is flat. Final. "Sympathy doesn't restore what was taken. Your kindness—" She shakes her head, and there's something almost like regret in the gesture. As if she wishes things could be different. As if she's sorry that my compassion can't change what has to happen. "It changes nothing. It heals nothing."
The last soft path closes.
I feel it like my own grief—not metaphor, but actual loss. The ache of reaching for someone and finding only air. I survived my childhood by learning to read people. I still navigate my world now by looking for the humanity in even the most broken among us, and by believing that understanding can build bridges across impossible distances.
But Nadiyah doesn't want a bridge. She doesn't want to be understood.
She wants equivalence.
And the shape of what I am in this equation begins to clarify, even as everything in me fights against the knowledge.
If connection won't help me reach her, maybe consequence will. Maybe the reality of what she's risking—exposure, capture, the loss of her son—will penetrate where compassion couldn't.
"People saw us leave the rec center together, Nadiyah. The staff knows I was with you." I hold her gaze, refuse to let mine waver even though the fear is climbing my throat like somethingwith claws. "And I sent a text to Nick before we left your apartment. He knows something is wrong. He'll come for me."
She blinks, mouth pursing around the edges.
"Whatever you're planning won't work. Nick will find me. He's probably already on the way here."
I can't be certain my text reached him, let alone that the fragmented message I sent will make any sense to him. But he'll figure it out.
And when Nick knows something is wrong—when he knows I'm in danger—he becomes a force of nature. He'll tear this city apart. He'll call in every resource, every connection, every favor he's ever been owed. He'll come for me because that's who he is. Because I'm his wife.
I hold my breath, waiting for fear to register across Nadiyah's face. For the mention of Nick's wrath to rattle her resolve, make her reconsider. Better yet, to make her wonder if she can actually finish this before he arrives.
Instead, what I see in her expression turns my blood to ice in my veins.
Something in her face eases. It's the closest thing to relief I've seen in her since this nightmare confrontation began.
"That's good." The word is soft. Almost grateful. "He should be here for this."
Oh, God. The ground drops out from under me as I realize the depth of my mistake just now.
Nick's arrival isn't the thing that stops this.
It's the thing that completes it.
Whatever balance means to her, whatever answering wrongs requires to her, it demands an audience. It demands that Nick witness. That he watch whatever she's planning unfold and be powerless to stop it, the way he did nothing on that rooftop in Dubai when Omar made his choice.
Nick will think he's coming to save me. But he's walking into a trap. One I've led him to with my cry for help.
The wind gusts harder, colder, yet I can't feel it anymore. I can't feel anything except the freefall sensation of everything I believed turning inside out.
Nadiyah takes a step closer. Not threatening, but almost intimate, the way you'd move toward someone you're about to share a secret with. The gun stays level between us, but there's something different in her posture now. She's not holding me at bay anymore. She's confiding.
"I thought about killing him, you know. At first, that's all I wanted. To watch him die the way Omar did. To make him feel that terror—that helplessness—in his final seconds."
She pauses. Her gaze goes distant, as if caught in memory, maybe. Recalling the fantasy she built and then set aside.
"But then I realized..." Her head tilts slightly, considering. "Death would end his pain. It would be over. Dominic Baine would be gone, and whatever he felt in those last moments would be finished."
Her gaze locks onto mine with terrible intensity.
"Losing you—losing the woman he loves—that is a wound that never closes. Every day. Every night. For the rest of his life, he will wake up and remember what was taken from him. What he couldn't protect."
