“I’ll handle it.”
His expression hardened, then he relented. “I’ll take care of them,” he said.
I nodded and turned away before I could say anything else. Before I could beg him to tell them I was sorry. Before I could ask him to explain what I couldn’t explain myself.
Knowingit would be impossible to watch them leave, I stood in the library and listened to the sounds of the castle emptying. Footsteps on stone. Voices in the entrance hall—Callen’s low murmur, Oliver’s sharp questions, and Ophelia’s silence that was somehow worse than her tears. The heavy front door opening, then closing in finality.
The helicopter’s rotors spinning up. The pitch rising, the blades biting into the air. The sound growing louder, then lifting.
Then fading.
Then gone.
I pressed my forehead to the cold glass and stayed there until I could breathe again.
I waited until the night had swallowed the last echo of the helicopter’s passage and I was certain they were truly gone. Then I poured another whiskey. This time, my hand shook so badly I spilled half of it across the desk.
I didn’t bother cleaning it up.
The images waited in the locked drawer. The note with its anonymous threat. Evidence of a predator I couldn’t identify, couldn’t track, couldn’t fight until I knew who the fuck they were.
I’d done what I had to do. Whatever came next—the exposure, the destruction, the ruin of everything I’d built—they would be safe. Far from Greymarch. Far from me. Far from whatever darkness had followed me here and was now demanding its due.
The fire crackled low, the last of the logs falling into embers. The library pressed in around me, heavy with shadows and the ghosts of what might have been. The sofa where I’d first kissed Oliver, where he’d pulled me down and opened for me. The rug where Ophelia had knelt at my feet while Oliver watched from the chair. The desk where I’d worked while they waited, desperate and denied.
Every corner of this room held a memory now. Every surface a reminder of what I’d had for far too brief a time.
I sank into the chair behind my desk and let my head fall into my hands. The whiskey burned in my throat. The silence rang in my ears. And the full weight of what my life now was settled over me like a burial shroud.
They would hate me for not confiding in them. That was the point.
Hatred was safer than love. Distance was safer than closeness. If they hated me, they wouldn’t return. Wouldn’t put themselves in danger. Wouldn’t give whoever was watching another chance to destroy them.
I told myself this was the right choice. The only choice.
I told myself the hollow ache in my chest would fade with time.
I told myself a lot of things, sitting alone in that library while the fire died and the darkness crept closer.
None of them were true.
I unlocked the drawer and spread the damning evidence across the desk one more time. I studied each image with an operative’s eye, looking for clues—lighting that might indicate time of day, reflections that might show the photographer’s location.
Nothing. Whoever had taken these knew how to avoid leaving traces.
However, everyone made mistakes. And I had resources. Callen, Gus, Rafe, and our silent partner—a man more lethal than the four of us combined. The full weight of Unit 23, if I could find a way to bring them in without exposing what they contained.
Whoever you are, I will find you.
It wasn’t a thought. It was a vow.
I would make them pay for every violation, stolen moment, and hour of happiness they’d poisoned with their surveillance.
I would destroy them. Tomorrow.
Tonight, there was only the silence. The empty castle. The knowledge that I’d had everything and cut it out of my own chest with my own two hands.
I picked up one picture—the three of us in the library, laughing together about a joke I could no longer remember.
