I don’t answer. He doesn’t push.
Instead he rolls us so I’m underneath again, his weight folding around me like armour. “Let’s make a promise,” he says.
My breath catches. “What kind?”
He grins, but it’s sharp now, a glint of something feral. “If we’re still here a year from now, we burn the whole thing down. Together.”
It’s a joke, sort of. But also not.
The thought sends a thrill through me, too loud, too bright. The idea of this soft, dangerous boy and me, setting fire to our own bad fate. A fresh start, in the oldest possible way.
“Okay,” I whisper, and he kisses the word right off my lips, sealing it in blood and spit and salt.
The night presses in, and for the first time it doesn’t feel suffocating. It feels like a secret, thick and alive, waiting for us to break it open.
He falls asleep with his arm caging me to his chest. I watch the shadows crawl across the ceiling, and even though I know the world will come clawing in at dawn, I let myself believe, just for tonight, that we’re safe. That if we ever do set it all on fire, we’ll be the ones to survive the blaze.
As sleep begins to edge closer, one thought settles into my bones with a quiet, seismic clarity: Love doesn’t have to hurt to be deep. Sometimes, it just holds you—and finally lets you rest.
Chapter 52
RAVEN
Iwake before the light does.
That’s new. Usually, my body waits for the world to tell it when it’s allowed to exist—waiting for a sharp sound, a shift in the mattress, the sudden presence of a danger it needs to negotiate. This morning, there is only the sound of my own breath. It rises and falls with a slow, rhythmic evenness, as if it finally trusts the space it occupies.
I don’t move at first.
Damien is behind me, his presence a steady heat against my back. He isn’t pressed against me with that old, suffocating urgency; his arm is simply draped across my waist, heavy but not trapping. He sleeps with the total, bone-deep exhaustion of a man who has finally spent himself telling the truth.
My chest tightens. It isn’t the familiar spike of panic. It’s grief.
Choosing him didn’t erase the wreckage. It didn’t scrub the past clean or turn the present into something simple. It justmade everything real. And real things have a weight you can’t ignore.
I slide carefully out from under his arm. He stirs, a low, wordless sound vibrating in his throat as if he’s on the verge of waking, but then he settles back into the grey half-light. I watch his face—the lines of strain I never noticed before, the raw vulnerability that lives there when he isn’t busy holding himself together for my benefit.
“I’m still choosing,” I whisper. Not to him. To the quiet. To myself.
I dress in the shadows and step outside.
The air is sharp enough to bite, a cold London morning that pulls something loose in my lungs—a knot I didn’t realise I’d been holding since the night of the bath. My feet carry me without the need for a map. Down the street. Toward the river. Toward the sound I already know is waiting for me.
The Thames isn’t dramatic. It just is. It moves with a relentless, muddy purpose, refusing to stop for anyone’s epiphany.
River is standing exactly where he always stands. He isn’t searching for me; he isn’t pacing. He’s just present. His hands are shoved deep into his coat pockets, his shoulders loose. He looks like a man who has already accepted every possible outcome and decided not to flinch when the blow finally lands.
I stop a few feet away. He doesn’t turn immediately, and that hurts more than a confrontation would have. When he finally does, our eyes meet, and the impact of it crashes into my ribs.
“You came,” he says. It isn’t relief. It’s recognition.
“I needed to.”
He nods. He doesn’t ask for an explanation. He never has. We stand there, the space between us heavy with the ghosts of the things we aren’t saying. The river churns beside us, loud enough to keep us honest.
“I chose him,” I say. The words shake. Not because I doubt the decision, but because of what they cost.
River exhales, a long plume of white mist in the cold air. I see his shoulders dip, just a fraction of an inch. “I know.”
