I turned my face away from him. Ashamed. "Don't," I managed.
"Don't what?"
"Don't—" My voice cracked on the word. I pressed two fingers to my mouth, furious with myself. "I'm not?—"
"I know," he said, for the third time, and this time it wasn't about the intel.
My shoulders dropped half an inch. My spine curved.
And I sat there on the bench of a piano that wasn't a Steinway in a city I was still learning and cried like I hadn't let myself cry since the night of my father's funeral.
It wasn't loud. It wasn't the wrenching kind. It was quiet and it cost me everything I had to let it happen, and it was a long time before I dragged the back of my wrist across my face and got my breathing under control.
Milo waited the whole time without moving, without speaking, without trying to touch me or fix it.
When the tears finally stopped and I sat there sniffling into a tissue he'd pressed into my hand, he said: "You know what I've been thinking about?"
The shift in his voice made me lift my head.
"What?" I asked, still a little watery.
"The night I watched you wear a bite mark to work." A beat. "In the dress that showed it off to everyone."
I went very still.
"Geoffrey looked like he was going to faint," he said. "And you told him…what was it?" I could hear it now, under the flat delivery. A dry, dark thread. Unhurried. "Do I ask you about the marks your partner leaves on you?"
"You were watching that."
"I was watching everything." Another pause that felt a lot like a man painstakingly choosing his next move. "I sat in that restaurant every night for months and watched you walk into a room full of men who would've killed you if they knew what you were doing, and you sat there and played beautiful music backat them while collecting everything they said." He let that sit for a second. "I've worked for some calculated people. Some brave people. I've never seen anything like it."
The back of my neck prickled.
"That sounds like a compliment," I said.
"It is."
I turned toward him. "You're not angry."
"No."
"You should be angry."
"Should I?" The same measured delivery, the one that held everything and revealed nothing. "You lied to protect yourself from an organization that dirtied your father's dreams and killed people right outside, then employed men like me to erase the evidence. You held that secret through an hour of torture with Viktor in the room." A beat. "I'm a lot of things right now, little bird. But angry isn't one of them."
Little bird.
The first time he'd called me that was in an alley, a name that landed like a hand wrapped around my throat. Gentle, but capable. It still did exactly that.
I should say something. There were probably things that needed to be said. Practical things, tactical things, the shape of what happened next between us.
Instead I reached across and found the front of his shirt.
He went still under my hand.
"Raven—"
"You've been waiting a long time," I said. "Ever since the cabin."
