Lorcan frowns. "She just got here."
I hold his gaze until he drops his eyes. "She's not equipped for this. She's spent her whole life running from danger, not toward it. I'm not putting her in the middle of a war." A beat passes before I add, “I want her settled before we make the next move. End of discussion."
Cillian watches me the way he watches everything—like he's reading three layers beneath the surface. Whatever he sees, he keeps to himself.
The rest of the meeting passes in logistics and numbers. I hear most of it. My mind is somewhere else—to my bedroom,ourbedroom now, the bedroom we shared last night in the brownstone. To Hope curled up sleeping at the foot of the bed, and a woman who told me, with her whole body pressed to me, that she was mine.
I have to send her away because the alternative could mean watching her pay too high a price simply for being with me.
The ride home is quiet.
We drove to the estate in comfortable silence. This silence is different. It's heavy and weighted. I glance at her in the passenger seat—her spine straight, her hands folded in her lap, her face turned to the window.
She was fine at dinner. Better than fine, actually. She held her own in an atmosphere that must have been completely foreign to her. She didn't balk at Lorcan's questions or Kathleen's careful scrutiny. She ate what was served. She spoke when spoken to and didn't shrink. I'd watched her across the table the way I watch everything I want to protect—cataloging, assessing, feeling an unfamiliar warmth spread behind my ribs every time she answered one of Lorcan's stupid questions with a dry precision that made Ronan hide his smile.
Now she won't look at me.
"How do you feel about tonight?” I ask.
A beat. "Fine."
I wait. Nothing more comes.
“They all like you," I try.
"Good."
The city scrolls past. I drum one finger against the steering wheel and stop when I realize I'm doing it.
This tension is my fault. I was distracted at dinner, she could probably tell, and now she's reading it as something directed at her when it's directed at the situation. I know her instincts. She reads rooms and people for threat, and she's reading something off me and drawing the wrong conclusion.
I want to fix it. Tell her about the threat and what I’ll do to keep her safe.
But when I do tell her, I know I’ll have to watch her absorb the information without argument or demand. Just her quiet, competent acceptance of whatever damage is incoming.
And I can't do it yet. I will. Soon. Once I have all the details ironed out.
I reach across the console and cover her folded hands with mine. She doesn't pull away. But she doesn't lean into the contact either, and the absence of her usual response is uncomfortable.
I leave my hand where it is for the rest of the drive.
At the brownstone, she goes upstairs without a word while I retreat to my office.
The lamp on the desk throws a pool of light across the papers I haven't touched in hours. I sit and pull out my phone.
Start the safe house timeline. I want her out by Thursday.
I stare at the message. Then I put the phone face down on the desk, press both palms flat against the wood, and hang my head.
Thursday, she won't be here when I come home. I’ll send Hope with her. The safe house closet will have her clothes because I'll make sure she has everything she needs and then some. But the brownstone will go back to being what it was before—a functional, empty space where I sleep and work and move through in silence.
The thought of it makes me want to put my fist through the wall.
This is love. The realization doesn't arrive gently. It lands like a body blow—blunt, winding, the kind of impact you feel in your back teeth. I've never had to name this before. I've watched Cillian with Nora and filed it under something I didn't have a word for. Now I have the word, and I hate it almost as much as I need it.
Love. The thing that makes a man willing to be without a woman who is becoming the air he breathes because her safety matters more than his own respiration.
I don't know how to love someone. I don't know how to say it aloud.
