She lifts her gaze. Her eyes are red-rimmed and wet and enormous, and behind all the fear and the defense mechanisms and the eighteen years of damage, I see something small and stubborn and bright.
"Okay," she says.
My heart stops. "Okay?"
"OK, let's go home."
I pull her off that step and into my arms so fast the duffel bag falls and spills half its contents across the sidewalk—granola bars and protein drinks scattering like confetti. She wraps her arms around my neck with a fierceness that squeezes the air from my lungs, and I crush her against me, one hand fisted in her hair, the other banded around her waist.
"I love you," she says into my neck, muffled and shaking. "I love you, and it terrifies me, and I don't know how to do this either."
I press my mouth to her temple, her cheekbone, the salt-damp edge of her jaw. "We'll figure it out."
"Promise me something."
"Anything."
She pulls back enough to look at my face. "No more deciding things for me. No safe houses, no plans, nohandlingmy life without telling me first. If there's a threat, you tell me. If there's a plan, I'm part of it. I spent eighteen years having no say in where I went or what happened to me. That's over."
"That's over," I echo.
"I mean it, Declan."
"I know you do. And I agree. No more unilateral decisions."
I pick up the duffel bag with one hand and keep her pressed to my side with the other. The granola bars and protein drinks stay scattered on the sidewalk. She doesn't look back at them.
In the car, her hand finds mine. She threads her fingers through mine and holds on.
Chapter 15
Saoirse
The front door closes behind us, and the sound of the deadbolt turning is the loudest thing in the brownstone.
Declan drops my duffel bag in the hallway. His hand is still wrapped around mine—has been since the car, since the sidewalk, since I said okay and meant it with every wrecked, terrified, stubborn cell in my body.
Hope appears at the end of the hall, tail high, meowing once like she's lodging a formal complaint about our absence.
"She missed you," Declan says.
"She missed breakfast."
His mouth twitches. Not a smile. Not yet. His face is still carrying the wreckage of the last few hours—the tight jaw, the hollowed-out eyes, the split skin on his knuckles where he hit the doorframe. He looks the way I feel. Gutted and grateful and running on something deeper than adrenaline.
He turns to me. His free hand comes up to my face, his thumb tracing the line of my cheekbone, the dried salt track of tears I forgot to wipe.
"I need you to hear something," he says.
I wait.
"I will never send you away. Not to a safe house, not to Ireland, not anywhere you don't choose to go. Whatever comes next, we face it here. Together. I'll quadruple the security on this building. I'll put men on every corner of every block. But you’ll stay with me."
The words land right where I need them to. In that place still raw from abandonment and neglect.
But his eyes are on mine, and they hold nothing back. No calculation. No distance. No thousand-yard stare aimed at a point beyond my shoulder. He is here. All of him, right here, looking at me like I'm the axis his whole world turns on.
"Okay," I whisper.
