Not to hurt me. Not to save me. No one was coming at all.
I have a system now. Refined over many years. Field-tested and reliable. Never unpack. Sleep near the door. Know two ways out. The system has kept me alive in shelters, squats, the back seats of unlocked cars, and twenty-four-hour laundromats like the one where Declan O'Rourke found me.
Declan O'Rourke.
The man’s a cold-blooded murderer.
I can’t stop replaying the controlled economy of how he moved to sit in that plastic chair, every shift of weight deliberate. The breadth of his shoulders. The low register of his voice when he told me he wasn’t there to kill me—not gentle, not kind, but factual. The way an average person might state the time.
I'd cataloged all of it in the two seconds before I tried to run, the same way I catalog every man who enters my space—measuring the threat, calculating the distance to the door, estimating the damage his hands could do.
Except my body filed a separate entry alongside the threat assessment. It surfaces now as heat across my chest when I replay the moment his hand closed around my wrist and a tightening below my navel when I remember his eyes tracking my face with that unnerving focus—not predatory, not leering, it was…attentive. No man has ever looked at me quite like that. The phantom touch of his thumb against my pulse point keepsintruding, so vividly I can almost feel the pressure of his skin against mine.
I shove it down. Hard.
My body is only doing what bodies do—responding to proximity and adrenaline and the biological confusion of being touched by a dark, dangerous, virile man. It means nothing. It's noise. I file it in the same category as the fight-or-flight tremors I can't always control—involuntary and meaningless.
When dawn arrives, I sit in a Dunkin' Donuts with my hands wrapped around a small coffee as I weigh my options. The math is the way it has always been—simple and brutal.
I have forty-six dollars and an expired ID.
I can try to run,reallyrun. Like, leave the city and start over. I know the arithmetic of homelessness. I know how many calories you can stretch, how many nights you can go without real sleep, how long before the cold or the exhaustion or the wrong person in the wrong doorway catches up. But I also know this city. Somewhere new, somewhere foreign…I won’t survive more than a few weeks.
If I go to the police, I'll end up in a system. Not the foster system—I aged out of that particular hell. A system of paperwork, interrogation cubicles, and courtrooms. But I know better than to trust any bureaucratic system.
Regardless of either option, the O'Rourkes will find me. I wouldn’t be walking free for twenty-four hours unless Declan O'Rourke was a hundred percent sure he could find me when my time was up.
But there’s a third option.
I could stop. Stop struggling, stop clawing, stop fighting so damn hard.
Not in the dramatic way. No jumping off a bridge, or downing a bottle of pills, or anything that requires the kind of courage I'm not sure I have.
I could just walk out of this Dunkin' Donuts and let the clock run out on Declan O'Rourke’s offer. Let whoever he sends find me in whatever doorway I end up in.
No more exhausting, grinding, minute-by-minute work of staying alive in a world that has never once made staying alive feel worthwhile.
The thought doesn't even scare me.
As I hold my coffee in both hands, absorbing the warmth, I turn over the idea. Examine it from every angle. Would it be so bad? Eighteen years of survival, and for what? Another corner in an all-night laundromat, another shelter cot, another temporary job that pays under the table?
I've been running since I was fourteen, but before that, life wasn’t much better. Before that, I was a small, voiceless nobody in a system that processed children the way a warehouse processes inventory—intake, placement, return, repeat.
And I'm tired. Not sleepy-tired.
Tired in my bones, in the marrow, in the part of me that's supposed to want things. Like a future. I can't remember the last time I wanted anything more than a warm blanket, a hot meal, or one more day.
One more day. I've gotten that, over and over, thousands of them stacked end to end, and not one has been a day I'd choose to repeat.
So, to the question of marrying a cold-blooded psychopathic killer, or dying. I’m not sure there’s anything left in me that still wants to live.
Chapter 4
Declan
The family estate looms at the end of the drive, all stone and ivy and buttloads of money. It’s the first Sunday of the month, which means family dinner, mandatory attendance, mandatory civility, and mandatory displays of O'Rourke unity.
I park behind Ronan's Audi. The driveway resembles a luxury car showroom—German engineering lined up in perfect formation. My knuckles remain split from last night's workout. I’ve gone two days without sleep, which isn't unusual, but usually it's due to guilt or adrenaline or the faces of men I've put in the ground. This time it's a face with haunted eyes, a messy braid, and practiced, careful stillness keeping me awake.
