The brownstone sits mid-block. Old brick, solid bones, a fire escape zigzagging up the side. He parks, kills the engine, and comes around to open my door before I’ve reached for thehandle. I step out, and the duffel bag over my shoulder bumps his arm.
He doesn’t react. We go inside.
The hallway is narrow, and we walk single file—Declan ahead, his shoulders filling the corridor. When he stops to open a door at the end, I almost walk into his back. I catch myself with a hand on the doorframe, and the near-collision puts me close enough to register the heat radiating off him through his shirt and his scent of cologne, soap, and skin, warm and specific and male. My pulse kicks. I step back before he turns around.
“Your room,” he says, stepping aside.
The room is small and plain. A bed with clean sheets, a nightstand, an empty dresser. My gaze goes to the door handle—a lock on the inside—then the window. We’re on the second floor, and the room is fire escape accessible. Two exits. Good. That’s good.
“You can leave whenever you want.” His voice comes from the doorway, and I’m sure he’s reading my thoughts. He hasn’t crossed the threshold. His hands hang at his sides, visible and loose. I’ve started noticing the way he manages his own body around me—the constant calibration of a dangerous man trying to take up less space.
We stare at one another for several long moments. Should I say something? Should he? Neither of us seems to know.
After another few awkward moments, he simply turns and leaves. His footsteps recede down the hall—heavy and measured. A door closes.
I drop my bag. My duffel contains three shirts, two pairs of jeans, underwear, socks, a toothbrush, and a utility knife I’ve carried since I was sixteen. There’s also a granola bar and a water bottle. I could unpack, but I’m not ready yet. I want to make sure I can be out of here in a moment’s notice if necessary.
I check the window lock and test the door lock twice before sitting on the edge of the mattress.
Did I make a bad choice? Probably. But all I had to pick from were bad choices. It seems that’s all life has ever offered me.
So far, this place seems better than most. Or not. The verdict is still out.
I think about that first encounter in the laundromat. Not the terror I felt, but the moment Declan let go of my wrist, stepped back, and put his hands up where I could see them. Palms out.
Every man who'd ever cornered me had pressed forward. Declan O'Rourke stepped back.
And then he sat under the humming fluorescent lights and told me the ugly truth without softening it, without wrapping it in kindness or apology, and without pretending the situation was anything other than what it was—marry me or die.
Blunt honesty doesn't make him safe. It doesn't make him good.
But it makes him different.
A memory of Mrs. Calvert's curling iron surfaces. Then the last foster father's footsteps. The window, the drop, the barefoot sprint.
I think about the years on the street, flitting from shelter to shelter, doorway to doorway, sometimes managing to snag a job long enough to afford my own room at a seedy motel.
Through all of it, the thing that kept me going wasn't hope. Hope is a luxury. The thing that kept me going was spite—the small, vicious, unkillable refusal to let the world be right about me. Every caseworker who wrote me off, every family that sent me back, every man who tried to treat my body as collateral—they all expected me to break. To fold. To stop.
I haven't stopped yet.
I have no hope. What I have is a fuck you. A raw, stubborn refusal to give the world the satisfaction of my absence.
I have spite like an ember. Glowing faintly, buried under years of ash. But I cup my hands around it now, and I feel it. Still there.
It's enough that I'll be damned if I let Declan O'Rourke or anyone else snuff it out.
So, here I am, married to a murderer.
Because, in the end, I didn’t choosemarriage. I didn’t choose aman.I chose one more day.
Chapter 6
Declan
She's been here four days, and I've seen her face maybe six times.
Not because she stays in her room. She doesn't. She moves through the brownstone constantly—I can track her by the soft pad of her footsteps, the small displacement of air when she passes through a room. But she times herself around me. When I'm in the kitchen, she's in the hallway. When I come down the stairs, she's already gone. She eats after I eat. Uses the bathroom after she hears my bedroom door close.
