"They're trying to make me kill you."
The words land in the car like a detonation in a sealed chamber. No escape. No diffusion. Just the concussive force of a truth that reorganizes everything I thought I understood about the last twenty-four hours.
The red light paints his face in crimson. In that light, with that truth settling between us, the man sitting beside me is not my enemy. He is not my ally. He is not my husband.
He is the weapon someone is trying to aim at my head. And he just told me where the trigger is.
The light turns green.
Neither of us moves.
I look at him. I look at the hands that strangled me last night, the hands that pulled a gun on his own men tonight to save me.
"Then we have to disappoint them," I say.
Killian looks at the road. He shifts the car into gear. The engine growls.
"Yeah," he says. "We do."
We drive into the dark, two targets in a black sedan, heading back to a glass cage that is the only safe place left in the city.
Chapter Ten
KILLIAN
The penthouse isdark when we walk in.
It isn't a peaceful darkness. It’s a heavy, pressurized absence of light, like the air inside a sealed vault. The city bleeds through the floor-to-ceiling glass in washes of cold blue and sodium orange, painting the white furniture in long, distorted shadows that stretch across the polished concrete like fingers.
I stand in the entryway. My boots feel heavy on the floor. My jacket smells like the warehouse—diesel, damp rot, and the metallic tang of the crime scene. It’s a smell that sticks to the back of the throat, a reminder that while we’re standing in a sixty-story glass tower, two of my men are lying on stainless steel tables in a morgue off Dock Street.
Alessandro locks the door behind us.
The sound is a sharp, mechanicalclick. Final. Absolute.
He moves past me, heading for the kitchen island. He sets his keys in the ceramic bowl with a soft clatter. He unbuttons his suit jacket, slips it off his shoulders, and folds it. He alignsthe seams. He drapes it over the back of a leather barstool, smoothing the fabric with the palm of his hand.
The ritual of it—the precise, mechanical dismantling of the day—makes my teeth ache.
I watch him. He looks untouched. His hair is still perfect. His turtleneck is crisp. He moves with the economic grace of a man who has never had to scrub blood out of his fingernails or call a mother to tell her that her son isn't coming home.
"Do you ever stop?" I ask. My voice sounds rough, scraping against the silence.
Alessandro pauses. He turns to face me, leaning his hip against the counter. His face is in shadow, but I can feel the weight of his gaze.
"Stop what?"
"The performance. The robot act. We just saw two bodies wrapped in your ties, Alessandro. We just saw my brother in a surveillance photo." I walk further into the room, the anger uncoiling in my gut, hot and toxic. "And you’re folding your jacket like we just got back from a board meeting."
"Order is a discipline," he says calmly. "Chaos is a liability. I prefer the former."
"Liability."
I spit the word out. I walk to the liquor cabinet. I don't bother with a glass. I grab the bottle of Redbreast—the good stuff, the stuff he saves for people who matter—and I pull the cork with my teeth. I spit it onto the counter.
I take a long pull. The whiskey hits the back of my throat like liquid fire, burning a path down to my stomach. It doesn't numb the edge. It sharpens it.
"You're drinking too much," Alessandro says.
