Something almost like a smile touched Magnus’s mouth and vanished. “He was offered the chance to leave.”
Elia stared at him. “That was a chance?”
“I’m a generous man.”
A startled laugh escaped her before she could stop it. It broke apart midway through, too ragged to be true amusement, but it loosened something in her all thesame.
Then the full consequence of the night came crashing back.Her knees weakened.
Magnus caught the shift immediately, his hand leaving her throat to clamp at her waist and drag her in against him. Elia braced one palm against his chest. His skin was hot beneath her hand. His heart was still beating hard from the fight.
That undid her more than the bloodhad.
Tears came without warning.Not sobs. Not collapse. Just a hard sting at the back of her eyes and then the betrayal of warmth spilling over. Elia turned her faceaway atonce.
Magnus wouldn’t let her.His fingers caught her chin and brought her back.“Don’t.”
“Don’t what?”
“Don’t hide from me.”
Magnus watched the effort it took for her to keep her voice steady. He could see it in the tight line of her mouth, in the way her shoulders held themselves rigid as if sheer discipline might keep the night from catching up with her. Most people shattered after something like that. Screamed. Collapsed. She was standing here instead, trying to containit.
Trying to do it alone.
She gathered herself. “I’m not hiding.”
He knew the difference between defiance and retreat. He had spent his entire life reading men across negotiation tables and battle lines. What he saw in her now wasn’t defiance.It was restraint hanging by a thread.
“You’re holding yourself together by sheer willpower.”
She didn’t deny it. “I’m trying not to come apart in your sitting room,” she confessed.
His thumb brushed one tear from beneath her eye with startling tenderness for a man who had just broken another man’s wrist and thrown him off a balcony. “Then come apart.”
The command broke something fragile and stubborn inside her.“He wasthere for me.”
Magnus’s hand tightened on her, the grip instinctive, as if some part of him was still braced to pull her out of danger. “Yes.”
The admission came out gruffer than he intended. The image of the blade cutting through the air toward her throat was still burned into the back of hismind.
“He would have killed me.”
Magnus didn’t pretend otherwise. “Yes.”
The word carried a dark certainty that sent another shiver through her. Not fear of him. Something deeper. Something that made the space between their bodies suddenly too small.
“You knew that before he even spoke.”
Magnus’s gaze held hers, steady and unflinching. “I knew the moment he moved.”
For an instant the memory flashed between them without words: the blur of steel, Magnus’s arm rising, her body being swept behind him, the impact of the blade slicing across his skin instead ofhers.
His fingers pressed more firmly into her hips, grounding himself in the reality that she was still here.Still alive. Still within reach.
She looked down at the bandage on his arm, at the pale old scars across his ribs, then up at him again. “And you still stepped in front of me.”
Magnus went very still.“There was never another outcome,” hesaid.
