I didn't blame her.
I had zero experience with children.
Never spent time with them beyond brief, uncomfortable encounters in markets or on streets during operations. Never thought I'd have them. Never even considered the possibility as something in my future.
Kids were for normal people. People with normal lives and futures that didn't regularly involve violence and death. People who hadn't been raised in institutional hell and systematically turned into weapons. People who knew instinctively how to be gentle instead of having to consciously suppress the impulse to scan for threats and calculate exit strategies.
People who could be trusted not to break soft things.
But when I saw Ella crouch down to Sabine's level?—
When I watched her reach out and touch the girl's hair so gently, like she was afraid of breaking something infinitely precious?—
When their eyes met and I saw Ella's raw grief transform in real-time into wonder and fierce, immediate protectiveness?—
Something deep inside me cracked.
It was subtle at first. Just a hairline fracture. A tiny opening in walls I'd built so carefully over years of survival. Walls specifically designed to keep emotion out. To keep vulnerability locked away where it couldn't be exploited or weaponized against me.
But then my heart gave in completely.
Just ... surrendered.
And the scene playing out in this ordinary Paris apartment threatened to tear me down with feelings I didn't have names for and hadn't experienced since I was too young to remember them.
Ella talking softly to her niece in that gentle voice I'd never heard her use before.
Sabine showing her crayon drawings with shy pride, seeking approval.
Étienne explaining with quiet, devastating pain how Rose had wanted to tell her family, eventually. How she'd been actively planning it. How death had stolen that choice and left only secrets behind.
A whole life hidden with surgical precision. A whole family built in secret and maintained with careful, exhausting lies to everyone she'd supposedly loved.
And watching it all, I felt something I hadn't felt in years.
Maybe ever.
Not in any way I could remember or acknowledge.
Want.
Not the physical kind I'd been fighting desperately since I met Ella, though that was still there, constant and demanding and getting harder to ignore with every passing hour.
This was something deeper. More fundamental. More dangerous to everything I'd carefully built.
I wantedthis.
Not just her body, though God knew I wanted that.
Not just temporary connection or momentary comfort.
But this entire scene. The domestic reality of it. The family dynamics. The normalcy I'd never experienced and never thought I deserved or could even survive in without destroying it.
The possibility of a life that wasn't just violence and missions and running and looking over your shoulder.
The thought terrified me more profoundly than any firefight or operation ever had.
Because you could survive bullets if you were fast enough.
