She’ll remember it as the time everyone lied.
I’ve spent years trying not to become my father. Telling myself I was doing better, raising her in honesty, in steadiness, in the light. But a lie is a lie regardless of how gently you hold it.
And this one isn’t mine to keep indefinitely. It belongs to her.
I pull the door to and stand in the quiet hallway for a moment, the decision settling into something that feels less like a choice and more like an inevitability.
I need to talk to Nikolai first.
But tonight, maybe, we tell her the truth.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Lauren
I knock on the office door.
“Come in.”
He’s still at the desk, shirt half-unbuttoned, sleeves pushed up, the blue light of the monitor cutting across his jaw. He looks up when I push the door open—takes me in with one quiet sweep—and the corner of his mouth moves slightly.
That’s all it takes.
Four years of grief and eighteen days of proximity and I am apparently no more immune to him than I ever was.
I cross the room and lean against the edge of the desk. “You have a minute?”
“For you.” He leans back in the chair. “I have five.”
The low register of it does not help me. I have things to say—things that need to be said before Claire comes back tomorrow.
“I wanted to talk to you about something.”
He stands. Not quickly, not with urgency. He simply unfolds from the chair and closes the distance between us in two unhurried steps, and then his hand is at my jaw, tilting my face up.
Every thought I arrived with exits the room.
“Niko—”
“Talk,” he says quietly, eyes on mine. “I’m listening.”
The problem is that the way he’s looking at me as he says it does something in my panties that has nothing to do with Claire, or Ronan Aslanov, or the danger we’re in. Whatever I came here to tell him becomes briefly inaccessible.
Shit.
Why does he have to be so damn hot?
“I—” I reach for the thread. “I wanted to—”
His thumb traces along my cheekbone.
Holy hell.
I close my hand around his wrist and stop pretending. I suppose Claire can wait another thirty minutes. She won’t be back till tomorrow anyway.
He doesn’t say anything else. Just looks at me the way he occasionally lets himself look at me—like the careful distance he keeps the rest of the time has a cost, and right now he’s done paying it.
His hands find my waist and I stop thinking in full sentences.
