The words hang between us.
I think of my mother in that room. Pale and tired and still somehow seeing too much. I think of Alena sitting in my fake date with that smile on her face. I think of Zatanna standing in my hospital hallway trying not to show fear after my father looked at her once and understood exactly where to strike.
Then I look back at him. “No,” I say. “That’s why you will.”
For the first time, something in his face goes flat. Not anger. Calculation. The kind that comes when a man realizes he may not be as far ahead as he thought.
Good. Let him wonder. Let him take that home.
By the time I get back to my mother’s floor, I am holding myself together with habit and spite. Nothing else.
The hallway is too bright. The hospital too quiet in all the wrong ways. My father’s voice is still in my head, smooth and poisonous, every word designed to make me feel twelve years old again and trapped in a house where the walls listened better than the people did.
I hate that he still knows how to do it. I hate even more that part of me walked away without breaking something.
The doors to my mother’s wing slide shut behind me. My men stay back without being told. Good. I can’t stand another witness right now.
And then I see her.
Zatanna is standing near the window at the end of the hall, arms folded around herself, staring down at the city like she’s trying to make sense of it from thirteen floors up. She hears me before she sees me, turns, and the second her eyes land on my face, something in her expression changes.
No questions. No bright concern. No performance. Just a soft, immediate understanding that I am not alright.
That undoes me faster than anything my father said.
I make it three more steps. That’s all.
Then I stop in front of her, and whatever it is I’ve been using to stay vertical all day gives out. I don’t even think. I just reach for her.
And she opens her arms.
I pull her into me hard enough that she gives a startled little breath, and then I’m there, bent over her shoulder, my forehead against her neck, one hand at the back of her head, the otheraround her waist like if I don’t hold on, the whole goddamn floor is going to tilt out from under me.
I don’t do this. Not with anyone. Not like this.
But with her, the instinct is immediate. Primitive. As if my body made the decision before pride had a chance to interfere.
She doesn’t say anything at first. Just holds me.
Her hands move slowly up my back, then settle there, warm and steady through the fabric of my shirt. Not possessive. Not pitying. Just there.
And for one shamefully long moment, I let myself stay.
Her perfume is faint under the hospital smell. Her hair brushes my jaw. Her pulse beats lightly against my mouth where my face is turned into her neck. She is soft in a way my world never is. Alive in a way this building doesn’t feel.
Safe.The thought startles me even as I feel it.
Not because she is safe. She isn’t. Not anymore. Not because of me. But because with her, some corner of me stops bracing for impact.
How is that possible?
We’ve known each other what, two weeks? Less? Enough time for bullets and lawyers and sex and one stolen beach that already feels like another life. And yet here I am, forty-three years old, standing in a hospital hallway holding a woman I barely know like she’s the only thing keeping me on my feet.
I don’t have a word for that. I’m not sure I want one.
“Aleksei,” she says quietly.
I pull back just enough to look at her.
