Silence stretches, warm and breathing.
She breaks it. “Family?”
I nod before I remember she can’t see it. “Yes.”
Her fingers trace once over the center of my chest, absentminded. Right over my sternum. Right where her weight has started feeling too fucking right.
“So you don’t want to go.”
“No.”
“But you have to.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
I stare into the dark a second longer before I answer. “Or he’ll come here.”
She goes still against me.
“He?” she asks.
“My father.”
The word feels wrong. Too intimate. Too earned.
Nikolai.
That’s who he is.
That’s all.
She sighs, and then her arm wraps around me, tighter than before, like she’s trying to hold something in place that doesn’t want holding.
The pressure of it goes straight under my skin.
“You don’t like him?” she asks softly.
A humorless laugh almost leaves me. Almost.
“No.”
“Okay,” she murmurs, like that settles it. Like the world is simple. “Then go for a couple days and come back.”
My hand tightens on her hip. She says it easy. Too easy. Go. Come back.
Like she’ll be here when I do.
Like I can leave her in this house and trust the locks and my men and the city and fate itself not to swallow her whole.
By the time I came back she’d be gone. I know it with the kind of certainty I usually reserve for blood.
She’d slip out from under me while I was gone, vanish into some alley of the world with that stubborn chin up and a knife in her boot and that death wish she dresses up like independence.
Or worse—someone would get to her first.
The thought turns my stomach so hard I almost sit up.
