Anya appears at our elbows, demanding an explanation for the disruption to her botanical research.
Rolan meets her gaze and says, simply, “Ellie is going to stay.”
Anya’s eyes travel to me.
“Forever?” she asks.
I bend down to her level and take her tiny face in my hands.
“Forever.”
She takes a moment to evaluate the promise before launching herself into my arms.
I hold her as tightly as I can, feeling the weight of Rolan’s ring on my finger. He quickly joins the hug. It feels like home.
Finally. Completely. Irrevocably home.
EPILOGUE
ROLAN
She’s been awake for twenty minutes before she says anything.
I know because I’ve been awake longer. Usually I’m out of bed before six and busy with work before seven, the day organized and moving before the house has fully woken.
Today, I stayed.
She shifts beside me, slightly restless, and lets out a long sigh.
“What’s bothering you, my love?” I already know the answer, but ask it anyway.
The ring on her finger catches the morning light when she moves — a flash of green and white that I’ve been watching with quiet satisfaction.Mine.
“She’s still out there,” Ellie says. To the ceiling, not to me.
I don’t pretend I don’t know who she means. “I know.”
“I don’t even remember the last time it was actually her — how long she’s truly been missing.” Her voice carries a thread of pain. “All those messages. I thought I was talking to Maren, and it was Landon the whole time, and I—” She exhales. “I should have known. I know her. I know how she writes.”
“He had her phone. He had time to study the pattern.”
“That’s not?—”
“It’s not your fault.” I say it flatly, not as comfort but as fact. She has a habit of absorbing blame that belongs to other people, and I’ve been working on interrupting it. “He planned it carefully and had help.”
The last report Dmitri filed arrived just a few weeks before Ellie was captured. He said everything was fine, but I don’t know how true that was. He could have been lying. He could have been compromised long before any of us realized.
I’ve been carrying this quietly for weeks — the guilt of a decision I made for the wrong reasons, and the consequences that followed. I sent Dmitri away to separate him from her.
After catching the two of them talking in the kitchen, the irrational, territorial part of my brain couldn’t tolerate watching her give her attention to anyone other than me.
I sent him because I was jealous. Which is not something I’d expected to be capable of feeling at the time.
And he took Maren with him. What he’s done with the woman he was assigned to protect, I don’t yet know, and watching Ellie carry that worry every single day is its own form of punishment.
I take Ellie’s hand, the engagement ring gleaming in the light, and bring it to my mouth, pressing my lips against it.
“You said you would marry me,” I say. “And you still haven’t kept your promise.”
