"I went to protect you. Elias had information about the Ironwood seizure. About the silent partners who backed the play against your family. I was trying to figure out how to bring it to you — how to give you something useful without blowing up everything I've spent the last week trying to hold together. I was trying to find a compromise."
Something moved across his face. It was the faintest fracture in his composure as the pieces rearranged behind his eyes.
"You don't compromise," I continued. "I've watched you operate for days now. It's your way or no way. You decide what's best, and you move, and you don't ask, and you don't explain. Your brothers know how to read you. Your mother knows what you mean when you don't say things. I don't have years of being a Blackwood behind me. I'm still learning the language. And when I can't read you — when I find a relocation order with my best friend's name on it and I don't know if it was malice or strategy or something you didn't think would matter to me — I have nothing to work with."
Vidar lowered himself onto the edge of the couch with the careful deliberateness of a man who had just found the groundcloser than expected. His elbows went to his knees. He looked at the floor for a long moment.
"How can love grow in that kind of environment?" I asked.
The four-letter word stopped him. He winced as if I'd spat a curse. I watched the word move through him the way a current moves through water; a visible disturbance, a change in the quality of the stillness. He looked up at me, and for once, the gold eyes weren't calculating anything. They were just looking.
"My father had a brother," he said. "Not blood. A man he'd fought beside for twenty years, built with, trusted with the kind of information that can end a family if it falls into the wrong hands. When I was nineteen, that man smiled at my father across a table and gave the order for the ambush that killed four of our pack. He'd been planning it for three years. He sat in our kitchen on Christmas. He was in the photos on our wall."
I sat down. Not across from him — beside him, close enough that our knees touched.
"My father survived. My brothers and I were strong enough to hold the pack together while he recovered. I was still a kid. I decided that night that family was the only safe unit. Blood was the only reliable bond. Anyone outside of that was a variable I couldn't control, and variables I couldn't control were threats."
"My father hurt Elias and me our entire lives. Both of us stayed long past the point where we should have left, because he was blood and we had been taught that blood was the highest obligation." I held my husband's gaze. "Blood didn't protect us, Vidar. It held us in place while he hurt us. Family isn't a guarantee. It's a choice that gets made over and over again."
His jaw was tight. I could see him processing it — not dismissing it, actually working it through, the way he worked through everything, with the full weight of that machinery turned on a thing that resisted his categories.
"The people I love are not a threat to you. The way you treat me looks like a threat in their eyes. So can you blame them for fighting so hard to save me?"
He didn't answer.
"If you keep making choices that hurt me and the people I love, I will leave. I want to be clear about that. I will not compromise on that."
The silence that followed was different from the silence in the car, or the elevator, or the locked door. It had texture. It had weight. It was the silence of a man who had just had something he believed in since he was a teen turned over in his hands and shown to him from the other side.
Vidar looked at his watch. He looked at the skyline. He looked at his hands. Then he looked at me.
"You should get some rest." He nodded his head towards my door. Not his bedroom.
I was too tired to fight. So I got up and went to my room.
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
VIDAR
She had gone to bed at ten. I watched the light under her door go out at ten-seventeen. Since then, nothing. No sound of movement, no creak of the floorboards, no soft percussion of bare feet on slate. The door stayed closed. The light stayed off.
I stayed on the couch.
I was a man who ran a nine-figure enterprise, who managed the political architecture of six-packs and several layers of organized human industry, who had not once in his adult life been unable to identify the logical course of action and take it. The logical course of action tonight was to go to bed in my own room and sleep and approach the morning as a series of solvable problems.
I sat on the couch and watched her door.
She could leave. She'd proved she could evade me. Said she would if I failed her again. I believed her. Addie did not saythings she didn't mean, and she did not mean things she wasn't prepared to follow through on.
That was the problem.
I had given her everything I knew how to give. The clothing, the money, the accounts, the access, the work she was built for and hadn't been allowed to fully use. I had given her a seat at the table and a mark on her throat, and my family's name. I had given her everything in my inventory, and she was sleeping twelve feet away behind a closed door, and I did not know if she would still be there in the morning.
At midnight I got up and checked the elevator — still locked from my override. I had engaged it after she went to bed and then felt immediately contemptible about it and then left it engaged anyway because the fuck was I going to make it easy for her to slip through my fingers. At five, I made coffee. I didn't drink it. At six, I sat back down on the couch.
At seven-forty, someone knocked at the door.
Three knocks. A specific rhythm — two, then one, then two again. The same pattern my father had used on my childhood bedroom door when I was twelve years old and refusing to get up for a pack run I didn't want to go on. When I was fifteen and hadn't come down for dinner after a fight with Magnus. When I was nineteen, two weeks after the ambush, and I had locked myself in my room with the financial records and the damage assessment and the certainty that if I stopped working, I would have to feel the thing I was refusing to feel.
