“Tell me this wasn’t just another goodbye, Seph,” Nerissa murmurs. All that remains is the raw vulnerability of someone who has given herself completely.
Seraphina holds her gaze without wavering. Her chest is still rising and falling heavily.
“I’m not leaving,” Seraphina replies, utterly convinced. “Not anymore. I’m sick of running away from how I feel about you.”
Nerissa watches her in silence, scrutinizing every detail of her face. She searches for the lie. She searches for the fear. But she finds only solid determination, as if something inside Seraphina had broken and been rebuilt differently this time.
For the first time in a long time, the knot in Nerissa’s chest loosens. She strokes Seraphina’s reddened lower lip with her thumb and leans in to kiss her, almost reverently.
“Then prove it to me,” she asks. “I don’t want to feel like I’m losing you every time you walk out the door.”
Seraphina nods and buries her fingers in the hair at the nape of Nerissa’s neck, pulling her toward her mouth.
“Even if everything goes to hell. Even if I have to lose everything. I choose you. I choose us. I just… need a little more time.”
Nerissa closes her eyes and lets those words sink deep into her. She knows the road ahead will be difficult, that storms and painful consequences will come. But as she looks into Seraphina’s eyes in the dim light, she believes, for the first time, that this time might be different.
That this time, Seraphina has chosen to stay and fight.
Chapter 15
“You’re going to freeze your hands off if you keep insisting on going without gloves.”
Nerissa’s voice is muffled by the damp wind rising from the River Dee, laden with the scent of wet earth and ancient stone. She walks beside her with her hands buried in the pockets of her black coat, her shoulders relaxed and carrying that elegance that always makes her seem dangerously self-possessed. Chester stretches out beneath them like a postcard frozen in another century, and Seraphina Chapman smiles. She smiles because she is utterly happy, even if she has to tuck her chin into the collar of her coat.
“Don’t exaggerate. It’s not that cold,” she replies.
“Says the woman who’s been rubbing her hands together for ten minutes as if trying to start a fire,” Nerissa retorts before flashing an incredible smile.
Seraphina is about to fire off one of those sharp retorts she usually uses to protect herself at board meetings, but then she looks around. No one knows them in this city. No one expects a studied smile, impeccable posture, or an impeccable surname from her. That absence of scrutiny gives her a strange, liberating sense of vertigo.
She stops in the middle of the Roman wall. Nerissa turns her head slowly and watches her in profile, bathed in the goldenlight of a streetlamp. The wind plays with a few dark strands of her hair and makes the tip of her nose turn slightly red. She is beautiful in a painfully ordinary way: she is neither the feared surgeon nor the woman who pushes her against hotel walls with savage urgency. She is simply Nerissa, tired after a hellish day, walking beside her.
Seraphina pulls her hand out of her pocket and intertwines her fingers with hers, feeling Nerissa’s slight start before her hand responds to the touch.
“No one knows us here,” Seraphina whispers, squeezing her fingers lightly. “Walk with me. Let me feel that this can be real. Without fear getting in the way.”
Nerissa’s expression changes completely. It isn’t an immediate smile, but something deeper and more vulnerable, as if that simple gesture had just opened a crack in all the walls she’s built between them over the last few weeks.
“You don’t know how dangerous you are when you do this,” Nerissa replies.
“Holding your hand?” Seraphina asks with feigned innocence.
“Acting like this could be normal. Like we could have this every day.”
Seraphina swallows.
“It’s going to be like this, I promise. As soon as I get everything sorted out,” she promises.
Together, they continue walking slowly along the wall.
Below, traffic moves slowly amid wet reflections and reddish lights. A group of tourists passes by laughing, too busytaking pictures to pay them any attention. For the first time since it all began, Seraphina doesn’t feel the need to let go, to run away.
“The conference was torture,” she remarks shortly after, trying to lighten the intensity surrounding them. “Four hours listening to men talk about ‘resource optimization’ as if patients’ lives didn’t matter.”
Nerissa bursts out laughing and shakes her head.
“I can just imagine.”
