His voice was low and controlled, every syllable cut clean. Not for show. Not for vengeance. For truth.
“You lost the right to speak to her.”
The silence that followed was deafening. Even the street noise seemed to fade. Somewhere nearby, a car passed, oblivious.
Kieran let the words hang in the air just long enough for them to sink in.
“Mark my words,” Dex said, his voice gaining a desperate edge as he tried to reclaim some control. “She’ll come back to me. She always does. She needs me.”
“No, she won’t.” Kieran’s response was immediate and final.
9WILLA
I wokeup in Kieran’s penthouse the next morning with my arm still in a sling and the weight of Jude’s box tucked safely into the nightstand drawer beside my bed. The guest room he had given me was larger than the entire living room I shared with Dex, with windows that stretched from floor to ceiling and offered a view of the city that made me feel as though I floated above the world instead of living in it. For a long moment, I lay there, staring at the glass and steel horizon, trying to reconcile this height with how small I felt inside it.
Everything in the place was perfect—expensive, pristine, untouchable. The sheets were Egyptian cotton with a thread count I couldn’t pronounce. Even the coffee maker in the kitchen was some Italian machine that looked like it required an engineering degree to operate.
I felt like a charity case.
The private nurse Kieran arranged came every morning at nine—a competent woman named Helen who checked my wound, supervised my movements, and spoke to me in the kind of gentle, professional tone reserved for invalids and small children. She was kind, efficient, and completely unnecessary;my shoulder was healing well, and I could manage the basic care myself.
But Kieran insisted, just as he insisted on having groceries delivered, arranging transportation to my physical therapy appointments, and handling every detail of my recovery with the same cold efficiency he probably applied to his business deals.
He took care of me the way someone might tend to a wounded bird they found in their yard—with careful attention and clinical detachment, waiting for the day it would be strong enough to fly away.
“I can’t just sit here and be taken care of,” I told him three days after we returned from the apartment. We were sitting in his living room—me curled up on his leather sofa with a book I couldn’t concentrate on, him working on his laptop with the kind of focused intensity that made the air around him feel charged. Outside, the city moved on without me.
He looked up from his screen, those dark eyes assessing me like I was a problem to be solved. “The doctor said you need rest. Your body is still healing from trauma.”
“My body is fine. It’s my mind that’s going crazy from sitting around doing nothing.”
“What do you want to do?”
The question was simple, but the way he asked it—like he genuinely couldn’t imagine what I might be capable of—stung more than I wanted to admit.
“I want to feel useful. I want to contribute something instead of just taking up space in your perfect life.”
Something flickered across his face at that, but it was gone so quickly I might have imagined it. “You’re not taking up space. You’re recovering.”
“For how long? Until Jude comes back? Until you find somewhere else to put me?”
“Is that what you think this is?” His voice was carefully controlled, but I heard something underneath it that sounded almost like hurt. “That I’m just warehousing you until someone else can take responsibility?”
“Aren’t you?”
The silence that followed was loaded with three years of history and misunderstanding. I watched him start to say something, then stop himself, retreating behind the professional mask he had worn since the night he found me bleeding in that alley.
“If you want to feel useful,” he said finally, “I suppose you could help with some basic office work. Filing, scheduling, answering phones. Nothing strenuous.”
The offer was made grudgingly, like he was humoring a child who wanted to help with grown-up work. But it was something, and I was desperate enough to take it.
“Thank you,” I said, and I meant it, even though his reluctance made it clear this was charity, not partnership.
That was how I found myself sitting in the Cross Security offices the next morning. The building was all glass and steel, thirty floors of intimidating corporate power that made me feel small from the moment I stepped off the elevator. Navigating a world built for two working arms felt alien, every door handle, chair, and stack of paperwork a reminder of how out of place I was.
Kieran’s assistant, a polished woman named Rebecca who wore designer suits and spoke in the kind of crisp, efficient sentences that belonged in boardrooms, set me up with a desk in a corner of the reception area.
“Mr. Cross thought you might start with updating client files,” she said, handing me a stack of folders thick enough to double as a weapon. “Just basic data entry. Nothing confidential, of course.”
