My heart felt like it might burst from happiness. “Is that a proposal, Mr. Cross?”
“It’s a promise, Ms. Winslow. The proposal comes later, when you’re not wearing body armor and we haven’t just survived a hostage situation.”
I laughed, actually laughed, and kissed him. Soft and sweet and full of all the possibilities that stretched ahead of us. When we broke apart, I rested my forehead against his.
“I love you,” I said, the words coming easily for the first time in my life. “I think I’ve loved you since I was seventeen years old.”
“I knew I loved you since then,” he said. “I was too scared to admit it. Too scared I would ruin you.”
“You didn’t ruin me. You saved me.”
“We saved each other.”
And we had. Two broken people who’d learned that sometimes love wasn’t about being whole when you found each other. Sometimes it was about being brave enough to heal together.
I was reaching for him again, ready to kiss him properly, ready to start the rest of our lives, when his phone rang.
He glanced at the caller ID, his expression shifted from contentment to confusion. “FBI. Agent Morrison.”
“Take it,” I said. “It’s probably just a follow-up about Dex.”
But as I watched him answer, as I saw his face change from confusion to shock to devastating grief, I knew this wasn’t about Dex.
This was something that was about to destroy everything we’d just won.
“When?” he asked, his voice barely audible.
A pause.
“Are you sure?”
Another pause, longer this time.
“No, I understand. Thank you for letting me know.”
He hung up slowly, staring at the phone like it had just delivered news of the apocalypse. When he looked at me, his eyes were filled with a pain so deep it took my breath away.
“Kieran?” I whispered. “What is it?”
“It’s Jude,” he said, and I felt my entire world tilt off its axis.
“What about Jude?”
“Willa…” He reached for me, but I was already pulling back, already knowing that whatever he was about to say was going to change everything.
“What about my brother?”
“He was killed in action three days ago.”
18KIERAN
I saved Willa from Dex,from physical danger, from external threats that I could identify and neutralize with tactical precision. But I couldn’t save her from this grief, and it was killing me to watch her disappear into it.
Three weeks passed since Agent Morrison’s phone call destroyed everything we’d just won. Three weeks of watching the woman I loved retreat so far into herself that sometimes I wondered if she was even aware I was in the same room.
She stopped coming to my room the morning after we’d gotten the news about Jude. No discussion, no explanation—I had just woken up to find her things gone from my bedroom and her door closed with the kind of finality that suggested I shouldn’t knock.
“I need space,” she said when I tried to talk to her about it. “I need time to process.”
