Terrified.
Both at once, the way only Riley ever manages to do.
I put the weapon down and open the window.
“What are you doing here?” Barely a sound. Less than a whisper.
“Let me in.”
I check the garden first.
The path back to the main house is still and quiet. The guards are at the far perimeter, unchanged, and the cameras are angled away.
Clean…
For now.
I step back from the window and let her in.
She comes through it with the practiced ease of a woman who has been moving carefully through dangerous spaces for months, no wasted movement, no noise, her bare feet finding the floor without a sound.
I close the window behind her and turn around.
The robe has fallen open more, but I keep my eyes on her face.
“How did you get out?” Still barely a whisper.
“I told the guards I needed some fresh air.” Her voice matches mine, less than a whisper, years of training making it instinctive. “That I couldn’t sleep. They wanted to come—”
“But you told them you needed the time alone.”
“You know how it works.”
“I know how it works. I also know you improvised that on the spot, which means you’ve used one of your limited excuses, and now you’ve got one fewer—”
“Ryan.”
She says my name, my actual name, not Marco, not anything else, and the sound of it in her mouth in the night stops me completely.
I hadn’t heard my own name in weeks.
She looks at me for a long moment, really looks, the way she’d been trying to do across the dinner table for hours, no candlelight, wine, and Clemente between us now. Just her eyes, my face, and eight months of everything that had happened since the last time we’d been in the same room.
Her face changes.
Something cracks open in it, and everything she’d held together through dinner finally releases at once, the way things do when you find somewhere safe enough to let them go.
Her eyes fill.
I cross the distance between us and reach her at the same moment she reaches me, both of us moving without deciding to, and I hold her. Both arms, her face against my chest, her hands gripping the back of my shirt like she is checking I am real, like if she holds on hard enough, she can confirm this isn’t something her exhausted mind has constructed out of isolation and hope.
I am real.
She is real.
She has one hand at the back of her head, and says nothing because there is nothing that matters more than this right now. Just this. Just being alive in the same room. Just two people who have known each other through enough darkness to understand that sometimes the only thing required is to hold on.
Her breathing slowly evens out.
