My blood is already humming.
“You here for a thank you card?” The words come out low, edged with violence I’m barely holding back.
Rowan doesn’t answer right away. He simply looks up at me with that same expression he’s leveled at me since I was a boy—patient, knowing, and utterly in control. It still crawls under my skin like spiders.
“To settle accounts,” he says quietly. “And to deliver on my end of an arrangement.”
The room feels smaller. The air heavier.
“What arrangement?”
His eyes flick to Ian. Just once. Brief. Almost nothing.
But it’s enough.
Ian’s jaw tightens, almost imperceptibly. A tiny tell most people would miss. I don’t. I see it. And the way Rowan’s mouth curves—just the faintest shadow of satisfaction—tells me everything I need to know and nothing I want to.
“What the fuck is going on?”
I look between them. The quiet knowing in Rowan’s face. The deliberate blankness in Ian’s. Two men holding opposite ends of a secret I’m not being shown yet.
“Your friend,” Rowan says, slowly dragging his gaze back to me, “drives a very hard bargain.” There’s something in his tone I can’t fully read—not admiration, not amusement. Something deeper. More genuine. Almost respectful. It makes my skin crawl. “He offered me something I couldn’t refuse.”
The words settle in the room like smoke.
I look at Ian.
He’s standing with his arms crossed, weight shifted to his back foot—the exact posture of a man who has already decided where he stands and isn’t fucking moving. He isn’t looking at Rowan. He isn’t quite looking at me either. His eyes are fixed on some point just past my shoulder, jaw locked tight, that distant, heavy stare I’ve seen on him across eleven years and every impossible situation we’ve survived together.
I know that look. I’ve learned to read the precise weight of it.
This isn’t Ian managing information for tactical reasons. This isn’t Ian being cagey because the timing isn’t right. This is Ian having already paid something. And from the look on his face, the price was steep.
Something cold moves through my chest. "What’s the deal, Ian?”
"Not today, Reth."
“What’s the fucking deal?”
He meets my eyes, and what's in his is enough to make me stop—the absolute certainty of a man who has made a choice and is living inside it.
"Deal with what's on the table first."
“Listen to your friend, Reth.” Rowan reaches into the inside pocket of his jacket. Sets a single folded piece of paper on the table between us. Smoothly. Without drama. The way you set down something you've been carrying for a long time and are finally ready to put down.
I don't touch it yet, eyes glued on Ian, whose expression is stone.
“I’ll let Ian here tell you his part of the deal when he’sready, but here’s mine.” He slides the paper toward me with two fingers. “That is my wife handed to you…on a silver. Fucking. Platter.”
I remain perfectly still.
No sudden movement. No outburst. Just the slow, methodical churn of my mind turning over every variable, every possible angle, every hidden blade this offer might carry. My gaze drops to the folded paper for only a second before returning to Rowan.
I don’t move. I count instead. The shallow rise of Rowan’s chest. The white of Ian’s knuckle where his hand grips his own forearm. The number of steps—four, maybe five—between me and the man whose voice used to make me wet myself as a child going through excruciating training, being built into what I am today, who is now sitting in my house, in my chair, in my light, with his legs crossed like he’s waiting on a fucking train.
My voice, when it finally comes, is low and flat. Controlled. “Why?”
Rowan lifts a brow. “Your friend and I made a deal.”
