Page 30 of Accidental Alliance

Whatever this is, whatever pulled her back to my apartment despite all common sense to stay away, has gone beyond just a single night shared together.

This is no longer something either of us can dismiss as a mistake made in a moment of weakness.

She takes in a breath like it hurts. “I wanted to tell you myself that I’m leaving the city.”

I go perfectly still. “What?”

For a second, I am not even sure I heard her correctly. The words seem to hang in the air, suspended and too unreal to be true. That is the last thing I ever thought I’d hear. Not why did you leave? Or why weren’t you here to tell me? Those questions would almost be easier to handle. Not this.

I was ready for her anger, for her to blame and lash out at me because of her grief.

Nothing prepared me for this. I stare at her while trying to find the crack in her expression that says she does not mean it. That this is grief speaking for her and this temporary feeling is simply an impulse to run from reality. Anything but real.

She looks tired but there is resolve threaded through her posture. It sits in the lift of her chin and the way she holds my gaze without flinching.

Careful control wraps around every breath she takes, settling her shoulders back.

“Leaving for where?” I ask, though I already know that isn’t really the question I want to ask. I ask it anyway because the alternative is asking for how long, and I am not ready for that answer. Or worse, for her refusal to give it to me.

Her eyes flicker. “I don’t know.”

My mouth opens, then closes again.

She folds her arms tighter around herself. “My father is dead, Elio.”

I say nothing.

What is there to say to argue?

Her laugh is soft and joyless. “We haven’t even put him in the ground yet and people are already whispering about what comes next and who can be trusted.” She swallows. “I can feel it when people look at me. They think I know something.”

The shame that hits me then is hot enough to feel like a fever. I sat there during those meetings with my face carved out of stone and said nothing because to defend her too fiercely would have exposed us both. Now she stands in front of me carrying the damage of that silence.

My jaw clenches until it aches. “You think leaving will make you safer?”

The correction is immediate. “It will make me less visible to people who think I have something to do with my father’s death.”

My lips thin.

She is too smart to pretend true safety exists for people like us, but invisibility, distance, obscurity from the world we both grew up in… these are things that will make her harder to hunt if she can successfully disappear without anyone outside of her family’s administration knowing.

I take another step toward her before I can stop myself. “Tell me where you’re going.”

Those honey-gold eyes lift to finally look at me. “I will if you agree to come with me.”

Something violent flashes through me so fast, it leaves my hands curling at my sides.

Not at her, never at her. I would sooner cut off my own arm than turn that kind of violence on her.

No, what surges through me is aimed at the request itself and at the brutal, breathtaking recklessness of her standing in my apartment and offering me the one thing I have wanted from the moment she first looked at me

Come with me. As if it could be that simple.

Beneath the instinct to reject what she is asking, something uglier tears awake inside me. Want. So strong, it makes my chest feel split straight down the center.

For one ugly, traitorous beat, I see myself bridging the distance between us, grabbing her hand, and walking back to the elevator without another word.

I see highways swallowing the city behind us as we drive, and motels booked under false names while we strip ourselves of our past identities.