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“Yeah.” Darius set his drink on the console table, untouched, which she was beginning to understand was itself a kind of statement from him. “You two are going to be absolutely fine.”

He let himself out without waiting for either of them to respond, closing the door behind him with a quiet click that landed like the final word on a conversation nobody had quite finished having out loud.

NINETEEN

ROMILY

Two hours alone in a penthouse gave a person plenty of time to do the accounting she’d been dodging for weeks.

Romily sat curled into the corner of Norden’s couch, still in yesterday’s clothes, glass shard finally set aside on the coffee table like the world’s least reassuring paperweight. The city glittered indifferently through the floor-to-ceiling windows, utterly uninterested in the fact that a woman inside one of its towers was finally, belatedly, having a conversation with herself she’d been avoiding since the day Gerri Wilder walked into her studio uninvited.

She went through it the way she’d go through a set of load calculations — no rounding in her own favor, no room for a version of the story that flattered her. Need nobody, and nobody gets the chance to gut you the way Renata had. That was the whole founding principle. It had built her a studio, a reputation, a client list that didn’t require anyone’s permission to exist, and she was truly, unapologetically proud of every inch of it.

And you’ve been calling it independence for years when the real word is lonely.

She hated how accurate that sounded, said in her own voice, at an hour she’d stopped bothering to check.

Cool. Great. Emotional breakthrough, several hours after watching my boyfriend turn into a dragon and dismantle a building. Very on brand.

Boyfriend reads like the wrong word for a man redecorating a skyscraper with his bare hands, but the English language hasn’t come up with an accurate word for romantic dragon shifters yet. It’ll have to do.

She thought about the studio, six years alone with a furnace she’d installed out of a manual and pure stubbornness. Renata had taught her that real things could be taken. Gone, on the other hand, you only had to lose once.

You’re allowed to want the thing you spent years pretending you didn’t want. Nobody revokes the studio for admitting that.

Conceding a decade-long argument with herself in the middle of someone else’s living room read, against every prediction she’d have made about it, nothing like defeat. It read like unclenching a fist she hadn’t noticed she’d been making since she was twenty-two.

The door opened without ceremony. Norden crossed the threshold the way he did everything — present, easy, no performance in it anywhere. He didn’t lead with an explanation of what he’d done to a financial district building or a man named Tarek. He didn’t need to.

He crossed the room in three strides and hauled her up off the couch and against him before she’d finished getting her feet under her, one arm banded hard across her back, face buried in her hair like he needed to confirm with his whole body that she was still where he’d left her. He held her like that a long moment, saying nothing, his heartbeat against her cheek slowing by degrees, a man running his own private inventory before he trusted himself to speak.

“You’re squeezing the air out of me.”

“I’m aware.” He didn’t loosen his grip in the slightest. “Give me a moment.”

She gave him the moment. When he finally let her breathe properly again, she noticed he’d changed his shirt somewhere between the wreckage and here, but the exhaustion sat on him regardless, a bone-deep kind that all those years apparently didn’t buy immunity from. He crouched in front of her without being asked, and checked her bandage again, unwilling to fully believe her safety until he’d confirmed it himself.

“It’s still attached. I checked ten minutes ago, and Victor checked it twice before that, so between the two of you I’m confident it isn’t going anywhere.”

“I’m checking again.”

“You’re going to wear a groove in that arm, checking it this many times in a single evening.”

“I’ve considered the risk and decided it’s acceptable, all things weighed.” He pressed a kiss to her knuckles, in no hurry, and finally sat back on his heels, studying her the way an engineer studies a structure that’s just survived something it shouldn’t have. “You went quiet somewhere around the third floor. I noticed.”

“I go quiet when I’m doing math. You should be used to it by now.”

“I am. I still notice. I don’t expect that to change.”

He settled onto the couch beside her, close enough that his shoulder pressed against hers, and for a moment, neither of them said anything at all — a rare kind of silence between two people who’d spent the last several hours proving, in increasingly dramatic fashion, exactly how much they meant to each other.

“You’re doing the math again.”

“I’m always doing the math. It’s a compulsion at this point, not a hobby.”

“What’s the current total.”

She looked at him a long moment, weighing whether tonight was the night she said it out loud or the night she deflected with a joke and put it off another week. She was tired of putting things off. She’d spent six years perfecting the art of putting things off, and the skill had never made her happier, only safer, and safer had started reading like a worse trade than she used to think it was.