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Rurik took it carefully. His fingers closed around mine with none of the desperate possession I had expected. He held me as though my hand were not a promise, only a truth we were finally willing to share.

“I wish I could love you the way you deserve,” I said.

Pain moved across his face, but he didn’t release me. “I don’t need another version of your life. I need you to stop abandoning the one you still have.”

“I don’t know how to believe I can survive this.”

“Then don’t believe it yet. Let me believe it until you can.”

For years, Salvatore’s voice had carried me from one morning to the next. Live until morning. Rurik offered no forever and demanded no future. He asked only that I stop treating the next sunrise as something meant for everyone else.

“My parents still need to know,” I said.

“Yes.”

“Then take me to Boston.”

Rurik’s thumb moved once across my knuckles. “I will take you, but you will not disappear, surrender yourself, or confront Sylvia without me.”

“You can’t turn love into another locked door.”

“And you cannot turn freedom into permission to leave me behind.”

I had no promise of survival to give him. Any vow that I would live would have been another kindness shaped like a lie. But one choice remained honest.

“I won’t leave you behind.”

Rurik released my hand and started the engine. The dashboard illuminated the exhaustion carved into his face.

“You already tried,” he said.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

The gates of Maxim’s estate opened before us, as Rurik drove away from the only window in the house I couldn’t bear to watch disappear. Henry remained somewhere beyond the trees with my kiss cooling against his forehead and Illyria’s promise standing guard beside his bed. I kept my face turned toward the darkness until the iron gates closed behind us, because watching them meet felt too much like witnessing the last door of my life seal shut.

Rurik said nothing as the road carried us away, but silence had never meant peace with him. His hands stayed fixed at ten and two, too careful for a man who usually drove one-handed, and each time I shifted in my seat, his gaze cut toward me before returning to the road. His confession remained between us, too new and painful to call love without making it sound like something beautiful. The hand he’d held still remembered the careful pressure of his fingers. I had promised I wouldn’t leave him behind. He had answered that I’d already tried. Then he drove toward Manhattan instead of Boston.

“You missed the turn,” I said when the signs for Boston disappeared behind us.

“I did not.”

There was no anger in the answer, which made it harder to challenge. “You decided where I’m going without asking me.”

His jaw tightened. “If I ask, you will lie. If I tell you, you will find a way around me. Manhattan gives me more exits.”

“You mean fewer for me.”

For one breath, his eyes left the road and held mine. “I mean I am trying to keep you alive long enough to hate me for it.”

The city received us before dawn, all glass towers and shuttered storefronts washed in the colorless light before morning decided what it wanted to be. Rurik changed cars twice, checking every mirror as though grief itself had learned how to follow. At the second exchange, he kept one hand around my wrist until I was safely inside the next vehicle. Not hard enough to hurt. Firm enough to make the warning unmistakable. I did not ask where we were going. Asking would have required me to admit I still expected an answer that included safety, and safety had become another word people used when they wanted to delay the inevitable.

By the time we reached the next safe house, my promise to stay until morning had already begun changing shape inside me. Rurik opened the door first, weapon drawn, then motioned me into a narrow hallway that smelled faintly of dust, old coffee, and rain soaking through the bricks outside. He waited until the locks engaged before looking at me, his body blocking the only obvious exit. “Tell me now,” he said quietly. “Are you planning to run?”

I met his gaze and hated that he knew which question to ask. “I promised you morning.”

His expression did not change. “That was not my question.”

It was not a home. It was a room chosen because it could be abandoned quickly, which made it honest in a way Maxim’s gates had never been.