The hotel suite had one bedroom.
I stood in the doorway and stared at the king-sized bed like it had personally offended me. Cillian set a key-card on the counter and shrugged off his coat like this was completely normal. Like checking into a hotel with your runaway wife on a Tuesday afternoon was just how his week worked.
"There's a couch," he said, reading my face.
"There'd better be."
The suite was clean and modern and had the soulless elegance of a place designed for businessmen who didn't unpack. Neutral walls, generic art, a kitchenette with a kettle and two mugs. I already missed Lana's chaotic apartment with its sticky cabinets and the shower that only worked if you kicked the faucet.
My phone had been buzzing nonstop since the car. I sank onto the couch and opened the group chat.
Lana:EVIE. The photo has 340 shares now. Katie from bio lab shared it with the caption "accounting girl has a SECRET HUSBAND??"
Elena:I'm giving him an 8. Would be a 9 but he has murder energy and that's a deduction.
Lana:That's not a deduction that's a bonus. 9.5.
Elena:You need therapy.
Lana:I need his skincare routine. That jawline is not natural.
Fourteen messages below that. People from class. Someone I'd spoken to exactly once at orientation. A girl named Megan who I was fairly certain had never acknowledged my existence was now asking if my husband was single, which was a question that answered itself.
I missed being nobody.
Cillian was on a call in the bedroom, voice low, switching between Russian and something else I couldn't place. I couldn't understand any of it but I could read the tone. Controlled, but tight underneath, like a wire being tuned.
I needed to do something with my hands or I was going to lose my mind.
The kitchenette had a kettle, two packets of instant oatmeal, a sad collection of tea bags, and a bag of pasta that someone had optimistically left in the cabinet. No stove, but there was a kettle, and I was desperate enough to try it.
I filled the kettle, dumped the pasta in, and turned it on.
I was chopping the single sad garlic clove I'd found with a butter knife when the smell hit.
The kettle was hissing, starchy water bubbling over the sides and pooling on the counter. Smoke leaked from the base. The whole kitchenette smelled like burned flour.
"No no no—"
I lunged for the kettle. The metal handle was scorching. I grabbed it anyway, yelped, and jerked my hand back.
Cillian appeared in the kitchenette doorway. He took in the scene with one sweep: the smoking kettle, the pasta carnage, the garlic massacred by butter knife, and me cradling my hand against my chest.
"Were you trying to cook pasta in a kettle?" he asked.
"I was succeeding until the kettle betrayed me."
He crossed the small kitchen in two steps. His hand caught my wrist and turned my palm up, thumb brushing across the red mark where the metal had caught me. His fingers were cool against the burn.
"It's nothing," I said. "Just a—"
"Hold still."
He ran cold water from the tap and guided my hand under it, his chest pressed against my back in the narrow kitchenette. There wasn't room for two people in here, not really, and definitely not when one of them was built like Cillian. His other hand rested on the counter beside my hip, bracketing me in. I could feel the warmth of him through my hoodie, the steady rhythm of his breathing against my shoulder blade.
My own breathing was doing something less steady.
"You could have ordered room service," he said, his voice close to my ear.
"Room service doesn't have the same healing properties as stress cooking."
"This isn't cooking. This is a crime scene."
"An unintentional one. I should get a lighter sentence."
His thumb was still moving across my wrist, slow circles on the inside where my pulse was doing embarrassing things. He had to feel it. There was no way he didn't feel it. From this close I could see the line of his jaw, the faint shadow of stubble along it, the way his lashes cast shadows against his cheekbones when he looked down at my hand. It was distracting in a way that felt deliberate, like he'd been designed specifically to make women forget what they were angry about.
The water ran cold over my fingers and the rest of me was burning.
"It's fine now," I said. My voice came out quieter than I wanted.
He didn't step back immediately. His thumb traced one more circle. Then he released my hand, reached past me to unplug the kettle, and stepped away.
The air rushed back in.
I busied myself cleaning the destroyed kettle, which gave me an excuse not to look at him. He leaned against the counter and watched me, arms crossed, the faintest trace of amusement still on his face.
After I'd scraped the last of the pasta remains into the trash, something in me settled. I kept thinking about what I'd read earlier, the headline I'd finally finished at two in the morning. His mother's face in that emerald dress. The boy who used to smile. The thing that had happened to take all of it away.
He didn't know I knew. And looking at him now, leaning against the counter in this sterile hotel kitchen with his sleeves rolled to his forearms, I thought maybe I could try being less terrible to him. Just slightly. Just for one evening. The man had driven me across town, let me destroy his kettle, and hadn't once said I told you so about any of it.
I cleared my throat. "Do you, um." I wiped my hands on a towel, not looking at him. "Do you want tea? I can make tea. The kettle still works, I think. Probably."
He tilted his head. "You're offering me tea."
"Don't make it weird."
"You burned my kettle and now you're offering me tea from its corpse."
"It's called hospitality. Accept it or don't."
Something shifted in his expression. Like I'd said something in a language he understood but hadn't heard in a long time.
"Careful, Ava," he said. "I might think you actually like me."
"Don't get excited. I'm just being a decent human. It's a low bar and you're still barely clearing it."
He almost smiled at that. Almost. The light from the window caught his eyes and turned them that pale, sharp green that always caught me off guard, the color softer than anything else about him.
I made the tea. It was bad. He drank it without complaint, which was somehow the most unsettling thing he'd done all day.
Jason's text came while Cillian was in the bathroom.
Jason:I found some things that don't add up, Evie. Your social security number flagged something when I asked around. I'm not trying to scare you but I think you need to tell me the truth before someone else starts asking.
My stomach dropped. I was still staring at the screen when a second buzz came. Not from my current phone. From the bag on the couch, muffled and faint. A sound I hadn't heard in three months.
My old burner. The one from my previous life, shoved in the bottom of the tote, dead for months. I'd plugged it in to charge out of habit while looking for the kettle's outlet.
One message. A number I recognized like my own heartbeat.
Matteo:Ave, I found this number in nonna's old phone book. Dad won't tell me anything. People came to the house. I'm scared. Please.
Of course, Matteo had found Nonna's phone book. He was smart and scared and twelve years old and the only person in that house who ever actually looked for me.
I read the message three times. Then I looked across the room at Cillian's coat hanging by the door, his phone on the counter, the space he occupied even when he wasn't in it.
Three months of running. Three months of hiding, of building walls, of telling myself I could do this alone.
My baby brother was scared and I was sitting in a hotel room with burned pasta and a man who had the power to do something about it.
For the first time, I didn't want to run from him.
I wanted to ask him for help.