The dean's office. Campus security. Admissions.
The words rattled around my skull while Cillian stood beside me in the hallway looking like he was calculating how many problems he could solve before lunch and how many of them were named Jason.
Jason was still standing there, pale and rigid. Cillian hadn't raised his voice. He'd stepped forward, leaned in, and said something so low I couldn't hear it over the noise of students moving past us. I didn't catch a single word.
But I caught the effect.
Jason's face went through three stages in about four seconds. Confusion. Recognition. And then something I'd never seen on him before. Real, bone-deep understanding that he had walked into a room he did not belong in and the door had just locked behind him.
He looked at me. Searching. Wanting me to shake my head or roll my eyes or give him any sign that this was a bluff.
I couldn't.
He left. His sneakers squeaked on the tile floor and then he turned the corner and was gone. But the look he gave me right before he turned, that stubborn set to his jaw even through the fear, told me Jason Miller wasn't the kind of person who stayed scared for long.
"What did you say to him?" I asked.
Cillian straightened his cuff. "Nothing he didn't need to hear."
"That's not an answer."
"It's the one you're getting."
Before I could argue, movement at the end of the hallway pulled my attention. A man was walking toward us with the loose, unhurried stride of someone who had been nearby the entire time and had simply decided this was the moment to stop being invisible.
He was tall, almost Cillian's height, with sandy brown hair and the kind of easy, open face that made you want to trust him immediately. Which probably meant you shouldn't. He was wearing a leather jacket over a plain white t-shirt, jeans, boots.
"Nik," Cillian said.
Nik grinned at him. "You look cheerful." His accent was Irish. Full and warm and completely at odds with the fact that he clearly worked for a man who made people go pale with whispered sentences. His eyes slid to me and his grin widened. "And you must be the wife."
I blinked.
"Shorter than the file suggested," he added, looking me up and down with open amusement. "Also, significantly more alive than I expected, given the morning you've apparently had."
"There's a file?" I said.
"Nik," Cillian said again, this time with the tone of a man who was considering violence against his own employee.
Nik raised both hands in surrender but the grin didn't budge. "Just making conversation. She looks like she could use some."
I liked him immediately. I could tell by the way Cillian's jaw tightened that this was exactly what he'd been afraid of.
Cillian turned to Nik and the grin faded into something sharper. The shift was instant. Nik's posture didn't change but his eyes did. He was listening the way people listen when the stakes are real.
"A welfare concern was filed this morning on Evie Ross". Cillian said. "There's a friend in admissions who accessed the file. Handle it."
Nik nodded once. Already moving, already focused. "The kid who filed it?"
"Handled."
"The photo on the gossip page?"
"Low priority. The file is what matters."
"Done." Nik glanced at me one more time, and the warmth came back. "Nice meeting you, Mrs. Volkov. Try not to give him a heart attack before dinner."
He walked toward the admin building with his hands in his pockets, whistling something I couldn't place.
The car was waiting outside. Same black car, same silent driver. I got in without being told. The door closed and the campus shrank behind the tinted glass.
Cillian didn't speak for two full blocks.
I knew what was coming. The silence had a texture to it, heavy and loaded, and his jaw was doing that thing where the muscle ticked like a countdown.
I decided to try something. I turned to him, smiled my brightest smile, and said, "Hey, babe. Before you get angry at your wife... I had a reason."
He looked at me.
I held the smile.
He did not smile back.
Internally, I was already dying. Babe. Had I just tried to flirt my way out of a confrontation with a mafia prince? Was that seduction? Was I seducing? I had never seduced anyone in my life. If this was my attempt, I deserved to be arrested for crimes against romance.
"You had a reason," he said. His voice was even. Controlled. Which was worse than yelling because yelling meant he'd lost his grip and this man never lost his grip. "You had a reason to leave the hotel I told you to stay in, with no security, no phone check-in, while someone we haven't identified is watching you."
So much for the babe strategy.
"Jason was about to blow my cover. He'd already emailed the dean. If I'd waited for you to figure something out, there would have been nothing left to figure out."
"And if the person sending those texts had been between the hotel and campus? If something had happened to you on a bus, alone, with no one knowing where you were?"
"Then I would have handled it."
"Like you handled the alley?"
That one landed. The night we met again. The drunk who grabbed my arm. The moment I'd needed him and hated that I'd needed him.
"That's not fair," I said quietly.
"None of this is fair." He turned to look at me and the full weight of his attention was almost physical. Green eyes catching the light from the window, jaw tight, every part of him held in check by sheer will. He was angry. But underneath the anger there was something else. Something he was working very hard not to show me.
"I have been taking care of myself since before you knew I existed," I said. "I ran from my father's house with a bag of stolen cash and a fake name. I built a life. I got a job. I made friends. I was surviving."
"You were hiding."
"Yes. And I was good at it until you showed up."
His jaw flexed. He looked away, toward the window, and the line of his throat was tight.
"I can't protect you," he said, "if I don't know where you are."
The words came out stripped of everything. The authority, the command, all of it gone. Just the raw, simple truth of a man who was afraid and didn't have the vocabulary for it because fear wasn't something he'd ever been allowed to show.
"I'm not trying to make your life harder," I said. My voice wavered and I hated it. "I'm trying to hold onto the only things that are still mine. My classes. My job. My name, even if it's fake. It's all I have, Cillian. And every time something happens, another piece of it disappears and I can't—" My throat closed. I pressed my lips together hard and looked at the window because I was not going to fall apart in the back of this car.
He was quiet for a long moment.
Then his hand found mine.
His fingers slid between mine and closed, warm and steady. He lifted my hand and pressed his lips to my palm. Slow. Deliberate. His eyes stayed on mine the entire time.
It was a kiss that said I hear you. The warmth of his mouth against my skin sent something through me that had nothing to do with fear and everything to do with the terrifying realization that this man, this dangerous, impossible man, was looking at me like I was the only real thing in his world.
My breath caught. I didn't pull my hand away.
He lowered it gently but didn't let go. His thumb traced a slow line across my knuckles and the car was very quiet and very warm and I was in serious trouble.
"For the record," he said, his voice low, the ghost of something lighter moving through it, "babe is growing on me."
A wet laugh escaped me before I could stop it. I pressed my free hand over my eyes. "Please forget that happened."
"Absolutely not."
His phone buzzed in his jacket.
He glanced at the screen. His expression didn't change but his hand stiffened around mine.
"What?" I asked.
He turned the phone so I could see.
Nik:Evie Ross file is clean. But someone accessed it two weeks before the kid did. Admin-level credentials. Someone's been in your girl's records since before you got here.
I stared at the screen and Cillian's hand tightened around mine and for the first time, the thing I was most afraid of wasn't the man sitting beside me.
It was whoever had found me before he did.