I woke up angry and stayed angry through breakfast.
Cillian was at the kitchen island reading something on his phone like he hadn't dismantled my entire living situation twelve hours ago. He'd made coffee. There was toast on a plate. He'd even cut an apple into slices, which felt like a personal attack because who cuts apples for someone they've just robbed of their autonomy?
"Morning," he said without looking up.
I took the coffee. I didn't take the apple. This was my protest.
"Ava," he said. The name sounded different now. "Sit down. Eat something."
"I'm going to campus."
Now he looked up. "No."
"I've a shift at the café. I've a class at two. I've a life that still exists."
"You've a concussion."
"I've a headache. There's a difference." I grabbed my bag from the spare bedroom. I'd packed it last night before bed because I'd known this argument was coming and I wanted to be ready for it. Textbooks, wallet, keys to an apartment that apparently no longer existed, and at the very bottom, the pepper spray I'd bought two weeks ago from the campus bookstore. I wasn't stupid. I was angry, but I wasn't stupid.
"Ava." He was standing now. "You're not going alone."
"Then send Nik. Send your driver. Send the entire Russian army. I don't care. But I'm going."
We stared at each other across the kitchen island. The morning light caught his face and I hated that even when I was furious with him, some part of my brain was cataloguing the way his jaw looked in sunlight and the way his t-shirt sat across his shoulders.
He called Nik.
Nik drove me to campus in a black SUV that was only slightly less conspicuous than a tank. He parked near the quad and turned the engine off.
"You want company?" he asked.
"I want to be alone."
"I'll be here." He pulled out his phone. "Take your time. Scream if something happens. Or don't. I'll probably hear it anyway."
I got out and the campus air hit me like a memory. Coffee and cut grass and the distant sound of someone playing guitar badly near the library. Everything looked the same. The buildings, the paths, the students moving between classes with their headphones in and their lives uncomplicated. No one here knew that Evie Ross's lease had been cancelled or that her husband had washed her hair last night or that she'd almost kissed him in a bathtub and was now having a crisis about it on a public sidewalk.
I walked toward the café because my shift started in twenty minutes and normal things were the only medicine I had left.
I made it halfway across the quad.
"Oh my God, Evie!"
Three girls from my accounting class materialized in front of me. I recognized them vaguely. Megan, the one who'd asked if my husband was single. Her friend with the blonde highlights. A third one I'd never spoken to in my life.
"Hey," I said, trying to keep moving.
"We saw the photo on the gossip page," Megan said, falling into step beside me. "Your husband is like, insanely hot. Where did you find him?"
"Craigslist," I said.
She laughed like I was joking. "Seriously though, is he a model? My roommate said he looks like he could be in a fragrance ad."
"He's in private consulting."
"What does that even mean?"
"It means he consults. Privately."
The blonde one leaned in. "Is he good in bed? He looks like he'd be good in bed."
I stopped walking.
Something in my face must have shifted because all three of them took a small step back.
"He's my husband," I said. The word came out sharper than I intended and for a second, I sounded exactly like Cillian when someone crossed a line. "Not a topic for your group chat."
They stared at me. I stared back. Then I turned and walked away before I could process the fact that I had just gotten territorial over a man I was supposed to be angry at.
I didn't go to the café. I didn't go to class. I walked past both, past the library, past the science building, and kept going until I reached the quiet area behind the old arts building. A small courtyard with a wooden bench and overgrown hedges and the kind of silence that only exists in the forgotten corners of busy places.
I sat on the bench and pressed my palms into my eyes.
I was angry at him for cancelling my lease. I was angry at myself for almost kissing him. I was angry at those girls for talking about him like he was public property when he was mine and I didn't even want him to be mine.
I sat there for maybe fifteen minutes. Long enough for my breathing to slow and my thoughts to stop screaming.
Then the air changed.
I knew before I looked up. The same way I'd known in the café that first day. Cillian was standing at the entrance to the courtyard. He was breathing hard. His hair was pushed back like he'd been running his hands through it and his eyes were wide in a way I had never seen before.
He didn't speak. He crossed the courtyard in five strides and then his hands were on the bench on either side of my hips, caging me in, his face inches from mine.
"Nik called me in a panic," he said. "Do you understand what that means?"
"I had my pepper spray. I was fine."
"Pepper spray." He said it like I'd told him I was fighting off wolves with a pool noodle. "You turned off your phone and disappeared into a campus where someone has already been inside your records, while the man who put you in a hospital bed is taking orders from someone we haven't identified. And you brought pepper spray."
"I was angry at you. I needed space."
"Space." His hands tightened on the bench, knuckles going white. "You needed space from the man who sat in a chair all night watching you breathe because he was afraid you'd stop."
That one landed somewhere underneath my ribs and stayed there.
"You cancelled my lease," I said, but the fight was leaking out of my voice. "You moved my entire life while I was sleeping."
"Yes."
"Without asking."
"Yes. And I would do it tomorrow and the day after that and every day until you're somewhere I know is safe, because the alternative is you on a hallway floor with blood in your hair, and I'll not live through that twice."
My chest ached. I wanted to stay angry. The anger didn't make me want to reach for him.
"You can't just decide things for me," I said.
"You can't just vanish." His voice cracked. "Not after everything. Not after last night."
Last night… the bath… his hands in my hair… the gap we didn't close.
"I'm right here," I said.
"Promise me."
"I'm right here, Cillian."
His hand came up and cupped the side of my face. For a second, something in his expression softened. Just enough for me to see the exhaustion underneath the anger, the fear underneath the exhaustion, and below all of it, something so raw and unguarded that it made my breath catch.
Then his gaze dropped to my mouth.
And the softness burned away.
His fingers slid from my cheekbone into my hair, curling at the base of my skull, and he tilted my head back with a grip that was firm enough to make my lips part on a sharp inhale. He watched that happen. He watched my mouth open and my breath hitch and my pulse jump in the hollow of my jaw and I saw something behind his eyes snap, like a chain pulled too tight for too long finally giving way.
"Do you know what I thought?" His voice had dropped into a register I hadn't heard before. Low, rough, scraped raw. "When Nik said he couldn't find you. Do you know what went through my head?"
I couldn't answer. His hand in my hair was holding me still and his thumb was pressing against the hinge of my jaw. Heat was pooling in my stomach. My fingers were gripping the front of his shirt. I could feel his heartbeat through the fabric, slamming against my knuckles.
"Every worst thing," he said. "Every version. In fifteen minutes, I lived through every single one and I couldn't breathe through any of them."
"I didn't think you would..."
"You didn't think." His face was so close I could see the gold flecks near the center of his irises, could count each individual lash. "That's the problem, Ava. When it comes to me, you don't think. You run. You hide. You sit on a bench with pepper spray and pretend the world isn't full of people who want to take you from me."
I should have been afraid. Every logical part of my brain was sending up flares, red ones, the kind that say this man is angry and his hand is in your hair and his eyes are dark and you are in a very compromising position on a very public bench.
I wasn't afraid.
I was electric.
Something about the way he was looking at me, the way his control was crumbling in real time, the way his breath came in short uneven bursts like holding himself back was costing him physically, made every nerve ending in my body light up. It was terrifying and magnetic and I wanted to see what happened when the leash broke.
"I'm not going anywhere," I whispered.
His jaw clenched. His eyes searched mine for something, permission or a warning, I couldn't tell which.
"Say that again."
"I'm not going any..."
He didn't let me finish.
His mouth dropped to my neck, right where my pulse hammered hardest, and he bit down.