He didn't answer.
He crossed the living room, closed the laptop with one hand, and set it on the counter. The gesture was careful and controlled, the way everything about him was careful and controlled, but his fingers lingered on the lid a beat too long.
"Go back to bed, Ava."
I didn't move.
"Ava."
"I read the article. I saw the photos from the gala. I saw her." My voice was quiet in the dark apartment. "You were seventeen."
Something moved through his face that I'd never seen there before. It wasn't anger. It was older than anger and it lived somewhere deeper, in the set of his jaw and the way his shoulders pulled back like his body was bracing against a hit that had landed years ago and never stopped landing.
"That's not a conversation for tonight," he said.
"When is it a conversation for?"
"It's not." He turned toward the bedroom.
I caught his wrist.
He went completely still. I could feel his pulse under my thumb, fast and hard, and the realization that his heart was racing while his face showed nothing made something in my chest twist. This was the man who held my wrist every chance he got, who pressed his lips to my palm, who tracked my heartbeat like it was information he needed. Now I was doing it to him and he looked like he didn't know what to do with it.
I didn't say anything. I just held on for a moment, my thumb against that hammering pulse, and then I let go.
He left. The bedroom door closed softly behind him.
I sat in the dark for a long time.
***
Morning was quiet in the way mornings are when two people are circling something neither of them will name.
He made coffee. I ate the apple slices he'd cut. He noticed. I saw him notice because his hand paused on the coffee pot for half a second before he poured.
The kitchen was small enough that we kept almost touching. His arm brushed mine when he reached for the sugar. My hip grazed his when I turned from the counter. Each time it happened, the contact sent a current through me that I tried very hard to ignore and failed completely.
I was reaching for his mug to refill it when I caught myself. My hand was already extended, already moving toward his cup with the easy instinct of someone who'd done this a hundred times. I pulled it back and wrapped both hands around my own mug instead.
He'd seen. Of course he'd seen. He saw everything. But he picked up his own mug and drank from it and the only sign that anything had happened was the faint warmth in his eyes when they met mine over the rim.
I was standing at the counter eating the last apple slice when he moved behind me to put his plate in the sink. He could have gone around. The kitchen had enough space. Instead, he went behind me, close enough that his chest nearly touched my back, and his hand settled on my waist as he leaned past me.
He lingered. His thumb pressed lightly against my hip through the fabric of my shirt. I felt his breath on the back of my neck, right where the collar of my t-shirt met bare skin, warm and close. My fingers tightened on the counter.
"You're in my way," he said. Low and unhurried, like he had nowhere to be.
"You could go around."
"I could."
He didn't. His hand stayed on my waist for another second, his thumb tracing one slow line along my hip bone, and then he stepped back and the warmth of him disappeared and I exhaled.
He put his plate in the sink. I stared at my apple slice. We were both pretending very hard that the last fifteen seconds hadn't happened.
***
Nik drove me to campus in the black SUV. He was in a good mood, which meant he was talking, which meant I had approximately zero silence to process anything.
"You look tired, Mrs. Volkov," he said, glancing at me in the rearview. "Rough night?"
"I asked Cillian about his mother," I said.
The car went quiet. Nik's hands adjusted on the steering wheel and the easy grin dimmed into something more careful.
"How'd that go?" he asked, though his tone already knew the answer.
"He shut it down."
Nik was quiet for a few seconds. "That's a touchy one for him," he said finally. "I've known him since we were fourteen. He's talked about her maybe three times in all those years. And never about what happened."
He said it lightly, but I heard what was underneath. Thirteen years of friendship and Cillian still couldn't open that door. Whatever had happened in that house when he was seventeen, he'd locked it so deep that even the person closest to him couldn't reach it.
"Give him time," Nik said. "And maybe don't ambush him at two in the morning. He's grumpy when he's tired. You should see him on long flights."
"I'll keep that in mind."
"Also, your coffee order is criminal. I saw you put four sugars in this morning. Four. That's not coffee, that's dessert."
"It's called having taste."
"It's called diabetes."
***
Elena spotted the hickey in under five seconds. I'd worn a crew neck specifically to hide it. The universe had other plans, because I reached up to adjust my ponytail and the collar shifted and Elena's eyes locked onto my neck like a heat-seeking missile.
"Evie."
"No."
"Is that a—"
"It's a curling iron burn."
"You don't own a curling iron."
Lana appeared from the back room with a tray of pastries and caught the tail end of the exchange. Her eyes went straight to my neck. "Oh my God."
"Allergic reaction," I tried.
"To what? Your husband's mouth?"
I gave up. "It's from Cillian."
They both made sounds that should not have been physically possible for adult women. Elena grabbed my arm. Lana set the pastry tray down so hard a croissant bounced off and neither of them noticed.
"Details," Elena demanded. "All of them. Immediately."
"There are no details. He just… we were talking and he…" I gestured vaguely at my neck. "He did that."
"Mid-conversation?" Lana looked impressed. "That's a power move."
"It was not a power move. It was… a moment."
"A moment," Elena repeated. "Evie. That is not a moment. That is a man staking a claim. That's a flag on the moon."
I pressed my hand over the mark and felt my face burning. They were delighted. I was dying.
For the next twenty minutes, I made lattes and answered invasive questions and felt, for a few minutes, like a normal girl whose friends were teasing her about her husband. The word kept replacing boyfriend in my head now. Husband. It had stopped feeling like a performance and started feeling like a fact, and that was the part I didn't know how to handle.
***
Jason was waiting outside when my shift ended.
He was leaning against the wall by the side entrance, hands in his jacket pockets, hood up. He'd clearly been there a while. When he saw me, he straightened, and there was something in his expression I hadn't seen before. Like a person who'd spent the whole night thinking and arrived at exactly the wrong conclusion.
"Jason," I said. "Please tell me you're here for coffee."
"I pulled back the welfare report," he said.
I exhaled. "Thank you. Seriously, Jason, thank—"
"I didn't pull it because I believe you're safe." His eyes were steady on mine. "I pulled it because if your records are fake, then an official investigation puts a bigger target on you, not a smaller one. I'm not stupid, Evie. Whatever you're hiding from, it's real."
My stomach tightened. He was smarter than I'd given him credit for.
"So thank you for listening," I said carefully. "And please, just let it go now."
He stepped closer. "I can't do that."
"Jason—"
"I know people. Off campus, off the grid. I have a friend who does new documents, clean ones, the kind that actually hold up. I can get you out. New city, new name, something better than whatever you put together last time." His voice dropped. "You don't have to stay with him, Evie. Whatever he's holding over you, I can help you disappear."
He reached for my hand.
His fingers closed around mine, warm and earnest, and he held on with the absolute conviction of a man who believed he was saving me.
And all I could think, standing there with Jason Miller's hand wrapped around mine on a public sidewalk, thirty feet from a black SUV where Nik was watching through the windshield, was that Cillian was going to find out about this.
Cillian was going to find out and Jason was going to die.
Oh, Jason. You beautiful, stupid, dead man.