The question sits in the air between us like a loaded weapon with the safety off.
Whether you can.
Lucia holds my gaze from across the room. She has not moved. She has not breathed. Her dark eyes are wide open, unblinking, and in them I can see the exact shape of the war she is fighting with herself.
She does not answer.
I do not repeat the question.
The intercom on the kitchen counter cracks to life. Commander Nick’s voice fills the cabin, clipped and lethal. “Broken Halos HQ. President Logan says the situation is accelerating. I am en route. Do not leave the cabin.”
I lift my chin once. My eyes stay on Lucia.
Rafe’s voice comes through next, low and heavy. “Exterior perimeter sweep. I am outside. Radio if anything changes.”
Another lift of my chin. Another acknowledgment that costs me nothing because the only thing in this cabin that has my full attention is one-seventy pounds of dark curls and Costa spine.
Click.The front door. Nick. Gone.
A beat of silence. Then the heavier sound of boots on the porch. Rafe. The night swallows both of them.
The cabin settles. When two men the size of Nick and Rafe vacate a space, the walls pull closer. The air thins. Every surface becomes more intimate because there is less mass to absorb the energy between two people standing four feet apart with a sleeping child between them.
Tyra is under her blanket in the makeshift bed against the far wall. The grey wolf is tucked under her chin, its worn fabric rising and falling with her breathing. Lucia’s phone sits on the nightstand beside her, the lullaby playlist cycling through something soft and instrumental. Muffled enough to be ambient. Present enough to be a thread connecting this room to the small human sleeping in it.
I sit in the wooden chair. Elbows on my knees. Hands hanging loose between my legs.
I watch her.
Not the way Rafe watches her, which is hunger wearing patience like a mask. Not the way Nick watches her, which is ownership already decided and waiting to be enforced.
I watch her the way a man watches something he has spent years convincing himself he does not deserve.
“Jude.” Her voice. Low. Not a whisper. A word spoken at the volume the room requires, nothing more.
“Lucia.”
She takes a step toward me. Not toward the door. Not toward Tyra. Toward me. One step, and then another, and the sound of her bare feet on the cabin floor is the loudest thing in the world.
That is your answer.
She stops in front of the chair. Close enough that if I straightened my spine, my face would be level with her sternum. Close enough that I can smell her. Soap and skin and something underneath both that has been in my bloodstream since the first time she looked at me and did not flinch at my hands.
I stand.
The chair scrapes against the floor behind me. Six foot three to her five foot four. She tilts her head back and meets me there.
She does.
Brave woman.
Lucia does not look away. She stays with it without flinching. Without pity. Without the careful softness people use when they know your history and are trying not to break you.
She looks at me like I am unbreakable.
God.
I close the distance. One step. I stop directly in front of her and I look at her the way I look at everything that matters. Completely. Without hesitation.