"That's not an answer."
"It's the beginning of one."
"What's the rest?"
He looks at me. In the dark, without the suit and the office and the power dynamics, he looks younger. Not young — this man has never been young — but less armored. The scotch has softened something at the edges, or maybe it's 3am, or maybe it's me.
"A bad night. The worst night." He touches the scar — runs his finger along it, absent, the way you touch something you've stopped seeing. "I got between someone and a knife. The knife won."
"And the shoulder?"
"Different night. Less personal." He takes a sip of scotch. "Your turn. Something you've never told anyone."
I consider lying. I consider deflecting. I consider the fact that it's 3am and I'm sitting three feet from a shirtless man with scars and scotch and gold eyes and the smart thing to do is nothing.
"I used to sneak out of my father's house at night," I say. "After he went to prison, even. Cormac had the locks changed and I found the window. I'd go to the roof of the building across the street and just sit there. Breathe. Not be Padraig O'Brien's daughter or Cormac's responsibility or anyone's anything. Just be."
"Freedom."
"Freedom." I turn the water glass in my hands. "It looks different now."
"What does it look like?"
"Sitting in a dark kitchen at 3am with a man I'm not supposed to want."
The words land between us like a match on dry wood. I watch them hit — see his hand still on the scotch glass, see his jaw tighten, see the effort it takes him not to react the way his body wants to react. He's so controlled. He's always so controlled. And I'm sitting here in his t-shirt telling him I want him and watching the control cost him everything.
"Siobhan."
"I know."
"You should go back to bed."
"Should I?"
He reaches across the island. His fingers find a strand of my hair — the same gesture from his office, weeks ago, a lifetime ago. He tucks it behind my ear. His knuckles graze my jaw. My breath catches, a sound I can't control and don't try to. His eyes drop to my mouth.
I reach for him. My hand moves before my mind approves it, toward the scar on his ribs, the long silver line that starts a story he hasn't finished. My fingers hover an inch from his skin. I can feel the heat coming off him. I stop.
Pull back.
His eyes track the retreat of my hand, and something crosses his face that looks like pain and hunger in equal measure. He doesn't ask why I stopped. He knows. The same reason he tucked my hair and didn't kiss me. The same reason I lie awake thirty feet from his door and don't knock. We're not ready. Not yet. Not like this, at 3am with scotch and insomnia blurring the edges. When I touch him — and I will, God help me, I will — I want to be awake. I want to choose it with every cell in my body. I want it to mean what it means.
He leans closer. I can feel his breath. The distance between our mouths is inches. Smaller. I can see the gold flecks in his eyes, the darker ring around the iris, the way his pupils are blown wide in the dark. My lips part…
And then his phone buzzes on the counter.
The sound is a gunshot in the silence. He freezes. I freeze. The kitchen goes from warm to cold in the space of a vibration.
He picks up the phone. Looks at the screen. His face transforms — the open, unguarded man across from me disappears in under a second, replaced by the boss, the weapon, the thing that keeps his family alive. The change is so fast it's violent.
"What is it?"
He angles the phone away from me. But the glass wall behind him — the floor-to-ceiling window facing the city — catches the screen's reflection. I see it in the dark glass: a face. Pale. Sharp-featured. Gray eyes that look almost silver in the phone's light. A man speaking, first in Russian, then in English, and his voice comes through the phone's speaker low and cultured and calm:
"Congratulations on your wedding, Mr. Konstantinos. Your wife is beautiful."
A pause. Then a photo fills the screen — I see it in the reflection, distorted but unmistakable. Me. In the ivory silk dress. Walking myself down the aisle at St. Demetrios. The angle is wrong — too far, too external, shot from across the street through a telephoto lens. The angle matches where Lex said the soldiers were parked.