I think about the scar. The silver line on his ribs that I reached for in the dark kitchen and stopped an inch from his skin because I wasn't ready. Tonight, I'll touch it. Tonight, I'll trace every inch of that line and learn the story it tells and finish what I started when I hovered and pulled back. Tonight, there is no pulling back.
My hand rises.
I'm not afraid. I'm not uncertain. The hesitation is the held breath before a freefall — the last still moment before gravity takes over and the falling begins. I'm standing at the edge of something I can't come back from, and the woman I was before this hallway is already gone.
"Nico."
I say it to the dark. To the door. To the man behind it who has been waiting for two weeks with his jaw tight and his hands at his sides and his heart on a wall I'm about to walk through.
My knuckles meet wood.
I knock.
Chapter 15
Nico
The Door Opens
* * *
Iknow her footsteps.
Two weeks of listening in the dark and I know them all. The brisk morning stride from bedroom to kitchen, bare feet quick on hardwood, purpose in every step. The slower evening walk back down the hallway, tired, her weight settling into her heels. The midnight pad to the kitchen for water, soft and uncertain, the footsteps of a woman who can't sleep and won't admit why.
These footsteps are none of those.
These are slow. Deliberate. Bare feet on cold wood, each step placed with the kind of precision that doesn't come from uncertainty but from decision. They're not headed for the kitchen, not the living room. From her bedroom. Down the hallway. Toward my door.
My hands grip the sheets. My pulse spikes hard enough that I feel it in my throat, in my wrists, in the center of my chest. I stop breathing. I've been lying in this bed for two hours staring at the ceiling, listening to the penthouse settle around me the way I do every night. Cataloging the sounds of a building thatcontains her. The creak of her mattress. The whisper of pages turning. The exact moment she gives up on sleep and goes still. Every night. For fourteen nights. A ritual of listening for a sound that never comes.
The footsteps stop.
Outside my door. The silence is so total I can hear my own heartbeat and hers. Shallow. Quick. Not afraid. Decided.
My mind offers one last rational thought: she's coming to fight. To tell me what went wrong. To negotiate new terms.
Then her knuckles hit wood and every rational thought I've ever had burns to ash.
She knocked.
I'm on my feet before the echo fades. Three steps to the door. My hand on the handle. I make myself stop. One breath. One second to hold this moment before it becomes the next one, because on this side of the door I am a man who has never been chosen, and on the other side of the door is the woman who chose me.
I open it.
She's in the hallway. Silk nightgown, ivory, the fabric catching city light from the glass walls behind her so the edges glow translucent. Bare feet on the hardwood. Hair down, dark against her shoulders. No makeup, no armor, no pretense. She's stripped everything away except the silk and the courage it took to walk thirty feet in the dark.
She is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. I have seen terrible beautiful things. Sunsets over harbors where men have drowned, the precision of a well-executed operation, the particular stillness of a room after violence. None of them come close to this woman standing in my doorway with her chin lifted and her pulse jumping in her throat.
"Siobhan."
"You said if I wanted this, I had to come to you." Her voice is steady. Her hands are not. "I'm here."
I step back. Open the door wider. I don't reach for her. Don't pull her in. The threshold is hers to cross. It's been hers since the wedding night when I pointed to this door and said the words that have been eating me alive for two weeks: you choose it. You come to me.
She walks in.
My bedroom. The room I designed the way I designed everything else in my life. For function, for control, for the absolute exclusion of vulnerability. Bed. Nightstand with a glass of water and the Beretta, face up, unhidden. East-facing window, the city's glow flattened against the glass. No photographs. No personal items. Nothing that says a person lives here rather than survives here.