Chapter 27 #2
“I can’t build a thing that protects you from yourself.
” It came out raw, the baritone broken down to the bare floor of it, nothing professional left in the sound.
“I can fight the network. I can file counter-claims and build strategies and spend every resource I have making sure they never touch your catalogue. But I can’t—”
He stopped. His hands pressed harder. The tremor got worse.
“I can’t protect you from the part of you that still believes you deserve to disappear.”
The kitchen was very still.
On the counter, the kettle clicked off. The sound was small and mechanical and nowhere near big enough for the room.
Cillian still hadn’t spoken.
He stood against the counter with his arms crossed and his dark eyes on me.
Steady, present, that quality of attention I’d learned to read over six years in a booth together.
Not the calm neutrality he wore in a crisis.
Something more private. Something that looked, if I had it right, like a man who’d been waiting for this exact moment.
Not the confession. Not the fury. The thing that came after.
The thing that was coming now.
He uncrossed his arms. Pushed off the counter. Crossed the kitchen in four unhurried steps, the same steady tempo he brought to everything, the rhythm that never changed no matter what the room was doing.
He stopped beside my chair.
His hand came down. Found mine where it rested on the table, beside the binder, beside the capped pen, beside the blue dot that marked the place I’d almost ended us.
His palm covered the back of my hand. Warm.
Dry. The calluses from years on boards and faders rough against my skin.
He pressed, not hard, just firm. He said things with touch the way he said things with sound.
Precise. On purpose. A man who’d been talking to me without words for years and had one more thing to say.
He shook his head. One motion, slow, side to side. The silver ring in his ear caught the light. His dark eyes held mine, all those years of guarding my voice from the world now turned to guarding me from the part of myself that still wanted to give it away.
He didn’t speak. He didn’t have to.
His thumb moved against the back of my hand. One stroke. The gentlest pressure. Years of small interventions folded into a single point of contact.
The kitchen held.
Tuck on my left, palms flat, his voice still ringing with I’d rather lose every contract. Bram across from me, hands trembling against the granite, his fury and his fear laid out in equal parts. Cillian beside me, hand over mine, saying nothing, saying all of it.
I looked at the blue dot.
I looked at the three of them, who had found their way to my kitchen through sealed booths and axe-throwing nights and production meetings and the slow, brutal accumulation of years of wanting something none of them would name.
Who’d held me through a suppressant crash and a heat and the wreckage of having my most guarded secret broadcast to the world.
Who’d cooked here and slept outside my door and built a legal counter-offensive while I built a den out of the smell of their bodies.
Who’d asked for nothing back except the right to stand near me while the world decided what to do with the truth.
The part of me that reached for the pen at three in the morning, the eighteen-year-old who’d been told her biology was a liability, who learned to shrink and suppress and perform something that kept everyone else comfortable, that part was still in me.
She’d always be in me. That much survival instinct doesn’t evaporate because three men hold your hands and a fever breaks at dawn.
But she wasn’t the only one at the table anymore.
The woman who’d recorded forty-seven minutes of unfiltered truth into a clean file was here too.
The woman who’d said her own name into a microphone in a voice full of honey and warmth and every note she actually was.
The woman who’d looked at her own waveform on Cillian’s monitor and thought, I was hiding something beautiful.
The woman who’d stood in a living room that smelled like all four of them and said, I choose this. As myself. Not as someone’s omega. As Isobel.
I turned my hand under Cillian’s. Laced my fingers through his. His grip tightened, immediate, certain, the reflex of a man who’d waited years for me to reach back.
“I didn’t sign,” I said again. But it landed different this time.
Not a confession reporting a near miss. A woman who’d come to the edge and chosen, in the dark, to stay.
“I sat here with the pen on the paper and I could smell all three of you in the walls. And I couldn’t.
Signing would have meant becoming someone I’m not anymore.
Someone who doesn’t have cedar in her wrists and peppercorn in her throat and sandalwood at her nape. ”
My voice held.