Chapter 11
Vivi
Caden is under medical supervision for forty-eight hours straight.
The shoulder required surgery — the bullet had done something to the joint that needed a specialist and six hours in an OR. Thankfully, Garza was relaying updates in the waiting room with the flat careful neutrality of a man who has done this before.
I sit in a chair with bad coffee and Dominic's closed laptop and I wait.
I try not to think too hard about what the waiting feels like, because I have a foundation to run and a legal team to brief and a Valenti agreement to execute.
I am not going to come apart in a hospital waiting room over a man who is going to be furious with me when he wakes up.
The first day he is medicated and I sit beside the bed and he sleeps and says nothing and I look at his face in the stillness of unconsciousness and think about him on the cathedral steps and the sound his voice made when he said down into the earpiece.
The legal team needs the Valenti confirmation, which I have.
The foundation needs a board statement, which I draft on my phone in the chair beside his bed while the machines track his heart rate with the steady patience of things that don't have feelings about it.
Marco calls three times and I answer twice and I handle what needs handling and I sit in the chair and I wait.
***
The third day they send him home.
He comes through the penthouse door with his left arm in a sling and Garza behind him with a bag and an expression that has absorbed a great deal in the last forty-eight hours. Garza sets the bag down, looks at me, looks at Caden, and leaves.
The door closes.
Caden stands in the entrance hall and looks at me.
He is pale under his usual register and his jaw has been set since the Steps and hasn't let go.
He crosses the room — slower than usual, the shoulder costing him, and I watch him make himself not show it the way I've watched him make himself not show everything that costs him. He stops in front of me.
I cross my arms and wait.
"You put my name in a Valenti agreement," he says.
"Yes."
"Without asking me."
"Yes."
"Without telling me you had their direct number. Without telling me you'd been building that contingency for days." He stops in front of me. "You sat in this apartment and you drafted terms and you put my name in them and you didn't say a word."
"I didn't know if it would hold until it held."
"That's not an answer."
"It's the true one." I hold his gaze. "If I'd told you, you'd have told me not to. You'd have said your name belongs in nothing, no agreements, no leverage, nothing they can use. You'd have said it very calmly and very certainly and you'd have been wrong."
His jaw tightens. "Vivi."
"You were on the ground." My voice stays level.
"You were bleeding on those steps and Petrov was contained and the contact had ten minutes before he moved and I had the number and I had the terms and I had everything I needed to close it except your permission, which you were not in a position to give and which I decided I didn't need." I start rambling, even though I try not to. I’m emotional. I can’t help it.
"You decided—"
"I decided." My voice is clipped. "The same way you've been deciding things about my life since the moment you read my file. The same way you moved into my apartment without asking. The same way you went between me and a bullet without stopping to discuss it first."
He goes still.
"You don't get to be the only one who makes decisions about what this costs," I say. "That's not how this works."
The apartment is quiet. The city runs outside the glass. I stand in the living room of a penthouse that has my name on it now, legally and completely, and I look at Caden Byrne with his arm in a sling and three days of fury in his jaw and I do not move.
I have stood in rooms full of dangerous men my entire adult life and learned to take up no space and offer nothing and simply wait. I am not doing that now. I am taking up every inch of space I'm standing in and I am offering exactly what I mean and I am not waiting for permission for any of it.
He looks at me for a long moment.
"You'd do it again," he says.
"Without hesitation."
"Your name in their system. A Valenti guarantee with your signature on it. You understand what that makes you?"
"You're infuriating," he says.
"I know. Would you have me any other way?” I can’t help but smile.
He reaches out with his good hand and takes hold of my jaw and tips my face up and looks at me. Directly. The full weight of that attention.
"I've spent seventeen years," he says, "protecting people who didn't belong to me."
My hands tremble in his.
"Jobs. Cases. Files on a desk with names I stopped thinking about the moment the threat was neutralized.
I was good at it because I kept it clean.
Nothing that mattered. Nobody I'd compromise the work to protect.
" His thumb moves once against my jaw. "And then there was a file on my desk with a wedding photograph and a woman who hadn't looked at her husband once in it, and I haven't kept anything clean since. "
I am not going to cry. I made a decision about that somewhere between the waiting room and the second day when he was awake and didn't ask me to leave, and I am holding it.
"You took a bullet meant for me," I say.
"I'd do it again." Flat. Certain. My own words back at me, and he knows it, and his eyes don't move from mine.
I reach up and put my hand over his. "I chose this," I say.
"I want to be clear about that. Not because I needed protecting and you were there.
Not because you're the first man who looked at me like I was worth something.
Because I looked back." I hold his gaze.
"I looked at you and I decided and I put your name in that agreement because you are mine and I am not apologizing for knowing it. "
He brings my mouth to his. Certain. The kiss of a man who has made a decision and is done being argued with about it and is not in any hurry because he has no intention of stopping.
I feel the edge of the sling against my shoulder and angle away without breaking the kiss and he makes a sound against my mouth that is low and satisfied and mine.
I pull back just enough to look at him.
"You're going to let me look after you," I say. "While the shoulder heals. Without turning it into an operational assessment or a professional courtesy or any other way you put distance between yourself and things that cost you."
He looks at me. "Is that a condition?"
"It's a fact."
"You're very certain about a lot of things."
"I've had ten years of not being certain about anything," I say. "I'm making up for it."
He looks at me and says: "All right."
I lean in and press my mouth to the line of his jaw, the only place I can reach without making him bend with the shoulder, and feel him exhale against my hair. Long and slow. The breath of a man setting something down.
"Sit down," I say. "I'll pour you a drink."
He sits and I go to the kitchen.
I take down two glasses without thinking, the same way I did the first night he stood in this kitchen and swept my apartment and I poured without asking because my hands needed something to do.
I pour two fingers of whiskey into each and I stand at the counter and I think: this is mine.
The penthouse. The foundation. The Ferraro name I'm stripping from the letterhead the moment the legal team clears it.
But mostly this — the sound of him in the other room.
The space that has rearranged itself around two people rather than one.
He chose me before he met me. From a file, from a photograph, from a woman looking at a camera instead of her husband.
I chose him from a kitchen wall with his hands on my hips and my better judgment nowhere to be found.
We are neither built for soft or easy. We are both built for exactly this — the city, the threat, the cold clarity of knowing what you want and not stopping.
I carry both glasses to the living room and set one in front of him and sit beside him on the couch.
He picks up the glass. I pick up mine. We sit with the city going past outside and I think: I have never once been chosen by someone who didn't want something from me.
It stopped being true the night a man stood in this kitchen and watched my mouth and didn't say a word about it.
I close my eyes.
He is here. The threat is behind us. Now, I can focus on what life looks like with a man I truly love.
For the first time in ten years, someone chose me.
And I chose him back.