Chapter 22
MILA
The police cars disappeared around the corner with Connor inside one of them, and for a moment the street felt hollowed out. Like sound had been siphoned away. Like the city had inhaled and forgotten to exhale.
I stood there longer than I should have.
People moved around me—pedestrians, bicycles, a woman tugging a child along by the hand—but I felt suspended, untethered from the rhythm of everything ordinary.
My fingers curled around my camera strap, instinctive, grounding. The leather was warm from my body. Familiar. Proof I was still here.
I didn’t know how long passed before the black car rolled to the curb.
It didn’t announce itself. No urgency, no sirens, no show. It simply appeared, sleek and quiet, as if it had always been part of the street’s architecture. The back door opened, and Connor’s butler stepped out.
Seeing him did something unexpected to my chest.
Relief. Immediate and unguarded.
“Mademoiselle,” he said, inclining his head slightly. “I was hoping you’d wait.”
I exhaled, something in my chest finally unclenching. “I didn’t know where else to go,” I admitted. My voice sounded steadier than I felt.
“Quite understandable,” he said, as if I’d just commented on the weather. “May I?”
He gestured toward the open car door, then paused, regarding me with polite consideration. “Ellsworth,” he added, extending a hand I hadn’t realized I needed. “I work with Mr. Ward.”
“I know,” I said softly. I had seen him before—hovering at the edges, moving with quiet authority. “I mean … I recognize you.”
A faint, almost imperceptible smile touched his mouth. “Good. That saves us both a great deal of explanation.”
As I slid into the back seat, I glanced at him again. “How did you know where I’d be?”
He closed the door gently, then met my eyes through the window, his expression calm and unruffled. “I have a tendency to know where I’m needed,” he said. “One picks up the habit in my line of work.”
I hesitated. “You make it sound effortless.”
“Hardly,” he replied, opening the driver’s door and settling behind the wheel. “But one does strive for the appearance of it.”
The car pulled smoothly away from the curb, and I let myself lean back against the seat, the first true breath of relief leaving me since Connor had been taken.
For reasons I couldn’t yet articulate, I trusted Ellsworth completely.
For a few blocks, neither of us spoke.
Paris passed by the window again, but now it felt distant, like scenery rather than a place I belonged. My mind replayed the moment Connor had looked at me as they took him—something unspoken in his eyes, protective even then, as if he were trying to shield me from the weight of what was happening.
Ellsworth broke the silence first.
“He’ll be fine,” he said calmly.
I swallowed. “You sound very certain.”
“I am,” he replied. “This is inconvenience, not catastrophe.”
I glanced at him. “You’ve said that before.”
“Yes,” he agreed mildly. “Experience has a way of refining one’s definitions.”
Despite myself, I huffed a small laugh. It felt brittle, but real.
“What happens now?” I asked.
“We go home,” he said.
I hesitated. “Home?”
“The Sanctuary,” he clarified. “At least, for the evening.”
I nodded. I didn’t have the energy to argue. Or the desire. The thought of Connor’s space—of being closer to him, even in his absence—settled something anxious inside me.
The car moved smoothly through traffic, and I watched the city shift from sunlit afternoon into something duskier, quieter. By the time we turned onto the familiar street, my shoulders had eased a fraction.
Ellsworth parked in the underground garage and walked me inside. The Sanctuary greeted us with its particular hush—thick walls, muted lighting, the sense of being sealed away from the world without being buried by it.
He guided me through the corridors I already recognized—the quiet turns, the soft echo of footsteps, the particular hush that lived in this part of the building.
I’d walked these halls less than twenty-four hours ago with Connor’s hand at my back, my body loose and open, my guard lowered in a way that now felt almost reckless in retrospect.
We stopped near the back, outside a door I remembered intimately—not because of what it looked like, but because of how it had felt to close behind us the night before.
“This is Mr. Ward’s room,” Ellsworth said gently, as if naming it aloud carried weight.
I nodded, my throat tightening. “I know.”
I hesitated, my fingers hovering near the handle. “Is it all right if I wait here?”
Ellsworth studied me for a moment, his gaze sharp but kind, assessing something beneath the question I’d asked.
“He would expect it,” he said at last. Then, softer, “And he would be comforted by it.”
The words settled into me, steadying and warm.
Ellsworth opened the door and stepped aside. “If you need anything at all, I’ll be nearby.”
“Thank you,” I said, and meant more than the words could carry.
The door closed softly behind me.
The room was quiet in the way spaces are when they belong to someone who doesn’t waste energy. The bed was made precisely, the lines clean. No clutter. No excess.
But it wasn’t empty.
A jacket lay folded over the back of a chair. A watch rested on the dresser beside a small stack of books. Nothing decorative. Everything intentional.
I moved slowly, like I might disturb something fragile if I went too fast.
On the desk sat a single photograph in a plain frame.
I stopped. I hadn’t noticed it when I was here before.
Last night, I’d been too immersed in Connor—too lost in the gravity of him, in the way his body had eclipsed everything else.
The room had been nothing but background then, a blur of walls and shadows and heat.
I’d been aware only of skin and breath and the feeling of being held in something relentless and consuming.
I’d moved through the space like someone underwater, sensing but not seeing, taking nothing in because there had been no room for anything else.
Part of me wished—achefully—that I could return to that version of myself.
The woman who noticed nothing but the man in front of her.
The woman for whom the world narrowed so completely that even memory loosened its grip.
But standing here now, alone and sharp-edged again, I understood why I hadn’t seen the room before.
Last night had been about surrender.
Today was about reckoning.
The framed photograph wasn’t a portrait. It wasn’t a place I recognized. Just an image of water at dusk—dark, almost black, the faintest sliver of light at the horizon. The composition was spare. Controlled. And deeply lonely.
My breath caught.
He hadn’t chosen something obvious. He hadn’t chosen comfort. He’d chosen stillness. A moment right before night fully claimed the day.
The almost.
I lifted my camera without thinking and framed the room—not to take the shot yet, just to see. Through the lens, details sharpened.
The crease in the pillow where his head rested. The scuff on the floor near the door, evidence of pacing. The faint indentation on the edge of the desk where someone had leaned there too often.
Connor existed in restraint.
In preparation.
In moments that never fully resolved.
I lowered the camera and sat on the edge of the bed.
This was who he was when no one was watching. Not the man who guarded me in the street or held me with devastating control. This was the version of him that lingered between things—between violence and peace, between isolation and connection.
Between past and future.
It made my chest ache.
I traced the seam of the blanket absently, my thoughts drifting—not toward fear, but backward. Toward something older. Quieter. Heavier.
My mother.
The thought arrived without warning, like it had been waiting for a crack to slip through.
Growing up, I’d learned to read rooms early. Learned how to tell, by the way my mother moved through the house, what kind of day it was going to be. Whether the curtains would stay drawn. Whether dinner would be silent. Whether I’d need to make myself smaller, lighter, easier.
She wasn’t cruel. She was absent in a way that felt lonelier than anger ever could.
Depression wasn’t something we named back then. It was just “one of her days.” Or “one of her stretches.” It moved through our house like weather—unpredictable, uncontrollable, something you prepared for but never stopped.
I became good at almosts.
Almost happy. Almost invisible. Almost enough to keep the darkness at bay.
I learned that love could be quiet to the point of disappearance. That needing too much was dangerous. That desire—especially loud desire—risked tipping the balance.
It wasn’t until much later that I realized how deeply that lesson had etched itself into my body.
How I’d gravitated toward men who were unavailable. Emotionally distant lovers. A married professor. People who offered attention in fragments, who never asked me to want loudly or fully.
Because I knew how to live in the margins.
In Connor’s room, that truth landed differently.
He was dangerous, yes. Complicated. But he was also present in a way that felt startling. When he looked at me, there was no almost. No half-measure.
And that terrified me more than absence ever had.
Tears came suddenly, sharp and uninvited. I pressed my palm to my mouth, trying to keep the sound in, but my chest tightened, the pressure too much to hold.
I cried quietly at first. Then less so.
I cried for the apartment that no longer felt safe. For the photographs that had been torn. For the man who’d been taken from my sight before I could ask the questions that had started to bloom.
But beneath all of that, I cried for the girl I’d been. The one who learned to disappear so others could survive. The one who learned to want in silence.
The sobs wracked me harder than I expected, my shoulders curling inward, my camera clutched to my chest like a lifeline.
A gentle knock sounded at the door.