Chapter 10
Siobhan
* * *
Ican't sleep.
It's been a week. A week of Italian cotton and east-facing windows and the low hum of a city I'm learning to read through glass.
A week of mornings with Nico in the kitchen and evenings with Nico in the hallway and the long dark hours between where I lie in this beautiful room and think about the man thirty feet away and wonder when I became someone who measures distance in heartbeats instead of feet.
Today was full — I spent the morning on calls with two clients, rebuilding a risk matrix for a healthcare startup whose CEO thinks cybersecurity is "an IT problem" and not the existential liability I've been explaining for three weeks.
I had lunch with Finn at The Galley, two guards in the booth behind us pretending to read menus while Finn pretended not to notice them.
He's the same calm, sardonic brother who sees everything and says half of it. "You look different," he told me.
"How?"
"Rested. Which is weird, because you're sleeping in a building with a man who kills people."
"I sleep fine."
"Liar." He stole my chips and changed the subject to Ronan, who's apparently been drawing the security guards when they're not looking.
I came home — home, I called it that, which is a problem I'm not ready to examine — and worked until seven.
Nico came in around six, nodded at me, poured scotch, and stood at the window the way he does when something's happened that he won't tell me about.
I've learned to read the silence: operational silence is still, almost meditative.
Worried silence is rigid, jaw tight. Tonight's silence was the second kind.
I didn't ask. He didn't offer. We ate Thai from the place on Newbury and talked about nothing that mattered and everything that did.
Then the hallway. Then the doors. Then the goodnight that gets heavier every night, like we're loading it with everything we're not saying and eventually the word won't be able to hold the weight.
Now it's 3am and I'm staring at the ceiling and the insomnia isn't about the war or the threats or the man who wants to kill me. It's about the man who's waiting for me to knock, and the fact that every night I don't, the wanting gets worse.
I get up.
Bare feet on cold hardwood. The penthouse is dark, though the city glows through the glass walls, the skyline indifferent and glittering. I take the hallway toward the kitchen. His door is closed. No light underneath. No sound.
I pause. Two seconds. The wood grain is silver in the dark. I think about his hands and his scars and the way he said knock. I didn't hear him say it through the wall, but I felt something that night. A vibration. A want that matched mine, pressing through plaster and silence.
I keep walking.
The kitchen opens off the living area — the island, the stools, the six-burner range Nico has conquered with eggs and toast and nothing else. I open the fridge. Pour water. Turn around.
He's already here.
Sitting at the kitchen island, shirtless, sweatpants low on his hips, hair wrecked from a pillow he wasn't sleeping on.
A glass of scotch in front of him — his father's Macallan, the one he pours when the weight is bad.
He looks up when I appear and those gold eyes catch the city light and he looks like something out of a painting I'd buy and a warning I'd ignore.
"Can't sleep?" I say.
"Can you?"
"No. I don't. Much."
I should leave. It's 3am and he's shirtless and the kitchen is dark and I'm wearing a t-shirt — his t-shirt, the one I stole and haven't returned — and shorts, and my hair is a mess, and my feet are bare and this is exactly the kind of situation my self-preservation instincts were designed to prevent.
I sit down.
He pushes the water glass toward me without being asked. I take it. Our fingers don't touch. They almost do. The almost is worse.
We sit in the dark kitchen and the silence is comfortable in a way that terrifies me, because comfortable silences are for people who know each other, and knowing Nico Konstantinos is a decision I haven't made yet. Or have. And just haven't admitted.
"Tell me about the scar," I say.
He looks down, following my gaze to the long line that runs from below his ribs to his hip.
In the dim light it's a pale ridge, old and silvered, evidence of something that happened to a body I'm trying not to catalog in too much detail and failing completely.
The bullet wound on his left shoulder is smaller, rounder, a punctuation mark to the sentence the rib scar started.
"I was twenty-two," he says.
"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.
"I look forward to meeting her."
The voice is pleasant. Conversational. The kind of voice that discusses dinner reservations and wine pairings and the weather.
The fact that it's discussing me — my face, my body, my location — in that tone is the most terrifying thing I've heard since Declan came home with broken ribs and a warning.
Viktor Reznikov. I've heard the name a hundred times. Now I've heard the voice.
Nico's thumb kills the video. His eyes find mine, searching, assessing, looking for fear.
He'll find it. But he'll find something else too: the cold clarity that settles over me when a threat becomes real.
The same clarity that made me sit down in Elysium and negotiate my own marriage.
The same clarity that walked me down that aisle alone.
"I have to deal with something." His voice is ice. He's already on his feet, already reaching for his phone to call Lex.
"Nico —"
"Go back to bed." Not cruel. Urgent. The man who almost kissed me is gone and the man who kills to protect is here and the switch between them happened so fast I felt the temperature drop.
I sit in the dark kitchen after he's gone. His scotch glass is still on the island, half-full. The water glass I was holding is still cold in my hands. The chair where he sat is still warm.
I press my hand to my chest. My heart is hammering — not from Viktor's message, though that's part of it. From the almost. From the hair tuck and the scar I didn't touch and the inch between his mouth and mine that the phone erased.
I almost kissed him. I wanted to — wanted to so badly my body ached with it, wanted to climb across that island and press my mouth against every scar and learn the taste of scotch on his tongue.
I wanted to touch the silver line on his ribs and the bullet wound on his shoulder and the hands that have killed men and made me breakfast and I want ALL of it, the violence and the tenderness, the boss and the man, and that was not the plan.
The plan was separate bedrooms. Strategic distance. A controlled consummation that both of us could walk away from unchanged. That plan is dead. I killed it somewhere between the hair tuck and the scar he got at twenty-two and the way his eyes looked in the dark when I said I wanted him.
This is not the plan.
This is so much worse.
And somewhere in this city, a man with gray eyes and a pleasant voice has a photograph of me in my wedding dress, and he's waiting.
I go back to bed. I don't sleep. And the wanting doesn't stop — it just changes shape, expands to include fear and fury and the specific desperation of a woman who almost had something beautiful and watched a monster take it away before it started.