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 that contains 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.
She looks around with those sharp eyes that miss nothing, and I watch her register the absence. The gun on the nightstand. She sees it and doesn't flinch. After the warehouse, after the blood behind my ear, the Beretta is just another fact about me she's already accepted.
"You're sure?"
"I'm sure."
"Because of what you saw? Some kind of —"
"I'm here because I want to be here. Don't make me say it again."
The words hit me the way bullets never have.
Center mass. No armor. Straight through.
I look at this woman standing in my bedroom in silk and bare feet.
She walked thirty feet of dark hallway. She knocked on a door I told her was hers to open and mine to wait behind.
She's not here out of obligation or adrenaline or some complicated reaction to watching me kill a man.
She's here because she decided. The way she decides everything.
Eyes open and her spine straight and a certainty that makes me feel like I've never been certain about anything in my life.
She's the bravest person I've ever met. And I've met men who walked into gunfire.
I cross to her. Slowly. Giving her time, giving her space, giving her every chance to change her mind. She doesn't move. Doesn't step back.
My hand cups her face. My palm against her jaw, my thumb on her cheekbone. The calluses on my skin catch against the softness of hers and I think about what these hands have done, today and this week and this lifetime, and the fact that she's letting them touch her face. These hands.
"I've thought about this." My voice doesn't sound like mine. Rougher. Lower. Stripped of every layer of control I've spent thirty-two years building. "Every night since you moved in."
"So have I."
My control breaks.