Epilogue
Six weeks later, Del still couldn't raise her right arm above her shoulder without the joint catching, a small, permanent reminder of a gunshot wound the hospital had cleaned up better than she'd expected and worse than she'd have liked.
She didn't mind it. Some scars were worth what they cost.
Marea's floor pulsed under her feet, a Friday crowd three deep at the bar, Sienna working the taps with the same magnetic ease she always had, though something sharper had settled into her since the night she'd fought her way out of that corridor bleeding and terrified and still standing.
Nico ran the books from a new office upstairs, one with better sightlines to every camera in the building, because trust, once broken, got rebuilt with steel instead of good faith.
Del still didn't know who'd leaked their location to Sorin's men. Ronan's investigation had turned up two possible suspects and confirmed neither, and the loose end sat in her chest like a splinter she'd learned to work around rather than remove.
Matteo came in through the back the way he always did now, no announcement, no permission asked, and Del felt him before she saw him, the particular shift in the air that meant he'd walked into a room and decided it was his to stand in.
"Obsidian's up eleven percent this quarter," he said, sliding onto the stool beside her, close enough that his knee pressed against hers under the bar. "Yours?"
"Twenty two."
"You're still winning."
"I never stopped."
His hand found her thigh under the bar, proprietary, no hesitation in it, and Del didn't move away.
"Ronan's still working the leak," he said, quieter now, mouth close to her ear.
"I know."
"When we find whoever it was, I want your permission before I move on them."
"You'll have it." Del turned her glass slowly on the bar top, watching the crowd, the lights, the particular chaos of a business that had nearly cost her everything and somehow still felt entirely, finally hers. "This isn't over. Sorin's operation. There's still threads we haven't pulled."
"There's always threads." His hand tightened slightly on her thigh, a claim rather than a comfort. "He wasn't the whole structure. We've only mapped the piece that touched you directly."
"So we keep pulling."
"We keep pulling." He turned her stool toward him with two fingers under her chin, unhurried, and the look in his eyes had nothing partnership-shaped about it at all. "And when we find him, whoever he is, you're not facing him alone. You're mine to protect. That's not up for negotiation anymore."
"I don't need protecting."
"I know you don't. I'm doing it anyway."
Her phone buzzed against the bar, Nico's name lighting the screen, and she glanced at it without pulling away from him. Found something in the old staffing records. Another name, not Sorin's. Might be nothing. Might not be.
"Later," Matteo said, before she could reach for it, his hand closing over hers on the bar. "Whatever it is, it'll still be there in an hour."
"You never let anything wait."
"I'm letting this wait." His thumb traced slow over her knuckles, the gesture more possessive than tender, the particular touch of a man reminding himself something was actually his. "Right now I want you looking at me instead of a phone."
Del set it face down without argument, and Matteo used the moment to pull her off the stool entirely, one hand at her hip, the other sliding into her hair, and kissed her hard in the middle of the crowded floor with no concern for who was watching.
She kissed him back the same way, nails digging into his shoulder, and felt the particular satisfaction of being claimed in the one building in this city that had never belonged to anyone but her.
He pulled back only far enough to speak against her mouth. "Mine."
"Yours," she said, and meant it as a choice, not a surrender.
The music kept playing. The lights kept burning, magenta bleeding into the dark the same way it had the very first night he'd watched this club from three blocks away and decided, coldly, that he wanted it.
He'd been wrong about what he actually wanted. She'd been wrong about how alone she actually was.
Whatever waited in Nico's new lead could keep for another hour.
Matteo's hand found the small of her back, guiding her off the floor toward the private stairs, and Del went with him without looking back once.