Chapter Forty-Two
XADEN
It takes me three weeks.
Three weeks of dead ends, cold trails and burning through every resource and contact I have across four states.
Three weeks of Cas watching me from doorways with that look on his face that I refuse to acknowledge.
Three weeks of walking into her empty library and standing there for reasons I won't examine, of leaving the divide in place at school because taking it down feels like something I'm not ready to do without her permission.
Three weeks of sleeping two hours a night and filling the rest with work, with strategy, with the methodical dismantling of anyone stupid enough to test the borders of my territory while I'm distracted.
I don't tell anyone I'm looking.
I don't have to.
Cas knows. He leaves a laptop open on the kitchen counter one morning with a single browser tab pulled up on a university enrollment page, a hockey program, a campus in Colorado and walks out of the room without a word.
It’s the same place Alex got us both into.
I stare at it for a long time. Then I close the laptop and go make coffee like I didn't just have every molecule of air vacated from my lungs.
That night I booked a flight.
I don't pack much. I don't tell Cas where I'm going, he already knows. I don't make a plan, don't rehearse what I'll say, and don't allow myself to construct some version of this moment that ends cleanly. I've never been the kind of man who deals in clean endings.
I deal in truth.
And the truth is ugly and complicated and I'm going to put it in front of her and let her decide what to do with it, because she deserves that much.
She deserves more than that, actually she deserves things I don't know how to give, things I'm going to have to learn from scratch because no one ever taught me how.
But I'm getting ahead of myself.
First I have to find my fairy.
Colorado in November is brutal, gray sky pressing down on everything like a lid, cold with teeth in it. I pull my hood up and move through the campus like I belong there, which I don't, but belonging somewhere has never been a prerequisite for occupying it.
I find the hockey rink first.
Not because I'm looking for it, because I hear it. The crack of a stick, the scrape of blades, the particular echo of a puck hitting boards in an enclosed space. Old instincts die hard. I follow the sound around the side of the building and find a service entrance propped open with a brick.
I let myself in.
The rink is mostly empty with just a few players running drills at the far end, a coach running his mouth from the boards. I move through the shadows of the upper corridor and look down through the glass at the ice below, scanning out of habit more than expectation.
She's not here. She wouldn't be rink side at a university she just enrolled in, that's not how she moves.
She's careful. She keeps her head down when she needs to and I know her well enough by now to understand she'd be rebuilding quietly, methodically, away from anything that might feel too familiar.
I move on.
I find her on the third day.
Not dramatically. Not the way these things happen in stories, no rain, no cinematic lighting, no moment designed to make anyone feel better about what comes next.
I find her because I've spent three weeks learning to think like her, and because thinking like her is disturbingly easy for a man who spent months convinced he didn't care.
A coffee shop three blocks from campus. Tuesday morning, between nine and ten because she always studied between nine and ten when she had somewhere to be at eleven, a habit I noticed without meaning to and apparently filed away without realizing it.
I spot her through the window before I go in.
She's sitting alone at a corner table with a textbook open in front of her and a coffee going cold at her elbow because she always forgets to drink it when she's reading.
Her hair is down. She's wearing an oversized sweater I don't recognize, bought here, part of the new life she's constructing without me and her hand is resting on the cover of the textbook but she's not reading it.
She's looking out the window at nothing.
She looks tired.
She looks like someone who's been sleeping in batches and thinking too much in the hours between.
She looks like herself, stripped of every defense, when she doesn't know anyone is watching.
Something in my chest does something I'm not going to describe.
I push the door open and walk in.
The bell above the door pulls her gaze from the window automatically, reflexive, the alert instincts of someone who's learned to monitor their surroundings. She scans the room the way people do when they've been taught to always know the exits.
Her eyes find me.
The color drains from her face.
I watch it happen, watch the sequence of it, the shock first, then something that moves too fast across her features to catch cleanly, then the walls slamming up. She's good. Most people would miss it entirely. I'm not most people.
I cross the room and pull out the chair across from her and sit down.
She doesn't run. I didn't expect her to, she's not built for running, not really, even when she tries. She lifts her chin instead, squares her shoulders, and looks at me with an expression that costs her more than she's letting on.
“How.” It's not a question. Her voice is steady and I hate how much I missed the sound of it.
“You forget to drink your coffee when you're reading.” I say. “You always study between nine and ten. You pick corners because you don't like your back to a room.” I hold her gaze. “I know you.”
Something flickers. She extinguishes it immediately. “You need to leave.”
“No.”
Her jaw tightens. “Xaden—”
“You named Cas head of the cartel,” I say it quietly, without preamble. “You balanced three towns against each other so none of them could move without toppling the whole structure. You built a peace on your way out the door.” I pause. “You thought of everything.”
“I tried to.” Her voice is carefully neutral.
“You didn't think of one thing.”
Her eyes narrow slightly. “What's that?”
“Me.” I lean forward, elbows on the table, and hold her gaze without flinching. “You accounted for Cas. For Alex. For the towns, the cartel, the power balance. You thought about everyone.” A beat. “You didn't account for the possibility that I'd come after you.”
The neutrality in her face develops a hairline fracture. She covers it fast but not fast enough.
“There's nothing to come after,” she says. “I made my choice. I left.”
“You did.” I don't argue with it, don't dress it up.
“You stood on that beach and you said goodbye and you walked away and I stood there and let you because I'm—” The word jams somewhere in my throat.
I work my jaw. “Because I couldn't say what needed to be said.” I watch her carefully.
“I'm not built for it. You know that better than anyone.”
“I know.” Her voice frays slightly at the edge. She firms it up immediately. “That's exactly why I left.”
“I know why you left.” I lean back, fold my arms. “I'm not here to tell you that you were wrong.
You weren't.” The admission costs me something measurable and I make no effort to hide that.
“You were right about everything. I shut you out.
I kept you at a distance because letting someone in has historically destroyed everything I love and I wasn't—” Another jam.
Another forced push through it. “I wasn't ready to survive losing something else.”
She's very still.
“So instead you just made sure I'd leave.” Her voice is quiet. Not accusatory… just honest, in that way she has that cuts cleaner than any insult. “You made the decision for both of us.”
“Yes.” No deflection. No justification. Just the word, flat and true.
The silence between us is different from the silence on the beach. That one had desperation in it, the frantic, wordless negotiation of two people hoping the other one blinks first. This one is quieter. Older. Like something that's been sitting in a room alone for weeks, waiting.
She looks down at her textbook. Then back up at me.
“What do you want, Xaden.” Not a question. A reckoning.
“You.” The word comes out without the hesitation I expected.
Raw and undecorated and entirely without the performance I usually wrap around anything that matters.
“Not the version of you that fits neatly into my life. Not the version I can control or keep at a manageable distance.” I hold her gaze and don't let myself look away because she deserves that much, to see that I mean it, that I'm not going to take it back the moment it makes me uncomfortable.
“You. All of it. The parts that scare me. Especially those.”
Her eyes are glassing over and I watch her fight it with everything she has.
“You don't do this.” Her voice comes out rough. “You don't show up and say things like—”
“I know what I do.” I cut her off quietly.
“I'm aware of exactly what I am and what I'm capable of and how much damage I can do to someone who gets close enough.” I pause.
“I'm also aware that you already know all of that. You knew it on that beach. You knew it every time I shut you out and you stayed anyway.” I lean forward again.
“You're not naive about who I am. You never were.
Which means when I tell you I'm not leaving here without you, you understand what that means coming from me.”
“That sounds a lot like a threat,” she says, but her voice has changed. Something underneath the armor is shifting, the way tectonic plates move, slow, enormous, inevitable.
“It's not a threat.” I hold her gaze. “It's the only honest thing I know how to give you right now.
I'll learn the rest. I'll figure out the parts I'm missing and I'm missing a lot, I'm not pretending otherwise.” Something tightens in my jaw.
“But I'm not walking out of this coffee shop without you knowing that I came. That I looked for three weeks. That I booked a flight with no plan and no script because—” The sentence resists me.
I push through it anyway. “Because you are the only thing in my life that has ever felt like it belonged there.”
The tear that falls is the one that she doesn't catch in time. She swipes it away with the back of her hand immediately, almost angrily, and I feel something that might be the closest thing to tenderness I'm capable of at the sight of it.
She looks at me for a long moment. Searching. Reading me the way she always has, past the surface, past the mask, straight down to whatever sits underneath.
Then she looks down at her stomach.
Then back up at me.
“This isn't simple, Xaden.” Her voice is raw. “This isn't you showing up and everything just—” She exhales. “There's so much. There's so much you don't say and I can't keep—”
“I know.” I don't let her finish because she's right and I'm not going to argue with it. “It's not simple. It was never going to be simple.” I hold her gaze. “I'm not here because it's simple. I'm here because it's you.”
The words land.
I watch them land.
She closes her eyes for a moment, just a moment and in that moment she looks like someone putting down something extraordinarily heavy that they've been carrying alone for a very long time.
When she opens them again, she doesn't look resolved or certain or any of the things that make moments like this comfortable.
She just looks like herself.
Tired, brave and impossible to walk away from.
“You have a lot to make up for,” she says finally. Her voice is steady again but underneath it is something fragile, real and entirely unguarded.
“I know.” I hold her gaze. “I'm not going anywhere.”
She looks at me for another long beat. Then she looks down at her cold coffee. Then out the window. Then back at me, and whatever she finds on my face in that moment tips the scale of something I can't see.
She doesn't smile. She doesn't throw herself at me or forgive me cleanly or make this easy on either of us.
She just picks up her coffee cup and wraps both hands around it and says quietly, without looking at me, “Sit down properly. You look like you're about to interrogate someone.”
I shift in my chair.
And say nothing.
And stay.