Chapter 15
AMELIA
Walking back into Dominion Hall felt like stepping into someone else’s life.
Just hours ago, this place had been an assignment. A lead. A network I intended to peel apart with surgical precision.
Now, the marble under my heels felt like it belonged to a family I hadn’t known existed—and to a man I’d spent two years training myself to hate.
Levi’s fingers were laced with mine as we crossed the foyer.
His grip was firm, but there was a tremor in it he couldn’t disguise.
He always moved like a mountain—sure, deliberate, weight distributed just right.
Tonight, he felt like a cliff edge that had just learned the ocean underneath it wasn’t quite as solid as it looked.
Teddy wasn’t in sight. The chandelier glowed dimmer, most of the house gone to sleep. We followed the strip of light spilling from the parlor, our joined hands the only steady point in a reality that kept shifting.
Inside, Byron and Charlie both looked up.
The older Dane had traded the mantle for one of the armchairs but hadn’t relaxed into it. He sat upright, forearms on his thighs, hands clasped like he was waiting for a verdict. Charlie stood by the window, staring out into the darkness. They both straightened when we entered.
I was very aware of Levi’s arm brushing mine. Of his damp lashes, the rawness at the edges of his mouth. The time we’d spent outside—him breaking apart in quiet, brutal pieces and letting me hold them—clung to my skin.
“We can finish this tomorrow,” Byron said, voice careful. “It’s been a day.”
Understatement of the century.
Charlie nodded once. “We can put you both in rooms here, if you’d like. Or Ms. Emerson, the driver can take you back to the hotel if you prefer to be out of … family business.”
It was tactful. Considerate, even. The kind of thing men like this said when they wanted you off the playing field without looking like they’d benched you.
Levi’s posture tensed beside me, as if he were about to argue.
My mouth moved first.
“I’m not going anywhere,” I said. “I’m with him.”
The words slid out before I could vet them. No caveats. No professional disclaimers. Not I’m embedded with him, not I’m here as his journalist, just I’m with him.
Three Danes stared at me.
Levi’s head turned sharply, eyes searching my face like he hadn’t heard me right.
It hit me then—what I’d just said, what I’d just claimed.
I’m with him.
Not for this investigation, not until I get my story, not until the next flight out.
With him.
My heart did a slow, stunned flip.
Oh.
The realization wasn’t fireworks or crashing waves. It was quieter than that—a click of tumblers in a lock that had been jammed for two years. A sense of rightness settling into the space where anger used to live.
I loved him.
Of course, I did. I had in the tent, scribbling notes with his body heat pressed against my side.
I had on bad satellite calls from hotel roofs, his voice cutting in and out between detonations.
I had even in the months I’d told myself I hated him, using that hatred like a tourniquet to keep the bleeding down.
Loving him hadn’t been the problem.
Surviving him had.
Now, watching his world tilt on its axis, the problem felt different.
He needed someone in his corner who knew how to stand in falling rubble and keep steady.
Apparently, that was me.
Byron’s gaze flicked from our joined hands to my face. Something soft flickered in his expression—relief, maybe, or regret that his son had had to build a life outside these walls to find that kind of loyalty.
“If you’re with him,” he said slowly, “you’re in more than you know.”
“I’m a war correspondent,” I said. “You’re going to have to be more specific.”
Charlie almost smiled. It made him look disarmingly like Levi. “She’s got teeth,” he murmured.
“She always has,” Levi said.
His voice was low and rough, but there was pride in it. Pride that curled warm and dangerous under my ribs.
Byron rubbed a hand over his face, shoulders sagging for the first time. “Please, sit,” he said. “Both of you. There are pieces I can give you tonight. Not everything. But enough that you’re not walking blind.”
We sat on the leather sofa, side by side. Our knees touched. I could feel the residual tremor in Levi’s leg, a subtle vibration against mine. I laid our joined hands on my thigh, anchor and tether both.
This is what I’d asked him for two years ago, I realized. A seat at the table. The courtesy of context.
Back then, in that desert compound, he’d denied me both.
I’d built whole structures of resentment on that denial.
I’d been embedded with his unit, chasing allegations that a private security outfit was running operations off the books—raids with civilian casualties that never made it into official reports. Levi had been my reluctant liaison. Somewhere along the way, reluctant had turned into something else.
We’d planned it carefully. A midnight drive outside the wire, a quick meet with a terrified interpreter who’d seen too much. Levi would snag out a vehicle; I’d slip into the back; we’d be in and out before anyone noticed we were gone.
The night of, I’d stood in the shadows by the motor pool, heart hammering, notebook inside my vest.
The truck never came.
Instead, an MP had found me and escorted me back to my tent, orders from higher up already crackling on the camp radios. My embed privileges were “under review.” My access was “temporarily suspended.”
Levi disappeared.
No note. No explanation. My calls went unanswered. Two days later, I was put on a helicopter headed back to Kabul, then home. A week after that, footage leaked from a different angle of the same operation—men moving in the dark, muzzle flashes, distant screams. A scandal bloomed, furious and brief.
I’d convinced myself Levi had chosen his mission over my story. That he’d decided I was a liability, dead weight to cut loose. That all his talk of integrity and truth had been camouflage for a soldier who’d rather obey than question.
It had been easier to hate him than to sit with the possibility that he’d been trapped between things I didn’t understand.
Now, watching him sit rigid beside me while his father confessed to faking his own death, I saw the pattern.
A man raised in a house where silence equaled safety. A boy taught that secrets were armor, that the people you loved were leverage. A soldier who’d spent his adult life absorbing threats so they didn’t spill onto the people in his blast radius.
Of course, he’d pulled the plug. Of course, he’d cut me out.
It wasn’t that he hadn’t trusted me.
It was that he’d trusted danger more.
“Dominion Hall didn’t exist in its current form when you were a kid,” Byron was saying.
“Back then, it was a network without a name. Men who’d learned too much in too many theaters of war and refused to let everything they knew vanish into redacted reports.
We thought we could do better on our own. Right the scales the state wouldn’t.”
I listened with half an ear, the reporter in me cataloguing terms—network, unnamed, refused to let it vanish—tagging them for later. The rest of me watched Levi.
Every time Byron said “we,” something flared behind Levi’s eyes. Betrayal layered over surprise layered over something quieter—grief for the version of himself who’d grown up measuring his worth against a man who’d been living a double life.
“How does faking your death right the scales?” I asked.
Byron’s gaze met mine. “It stops the people who want to use you from having a handle,” he said simply. “The dead can’t be threatened.”
Images flashed behind my eyes—names I’d written, faces I’d photographed, families I’d interviewed whose loved ones had vanished into black sites and shadow wars. All the men and women who’d told me, in exhausted, clipped sentences, about the price of getting too close to certain truths.
He wasn’t wrong.
He also wasn’t forgiven.
“It destroyed them,” I said. “Your family. You know that.”
“Yes,” he said. “I read every report. Every school record. Every hospital bill. I made sure there was money when it mattered.”
Levi’s head snapped up. “You paid for Ethan’s surgery?”
Byron nodded. “Among other things.”
Levi’s mouth opened, then closed. I could almost hear the mental calculus—every time his family had been pulled back from the brink by a mysterious donor, every near-miss with foreclosure, every semester one of his brothers had scraped through without dropping out for lack of tuition.
They’d credited luck. Anonymous charity. A system that occasionally, miraculously, worked.
All the while, the ghost in the empty box had been signing checks from the shadows.
“Why now?” I asked. “Why bring him here?”
Byron’s jaw tightened. “Because the people we’ve been keeping at bay for years are changing tactics,” he said. “They’re getting impatient. Hungrier. Less predictable. And my sons are in their crosshairs.”
I thought of the anonymous text that had started this whole thing, the blurry screen grab of corporate records, Danes dotted across them like a rash. I thought of the card at dinner, cream and expensive in my hand.
Ask him about his father. Ask them all.
“Someone wanted us to have that card,” I said. “Someone who knows Levi’s history and yours.”
“And Dominion Hall’s,” Charlie added.
My brain spun through possibilities—disgruntled insider, rival network, government contact with an agenda. The story expanded around us, layers shifting, new seams opening to dig into.
But right now, those were future problems.
The present problem sat next to me, breathing shallowly, his hand still locked with mine like he’d forgotten how to be alone in his own head.
“I used to think anger was my only fuel,” I said suddenly.
Three sets of eyes turned toward me.