Chapter 13 #2
“That’s a big ask.” His voice was rough. “Considering my family’s lives are on the line.”
“I know.”
“And Oliver’s.”
“I know that too.”
He scrubbed a hand down his face, the rasp of stubble loud in the quiet room.
Then he dropped to a crouch in front of her, his knees on the hardwood, putting himself below her eye line.
It was such an unexpected thing to do — making himself smaller, more vulnerable — that for a moment, Grace just stared at him.
“Gracie.” His eyes were steady, dark in the storm light, and so close she could see the exhaustion bruised beneath them.
“I trust you. You hear me? Not because I understand what’s coming.
Because you gave up everything to keep Oliver safe.
You walked away from your whole life for that kid, and then you walked into a house full of people who hate you to get him back.
That’s not someone I need to second-guess. ”
Something cracked in her chest. The way ice cracks when the current beneath it shifts. Still holding, but changed.
“Magnus—”
“But I need something from you, too.” He reached for her hands.
His fingers were warm and rough, calloused from years of Pulaski handles and fire shelters and hauling hose up ridgelines that would break most people. They closed around hers — still cold, still faintly trembling — and held. Not tight. Not possessive. An anchor.
“Don’t disappear on him again.” His voice roughened. “On Oliver. He’s already lost you once. Whatever happens next, you don’t vanish. You come back. To him. To—”
He stopped. The word he didn’t say sat between them like a living thing.
Grace looked down at their joined hands. His hands were scarred and roughened, built for catching people when they fell. Hers were small, precise, built for keyboards and code and picking locks that shouldn’t be pickable. They shouldn’t have fit together. They did.
“I’ll do everything I can,” she said.
“That’s not what I asked.”
“It’s the most honest answer I have.”
He held her gaze for a beat that stretched too, then, slowly, like he was giving her every chance to pull away, he brought her hands up and pressed them flat against his chest. She felt the thud of his heart beneath her palms, steady and hard, a metronome beating out a rhythm that said I’m here, I’m here, I’m here.
“Feel that?” His voice had dropped to something just above a whisper. “That’s what you’re coming back to. All of us. Me and Oliver. You don’t get to be a casualty, Grace. Not on my watch.”
Her breath caught.
She should have pulled away. Should have reassembled the mask and the distance and the cold, clean logic that had kept her alive this long.
Instead, her fingers curled into the fabric of his shirt, feeling the warmth of him through the cotton, and she leaned forward until her forehead rested against his.
They stayed like that. Breathing the same air. The storm throwing itself against the glass three feet away, and neither of them flinching.
“The Count of Monte Cristo,” she said, barely audible.
“What?”
She pulled back just enough to see his face, but didn’t let go of his shirt. “Dantès spent years in prison. Everyone thought he was dead. He let them think it. Because the only way to destroy the people who’d taken everything from him was to become someone they’d never see coming.”
Magnus’s eyes searched hers. “Is that what you’re doing?”
“I’m saying that Dantès didn’t fight his way out. He waited. He planned. And when he finally moved, no one saw it until it was already over.”
A beat. Then the corner of his mouth lifted — not a smile, not quite, but the ghost of one. “And does Dantès come home at the end?”
The question hit her somewhere below the ribs. Home. She hadn’t had one in eight years. Maybe never. Hadn’t let herself think the word without flinching.
“He sails away with the people he loves,” she said. “And the people who hurt them spend the rest of their lives paying for it.”
“Good.” Magnus’s voice was certain, absolute. “I like that ending.”
He held her gaze for one more moment, his forehead still close enough that she could feel the warmth radiating off his skin.
Then he squeezed her hands once — firm, deliberate, a promise sealed in pressure — and let go.
He rose to his feet, and the absence of his warmth hit her like stepping out of the bakery back in Alaska on a February morning.
She watched him walk toward the archway. Just before the light from the hall caught him, he paused, drew one careful breath, and let the softness leave his face.
A few seconds later, she heard Astryde say something sharp, and Magnus’s low laugh in response. The break of a fresh game. The world of warmth and belonging closing around him like water.
She sat with the silence he’d left behind. Her palms were still warm where his heart had been beating against them.
Grace pulled up the video again, freezing on the frame where Oliver looked directly at the camera. His eyes held terror, yes, but also hope. He believed she was coming for him. Believed with the absolute faith of a seven-year-old that his mother would save him.
She wouldn’t fail him. Even if it meant sacrificing every carefully constructed plan. Even if it meant revealing her hand to Lars before she was ready.
Her fingers flew across the keyboard, pulling up the vault access protocols she’d memorized years ago. The Patroclus facility held the keys to Lars’s destruction, but that wasn’t the only arsenal at her disposal. She had backdoors, digital weapons, and eight years of preparation.
And now she had Magnus.