Chapter 19 #2
“You keep handing me logic like it’s the thing I’m short on.” I plant both hands on the desk. “I’m short on the version where the people I love get the benefit of the doubt you extend to everyone whose access you find useful.”
“Vera knowing Adrian’s guest list cold—and knowing more than was on it—only rates a shrug, apparently, but my brother forgetting his phone is a case file.
” I raise my voice before I can stop myself.
“You’ve decided it’s Callum. You decided it in the car last night and you’re building the file to match. ”
“I haven’t decided anything. That’s the entire point. I can’t afford to.”
“Then why did Platon build a file on my brother first?”
He stills at that, and for a moment I think I’ve found the real thing, the loose thread under all of it.
Then he says, quietly, “Someone inside this circle already betrayed me once, and it cost me four years of my life and everyone who trusted me. I know what it looks like when someone close uses the access you gave them. It looks reasonable until the damage is done.” He stops, like he’s said more than he planned.
“I’m trying not to make that mistake twice, and the way I do that is to suspect everyone, including the people you love.
Especially them.” He holds my gaze. “Vera and Adrian included. Platon has had a forensic accountant inside Adrian’s books for a week, quietly, because a man with sole control of the trust is the first person I check, not the last. If that surprises you, it’s because I don’t announce who I’m auditing. That’s the whole point of an audit.”
That’s when it stops being about Vera and Callum.
“That’s the thing, though.” I grip the edge of the desk until I control the tremor.
“You suspect everyone. You control everything. Something scares you, and your answer is to pull it closer and tighter until you’re the only one holding it.
You did it with the guards and the house.
You’re doing it with my brother right now, and you’d do it with me if I let you. ”
“I’m trying to keep you alive.”
“I know. That’s what makes it so hard to fight.” I blink hard, because crying in front of him would feel like handing over ground I can’t spare.
He watches me do it, and he starts to reach for me, then lets his hand fall.
“You want to talk about defaults, here’s yours,” he says.
“The second this got too big to control, you started looking for the door. I run at things and you run from them, and right now you’re deciding you have to leave before the leaving can be done to you. ”
He’s named it exactly, and I don’t have the footing to deny it.
“Maybe I am. That doesn’t make me wrong about you.
” I make myself say the rest, the part I’ve never said to anyone.
“I’ve spent my whole life making sure I could always leave.
I did it with every apartment, every job, and every person.
I kept a bag packed in my head at all times.
Somewhere in the last two months, I stopped packing it, and I only noticed tonight, realizing I’m terrified, not of you but of becoming the woman who disappears into a dangerous man’s life and calls it love because she’s too far in to see the difference. ”
He stops moving, and all the defenses drop off him at once, and for a second, I think we’re about to reach the actual center of it together.
“Will your world always come first?” I ask. “When it’s down to your war or me, will it always win?”
He doesn’t answer fast enough. It’s a half-second, maybe less. The pause hurts more than an immediate yes would have. His old answer came first, and he had to search past it.
“Piper, you need to listen to me.” He steps toward me. “It’s not—”
“You don’t get to do that.” I’m already moving. “You don’t need to explain it. I saw you hesitate. That’s the answer. The rest is just how long it takes you to be kind about it.”
“That’s not fair.”
“You’re right. It isn’t fair.” I stop at the door, because he deserves this much of the truth even if I can’t stay for the rest. “I’m not leaving because you did something wrong.
I’m leaving because you didn’t, but the floor went out from under me anyway, and that means it’s already too late for me to be smart about you.
I need one night where I’m the only one deciding what happens to me. You need to give me that.”
He could stop me. He has forty ways to do it and the will to use them, but he doesn’t. He stands in the middle of his office with his hands open at his sides and lets me walk out, and somehow that’s worse because it means he understood every word.
I end up in the guest room.
I don’t decide to. I walk there without choosing it, past the room I actually sleep in now, to the one at the end of the hall with the good light and the dust I wiped off a lifetime ago.
It’s the first room they ever put me in.
The night they caught me, I lay on that bed with my shoes on and mapped every exit in the house, certain I’d be gone by morning.
I sit down on the edge of the same bed. I still have my shoes on. Some habits wait a long time for their moment.
That first night, I could see all the exits, bright as marked doors, and I wanted every one. I’d have taken the window and the bad ankle over staying in a dead man’s house an hour longer than I had to.
Tonight, I sit in the same room and understand that I didn’t walk out because I want to go.
I walked out because I don’t, and wanting to stay this badly is the most dangerous thing that has ever happened to me.
The bag packed in my head was never about apartments or jobs.
It was about making sure no one ever got the power to take me apart, and I gave Nikita that power somewhere in the last two months without deciding to.
I came to the room where I once mapped my escape, and I sit on the bed with my shoes on, but I can’t make myself pack the bag that would mean leaving him for good.