Epilogue | NOA #2
The ring wasn’t delicate. It wasn’t ostentatious either.
A deep red stone sat at the center, dark as wine until the tree lights hit it and pulled fire through the facets.
Small diamonds framed it, sharp and bright, set in gold warm enough to sit beside the bracelet on my wrist like it had been meant to end up there.
I looked at the ring instead of him because I had limits and dignity, and neither one was currently performing well.
“That’s very red,” I said.
Torin’s smile was quiet. “I’ve a weakness for you in red.”
“That was one time.”
“That was a religious experience.”
“We’re going to church. Try to behave.”
“I won’t.”
The laugh came out of me before I could stop it, shaky at the edges.
Then Torin went down on one knee.
My hand tightened in his.
He held on, his thumb steady over my knuckles, his face tipped up to mine. He looked cocky, impossible, gorgeous, and mine in every way that should have terrified me. Somehow, it didn’t.
“Noa Dahl,” he said. “I love you.”
The words hit harder with him on one knee and the ring open between us. I held his hand tighter.
Torin’s voice stayed low and certain.
“Life is short. We both know that too well. When God puts the woman you’re meant to find in your path, you don’t let her walk off while you’re busy feeling lucky. You take her hand. You make her a home with more exits than she needs. You ask her properly before she decides you’ve taken too long.”
“That sounds dangerously close to you admitting I’m right about things.”
“You’re right about many things.” His thumb brushed my hand. “Not the tree. The tree’s grand.”
“The tree is a hazard.”
“The tree is witnessing.”
My laugh broke a little on the way out.
Torin’s gaze didn’t move from mine.
“Marry me, sweetheart.”
I looked at him kneeling on our living room rug beside a crooked Christmas tree, with cathedral bells starting up in the distance and Halo City waiting below in its hard winter brightness.
I looked at the man who had walked into Claudia Kent’s office and decided I was trouble, then spent every day since proving he had excellent instincts and no survival mechanism where I was concerned.
My old life had been built around leaving clean. I had wanted no witnesses, no attachments, and no one close enough to turn absence into damage.
Torin had ruined that with patience, arrogance, black coffee, a frightening number of weapons, and the kind of devotion that didn’t ask me to become softer before I was allowed to be loved.
I touched his face with my free hand.
“I had plans,” I said.
His eyes warmed. “I remember.”
“They were very organized.”
“They were terrible.”
“They kept me alive.”
“They brought you to me.”
“That’s your argument?”
“It’s a strong one.”
I stared at him for another second, because some part of me still expected the floor to shift under happiness. It didn’t. The apartment held. The tree leaned. Torin waited, steady as a locked door and twice as difficult to move.
“Yes,” I said.
His hand tightened around mine.
“You’ll marry me?” he asked, and for the first time since I had known him, Torin Dempsey sounded like certainty had caught him by surprise.
I smiled then. I couldn’t help it, and I didn’t try.
“Yes, you impossible man. I’ll marry you.”
The ring slid onto my finger in one smooth, devastating motion. Gold sat beside gold. The red stone flashed above the cat charm like a dare the universe had been foolish enough to accept.
Torin surged to his feet and kissed me before I could say anything clever.
Clever would have been wasted.
His mouth took mine with heat and relief and six months of almost losing, then finding, then keeping. I fisted both hands in his shirt and kissed him back hard enough to make midnight Mass a negotiable concept.
When he lifted his head, his breathing wasn’t as controlled as he probably wanted it to be.
“We’re going to be late now,” I said.
“Aye, we are.”
“You seem unconcerned.”
“I’m newly engaged.”
“You’re insufferable.”
“I’m blessed.”
That shut me up.
His expression softened, not into something tame, but something truer than the sharp edges he wore for the rest of the world. Torin brushed his thumb beneath my eye, catching evidence I refused to acknowledge.
Outside, the cathedral bells rang again, deep and bronze over the winter streets.
Inside, the Christmas tree gave up the fight by another visible inch.
I looked past Torin’s shoulder. “Your witness is falling.”
He turned, saw the tree, and lunged one-handed to catch the top before it took out the side table.
I laughed so hard I had to brace one hand on his arm.
Torin stood there in black trousers and an open dress shirt, one hand gripping a collapsing Christmas tree, the other still holding mine.
“It’s perfectly stable,” he said.
“Your definition of stable explains so much about our relationship.”
“You still said yes.”
“I make questionable decisions under emotional pressure.”
“You make excellent decisions when properly kissed.”
“That theory lacks peer review.”
“I’ll gather more evidence after Mass.”
Heat curled low in my belly. “That sounds like a threat.”
“That’s a promise.”
I picked up my coat from the back of the chair, dark wool with the concealed inner pocket Torin had insisted on having tailored because romance, apparently, included practical places to put a blade.
He helped me into it, then put on his own black coat, checking the tree once before turning off the lamps.
The apartment settled into Christmas lights and shadows behind us.
At the door, I stopped and looked back.
My mug waited in the kitchen. His boots stood by mine. The crooked tree glowed in the corner. The half-unpacked box was finally gone from the closet because I had emptied it two weeks ago while Torin pretended not to notice from the hallway.
I hadn’t become less myself by staying. I had become harder to leave.
Torin’s hand found the small of my back. “Are you ready?”
I looked at the ring on my finger and the cat charm below it, both of them catching the tree light.
Then I looked up at him.
“Yes,” I said. “But if the tree falls while we’re gone, I’m blaming you.”
“That’s fair.”
“That was too easy.”
“I’m engaged now. I’m trying to be agreeable.”
“I already hate it.”
He laughed and opened the door.
We stepped into the cold December hallway together, toward bells, midnight, and the city waiting below. Torin’s hand closed around mine, warm and certain.
This time, when I walked out into Halo City, I wasn’t leaving anything behind.
***