Chapter 5 #2
And I understood something else, too, looking at him — that to ask him not to do it was to ask him for something far harder than violence.
Violence was easy for a man like Declan.
Violence was a language he was fluent in, a tool that had kept his brothers alive and his territory whole for two decades.
What I was about to ask him for was the thing that didn't come easy: to stand back.
To trust. To let the woman he loved walk into danger on her own terms and merely accompany her there.
I knew, even as I opened my mouth, that I was asking the King to do the one thing kings are worst at — to not rule the outcome.
And I couldn't let him.
"No," I said.
His brow lowered. "Brynn—"
"No. Listen to me." I gripped his hands hard.
"I know what you're offering. I know what it costs you to hold back and I know you'd burn down the world for me, and there is a part of me — God, Declan, there is a part of me that wants to let you, that wants you to make him disappear and make this be over.
" My voice shook. "But think. Think. What happens after?
Say you scare him off. Say it works. Then what's the story I've spent my whole life telling about Safe Harbor?
That we serve the most powerless people in this county through the system, because the system is supposed to work for them too, and somebody has to make it.
The second I solve my problems the way the MC solves problems, I prove Reyes right.
I prove every bureaucrat who ever looked at my families like criminals right.
I become a woman in the MC's pocket who makes her problems disappear.
And the families — the next time one of them needs the system to protect them, the system says oh, Safe Harbor, isn't that the place with the biker muscle? "
Declan's jaw was tight. "So you let him do this to you. To us."
"No." Tears were coming now and I let them.
"I fight him. My way. Loud and legal and in the sunlight, the way you taught me at the hearing — that was your idea, Declan, don't you remember?
You said I don't win by being right, I win by being loud.
So we get loud. We get Vincent. We get ahead of the story instead of hiding from it.
We don't make the photos disappear — we take the power out of them ourselves, before he can use them. "
"That could blow up the whole thing." His voice was rough. "Your funding. Your board. All of it. My way, nobody ever knows. Your way, it all goes public and you might lose everything anyway."
"I know." I pressed his hands to my chest, over my hammering heart. "I know the risk. But your way protects me by making me into something I've spent my whole life fighting. And I'd rather lose Safe Harbor as the woman I am than save it as the woman he says I am."
We stood there, the two of us, locked. And I watched the war happen on his face — the President who wanted to deploy his club against a threat, and the man who'd promised to let me lean on him, and the two of them tearing at each other in his storm-gray eyes.
He let go of my hands and turned away. He walked to my office window — the one I'd watched him through, crouched in the gravel with Eli's bicycle — and braced both hands on the sill and dropped his head, and I watched his shoulders rise and fall with the effort of it.
For a man who governed everything by being three moves ahead, by always having the next play, I was asking him to choose the one path he couldn't control.
I gave him the silence. I'd learned that from him, too — that sometimes the most useful thing you can do for someone is not fill the air while they fight themselves.
"You're asking me," he said finally, very low, still facing the window, "to stand still while somebody comes at you. Do you have any idea how that goes against everything I am?"
"I'm not asking you to stand still." I crossed to him, reached up and put my hand on his face, on the rough silver of his beard, and turned him toward me.
"I'm asking you to fight beside me instead of in front of me.
There's a difference. You don't have to protect me by hiding me or by hurting him.
You can protect me by standing with me when I do the hardest thing I've ever done.
That's not less than what you were going to do, Declan.
It's more. It's harder. It asks more of you. "
His eyes closed. He turned his face into my palm and held it there, and I felt the breath go out of him, the violence draining slowly, reluctantly, replaced by something rawer and more terrified — because a man like Declan O'Connor would always rather face a threat than feel helpless before one.
"My mother used to say the bravest thing she ever did was let me make my own mistakes," he said, eyes still shut.
"I never understood it. I think I'm about to.
" He opened his eyes. "If this goes wrong," he said against my hand, "if you lose everything you built because I didn't just handle it when I could've—"
"Then I'll have lost it as myself. And I'll still have you. And we'll build it again." I made him look at me. "You told me I didn't have to deserve you, I just had to let you. Well — let me. Let me do this my way. Trust that I know my world the way you know yours."
For a long moment he didn't answer.
Then Declan O'Connor — the King, the man the whole county feared, who had never once in his life walked away from a fight he could win with his fists — pressed his forehead to mine, and breathed out, and made the single hardest choice I'd ever asked of anyone.
"Okay," he said hoarsely. "Your way. Loud and legal and in the sunlight.
" His hands came up to grip my shoulders.
"But I'm not in front of you and I'm not behind you.
I'm right beside you. Every step. And the whole world's gonna see it, because the first thing your way means is that we stop hiding.
" His eyes burned into mine. "You ready to be my queen out loud, Brynn?
Because that's the only way this works now. We don't kill the story. We own it."
I thought about the patch he'd promised to have made before I finished the sentence. I thought about three hundred families. I thought about a woman in an emerald dress who, for the first time in her life, hadn't flinched in the mirror.
And I thought: the only way out is through, and the only way through is together, in the light.
I also thought about the cost of it — that there would be no taking it back.
Once I stood in front of cameras and said yes, I love that man, that outlaw, that king, the careful invisible life I'd built would be gone for good.
There would be no more disappearing into the back row.
No more being only the helper. I would be, permanently and publicly, a woman who had wanted something out loud.
The terror of that was enormous. And underneath the terror, for the first time, was something that felt almost like joy.
"Get Vincent on the phone," I said, wiping my eyes, my voice steadying into something I recognized — the voice I used when I'd stopped being scared and started being dangerous. "And then help me write a press conference. Because I'm about to do the bravest, stupidest thing of my entire career."
Declan looked at me like I'd hung the moon.
"That's my queen," he said.