Chapter 40 Keira
FORTY
KEIRA
Ididn't sleep. Not for a single minute.
Just lay here in the dark beside Ewan, staring at the ceiling while my mind replays every second of that bathroom.
Storm-gray eyes where brown should have been.
Every time Henri looked at me with that impossible longing, it was Tristan. Every time he touched my hand or stood too close or said something that made my pulse stutter—Tristan. Every heated glance, every careful word, every moment I thought I was losing my grip on reality…
It was him.
All of it.
I wasn't projecting a dead love onto a stranger. I wasn't unraveling.
I was remembering.
Ewan shifts beside me, his arm heavy across my waist. I force myself not to flinch. His skin against mine feels like something my body is actively trying to reject.
I thought want had died inside me. Thought it had been beaten out, smothered to oblivion.
Last night proved me wrong.
Do you want me the way you used to?
Yes.
God, yes.
When he looked me in the eyes and asked that question, I nearly dissolved on the spot. The wanting hit me like a wave I'd forgotten existed, consuming and terrifying in its intensity.
I want him so badly it's making me reckless. Making me stupid. Making me think about things that could get us both killed.
Ewan's arm tightens and I go rigid, but then I realize he's just adjusting in his sleep.
The clock on the nightstand reads 5:17.
Forty-three minutes until the garden.
Forty-three minutes until I see him again.
I count every single one.
I slip through the east doors at 5:52, wrapped in a cashmere cardigan that does nothing against the cold. The sky is still colorless, the sun just starting to bleed pink along the horizon. The grounds are empty except for the birds.
And him.
Tristan is waiting by the hedgerow in his guard uniform, looking like he belongs there. Just another soldier doing his job.
But when his eyes find mine across the lawn, there's nothing calm about them.
I walk toward him on legs that don't feel entirely solid. He stays there, watching me approach with that careful stillness I'm beginning to understand—jaw tight, hands clasped behind his back like he's physically restraining himself.
The brown contacts are back in place.
I hate them.
"You came," he says.
"Did you think I wouldn't?"
"I thought you might talk yourself out of it."
I stop a few feet away. The distance feels unbearable. "I almost did. About seventeen times."
The corner of his mouth twitches. "And yet."
"And yet." I feel nauseous from nerves.
Neither of us moves. The air between us thickens with everything we haven't said. Years of questions, of longing, of grief and loss, all compressed into the early morning silence.
"We don't have much time. Groundskeeper returns in twenty-five minutes."
"Then talk fast."
He nods, takes a breath, and starts laying it all out.
That strategic mind of his emerges. I listen and try to retain every detail, knowing it matters even when my brain wants to focus on the way his jaw moves when he speaks.
His lips. I remember what that tongue can do.
Mind out of the gutter.
The team waiting in New York—Aaron and Cat. There's a strange symmetry to it. I helped save them once, and now they're showing up for me. Well, for Tristan, really, but still.
The gala, where Ewan will be distracted, surrounded by people he's desperate to impress. The extraction point. The safe house. The new beginning for me and Hale.
He's thought of everything.
Every detail. Every contingency. Every possible failure point and how to prevent it.
"And if it doesn't work?" I ask when he finishes. "If something goes sideways?"
"Then we adapt."
"That's not a plan."
"It's my plan." He moves closer, and the distance between us shrinks to almost nothing. "I've been running ops like this for years. I know what I'm doing."
"This isn't an op. This is our lives."
"Which is exactly why I'm not taking chances." Something flickers in his expression. "It's also an opportunity to take back everything he stole from you."
I exhale slowly. "I don't care about any of that right now. I just want us to get out. That's it."
He looks pained, maybe a little regretful. But he buries it beneath that controlled exterior before I can examine it too closely.
I've always been able to see what he tries to hide.
That's what made him different from the beginning. Not the power—I've known powerful men. Not the confidence or the danger that radiates off him like heat from a forge.
It's what lives underneath.
The way he holds himself back.
I remember the first time I noticed it. We'd been arguing about something stupid—I can't even remember what. I said something sharp. It should have made him snap back or walk away.
Instead, he stopped and went quiet.
He gave me space for the anger, and I remember looking at him, seeing the aching tenderness hiding behind all that steel. A gentleness he protected so fiercely I wondered who had taught him it was something he should be ashamed of.
I'd kissed him then. Right in the middle of our fight.
I told him he didn't have to hide from me, and he looked so confused, like no one had ever said those words to him before.
We always understood each other in ways that didn't require words. I felt it then. I feel it now.
This invisible thread between us that so many years and an ocean and a dirtbag couldn't sever.
"Hey." His voice pulls me back. "Where'd you go?"
I blink. "Nowhere. Just…remembering."
"Remembering what?"
You. The way you used to look at me when you thought I wasn't paying attention. The way you'd trace patterns on my skin while I slept, like you were trying to memorize me. The way you never once made me feel like I owed you anything.
"Nothing," I say instead. "It doesn't matter."
"Worried about the plan?"
"No. I trust you." And I mean it completely.
His certainty should worry me. The confidence bordering on arrogance, and his complete disregard for his own mortality that makes him think he can walk into hell and walk out carrying everything he came for.
But it's different with Tristan. It's always been different.
He's not performing. Not calculating how to use me or control me or whittle me down into something more manageable. He's not pretending to be something he's not.
He just is.
It makes me want to collapse into him and let him carry the weight I've been holding alone for so long. Let him take the fear and the exhaustion and the constant, grinding vigilance that's kept me alive but hasn't let me live.
I want to rest.
I want to stop fighting for once and trust that he will catch me when I fall.
"There's something I need to tell you." The words slip out before I change my mind. "About what happened. Back then."