23. Cillian #3
“Good.” Leo stands up. “I’ll keep investigating. I’m sure Connor will throw resources at it too. But Cillian.” He fixes me with a heavy look. “Focus on your marriage. Focus on your wife and baby. The rest of us will handle the conspiracy.”
I nod. I can do that.
“Good.” Leo picks up the half-empty whiskey bottle. “And get that shoulder looked at. It looks disgusting.”
I bark out a laugh, shaking my head, “Goodnight, Leo. Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.”
Once Leo leaves, I head toward our bedroom. I open it to find Valentina sitting on the edge of the bed, staring at nothing.
The lamp on her side is on, the light catching the side of her face and the large bump above her temple.
God, I hate seeing it because it reminds me of my own failure. Her hair is still damp from her shower and she’s in her pajamas, but she doesn’t seem to notice I’ve come in.
She doesn’t look sad, she just looks…empty.
“Hey,” I say gently, snapping her out of her thoughts.
“Is she really gone?” she asks. “Really?”
It takes me a moment to figure out who she is, then I nod. It makes sense Valentina wants to be reassured even though we had this conversation earlier. “Yes,” I lean against the doorframe. “She’s really gone.”
Valentina nods, taking in a deep breath, her breasts rising. “We’ll never know for sure, will we? Who hired her? Why they wanted to destroy us.”
“Probably not,” I admit, sitting down next to her on the bed, the mattress dipping beneath my weight. She doesn’t move away and I’m grateful for it.
Up close I can see the small cuts on her hands from the glass, the shadows under her eyes.
I wait for the familiar feeling of self-loathing to hit, but I’m surprised that instead of hatred for myself I’m relieved that it could have been so much worse.
I’m thankful it’s not.
“I’m sorry,” I tell her, placing my hand over hers.
She glances at our joined hands but doesn’t pull away. “For what?”
“For all of it.” I turn to face her. My shoulder stings like a motherfucker but I don’t care. “For lying to you. For not trusting you. For calling you jealous and irrational when you were trying to protect us.” I take a breath. “For almost losing you because I was too proud to admit I was wrong.”
She’s quiet for a long moment and her fingers flex under my hand. “You covered me,” she says softly. “When the shooting started. You didn’t even hesitate.”
“Of course I didn’t.” Doesn’t she realize I would do anything to protect her, including sacrificing my own life?
She glances at me. “You could have been killed.”
“So could you,” I argue. “I wasn’t about to let that happen.”
She turns and looks at me fully. Her dark eyes are tired, but there’s also a resolve in them. “I was so angry at you,” she admits. “For weeks. I didn’t know if we were going to survive this.”
I can’t fight the flinch. I did that. “I know.”
“But when that window exploded and you covered me—” She stops, her throat moving as she struggles to vocalize her thoughts. “I realized that whatever mistakes you made, whatever lies you told—you—you love me. And you’d die to protect me.”
I nod. “In a heartbeat,” I tell her fiercely.
“That doesn’t make the lies okay,” she points out.
“I know,” I sigh. If she’ll let me, I’ll spend the rest of my life making it up to her.
“And it doesn’t mean I’m not still hurt,” she continues, further twisting the knife even though I know I deserve it.
I nod again. “I know that too.”
She moves her hand and laces our fingers together.
I look down at our joined hands, her small cuts and my bruised knuckles, and I think about how many times today I could have lost this and didn’t.
“But it means we have something worth fighting for,” she says quietly. “Worth saving.”
Weeks of tension seemingly release from my body, and it takes everything in me to not sag in relief. “So we’re okay?” I ask, trying to keep the hope out of my voice.
She gives me a small smile. “We’re not okay yet,” she says gently, playing with my fingers. “But we’re going to be. Eventually.”
I reach up with my free hand and push her hair back from her face, careful around the goose egg, tucking it behind her ear. She leans into it slightly, her cheek warm against my palm and my breath catches in my throat.
“Okay,” I say quietly, feeling like this is a sacred moment. “I can live with that.”
We eventually lay down in bed with her head on my good shoulder.
I pull her into me so she can lay her head on my chest, our legs tangling together.
She tucks herself into my side, arm around my waist, and I press my lips to the top of her head, breathing her in.
Claire Murphy is somewhere out there. Whoever hired her is watching and waiting and still holding cards I haven’t seen. Connor is furious.
Tomorrow there will be a hundred things to deal with.
But right now, Valentina is warm against my side, her breathing going slow and steady in the quiet room.
They tried to take this apart and spent months, if not years, engineering exactly the right lever to use against me.
They found my guilt and my pride and my particular brand of stubbornness and aimed all of it at my marriage, hoping to break it.
They came close. They came frighteningly close.
But she’s here. We’re here.
And she said eventually.