CHAPTER FORTY FOUR
“Starling.”
Montgomery’s voice drifts through the garden like smoke—quiet, careful, almost afraid to touch me.
I don’t turn. “Not tonight,” I say, my voice thin, raw. “Go away.”
I wipe at my eyes with the back of my hand, as if I can scrub the memory of everything off my face.
But I feel him behind me before I hear another word. His warmth wraps around me like a shadow, hovering just close enough to unsettle every part of me that still remembers what it feels like to trust him.
“Please,” he says softly. “Can we talk about all this?”
The wind stirs, brushing petals from the overgrown flowers at my feet. My throat tightens.
“Talk?” I echo bitterly. “What do you want to talk about? The lies?”
Silence stretches between us.
Behind me, I hear the faint rustle of fabric. The shift of his stance. The hesitation.
He doesn’t answer right away.
Instead, I feel it—
The way his presence dips closer.
The way the space between us starts to shrink.
“I know you may hate me right now,” he says finally, voice low. Tired. “I just…I thought I could continue doing my job while protecting you at the same time.”
His breath brushes the back of my neck, warm and careful, like he is afraid I’d break if he got too close. Like he remembered every time he’d been the reason I almost did.
I still don’t turn. But I feel my body betray me—leaning ever so slightly back, into that heat I’d once memorized in darker places.
“We used you,” he says, and there is no deflection this time. Just brutal honesty. “But I never stopped seeing you as mine.”
My heart cracks. Splits open under the weight of those words.
I should walk away.
I should scream.
I should slap the lie right out of his mouth—
But instead, I whisper, “What is it going to take for you to take me away from it all?”
His silence is thunderous.
I turn.
Slowly. Stupidly.
And there he is—barely a foot away, looking at me like I am still that seventeen-year-old girl in the concrete room, and he is the one who chose to sit idly by instead of walking through hell to get me out.
“I couldn’t,” he says hoarsely. “Back then, they would’ve killed us both. And now…”
His voice trails off like he can’t decide whether to tell me the truth or protect me from it—again.
I stare at him, that familiar ache tightening behind my ribs. “And now?”
He swallows hard. “Now I’d walk straight into that hell without hesitation,” he says, voice rough around the edges. “Burn it to the ground if it meant you never had to look at me like that again… not even once.”
My breath catches.
He reaches for my hand but doesn’t take it. Just hovers, waiting.
I should pull away.
Instead, I let my fingers graze his—just enough to feel the tremble there. Just enough to remember how he used to hold me when no one was watching.
His head dips closer, forehead nearly touching mine. I can smell him—clean sweat, soap, a hint of leather and something older. Familiar.
“You’re not my handler,” I whisper.
“No,” he breathes. “I was never good at pretending I was.”
“I’m not a prisoner, Montgomery.”
His lips brush my temple—soft, fleeting. “No, that you aren’t.” A promise. A regret. A thousand unsaid things in one delicate press.
“And I am not yours.” I sigh.
“You were always mine, my rose,” he murmurs, voice rough with the weight of memory. “Even back then. In that concrete prison, surrounded by hellfire, you were the one who anchored me.”
I don’t breathe.
“Something about you—your strength, the way you kept surviving when everyone else had given up…it pulled me into your orbit. I wanted to save them all, but you—” His voice cracks, and he leans in closer, forehead resting against mine. “You were the one I wanted to take home. To keep.”
My eyes burn.
Because I remember.
The way he used to sit just close enough to feel like protection.
The way he never touched me, but his silence always spoke louder than the men who did.
I should push him away.
Should remind him I’m not a girl to be kept.
But my fingers curl into his shirt instead.
“You still feel like home,” he says, barely audible, like he hates himself for it.
I close my eyes.
“Then why did you leave me in hell only to pretend to keep me in another?” I whisper.
His jaw brushes my temple as he exhales hard. “Because I wasn’t strong enough to burn it down for you. Not then.”
“And now?” I ask.
The words hang between us.
But his hands speak for him.
One lifts to my waist, ghosting over the cotton shirt I’d nearly forgotten I am wearing. The other settles at the curve of my neck, fingers splayed—possessive. His thumb traces the side of my throat, where my pulse betrays everything I’m not ready to say aloud.
I turn into him without thinking, my forehead resting against his chest. The heat of him. The familiarity. My shirt clings to me in the cool garden air, and suddenly the thin fabric feels like it might catch fire.
He kisses the top of my head. Then lower. My temple. My cheek.
I let my lips part.
I hate him.
I want him.
Both can be true. Both are .
“Tell me to stop,” he murmurs, his breath against my jaw now. “Say the word and I’ll walk away.”
I don’t .
I can’t .
Because my fingers have already found his belt, not in lust but on instinct. Like my body remembers before I do how he, as the Warden, used to hold me through the dark, how he used my body and brought me pleasure.
So I don’t tell him to stop. I step even closer.
He pulls me into him fully, both hands gripping my waist like he is afraid I’ll vanish. And then his lips are on mine—soft at first, loving, testing. Like he is kissing a memory. Or apologizing to it.
I kiss him back.
Harder than I should. Desperate. Angry. Starved.
His mouth opens to me with a groan, and the moment breaks wide open—hot, consuming, and electric with everything we haven’t said.
His hands slide up beneath the shirt, skimming my hips, my spine, stopping just below the curve of my shoulder blades.
“Starling,” he rasps into my mouth.
“I don’t even know what’s real anymore,” I whisper, voice ragged. “What’s pretend and what’s not.”
He leans back just enough to look into my eyes. “Then let me help you figure it out.”
And then I hear it—a sharp, brittle snap of a twig breaking somewhere in the quiet garden.
The sound slices through the night like a warning.
I freeze immediately, every nerve alight, heart pounding like a war drum beneath my ribs.
Montgomery’s head whips toward the noise, muscles tightening visibly beneath his shirt, his stance shifting into that soldier’s readiness I’d come to know so well.
Protective. Alert. Every inch of him screams to defend.
From behind the dense hedges, a shadow emerges—slow and deliberate.
Shoomaker steps forward, his eyes dark and unblinking as they lock onto me.
They roam over the thin cotton of my shirt, taking in the way Montgomery’s hands clutch my waist like a lifeline, like he is terrified to lose what he already barely held.
Shoomaker’s gaze is cold but sharp, sharper than a blade. His jaw clenches slowly, deliberately. There is no surprise in that look. Instead, something primal and hungry stirs behind his eyes—as if this moment, this exact scene, is exactly what he has been waiting for.