CHAPTER 6 #2
"I ran first." She meets my eyes, something fierce and exhausted tangled together in her expression.
"Packed one bag, took Mia out of daycare on a random Tuesday like it was any other pickup, and drove until the money I'd been quietly hiding for eight months ran low enough that I had to stop somewhere.
Oakhaven was random. I picked it off a map because it was small and far from Seattle and I liked the name. "
"And he's been looking for you the whole time."
"He's been looking for me the whole time.
" She wraps both hands around her water glass, knuckles pale.
"I don't know how those men found me today.
I've been so careful, Damon. Cash only. No accounts in my name.
I even changed my last name back to Vance from Marchetti so it wouldn't flag as unusual if anyone ran it — figured a common name was better camouflage than my maiden one. And they still found me."
Something cold settles in my chest, replacing the earlier heat of guilt with a sharper, more focused rage.
"Men like him don't stop looking. Not because they still love you — because losing isn't a feeling they know how to have.
He's spent his whole life being the man who wins, and you walking out with his daughter isn't heartbreak to a man like that. It's a defeat he can't tolerate."
"That's exactly it." Her voice cracks slightly on the last word, the first real crack in two years of careful control, and I feel every protective instinct in my body surge at once, a physical ache to close the distance between us and pull her against my chest and simply absorb whatever weight she's been carrying alone.
I don't do that yet. Instead I reach across the table, slow, giving her every chance to pull away, and rest my hand over hers where it's wrapped around the glass.
She doesn't pull away.
"He will never lay a hand on either of you again," I say, low, and I feel the words settle into something solid and unbreakable in my chest as I say them, a vow forming in real time.
"Not while I'm breathing. Not while the Iron Vipers exist. I don't care what it costs, Selene.
I already paid once to keep you safe from something I couldn't fight head-on.
I'm not standing back this time and letting distance do the work. I'm going to handle this directly."
"You don't even know him."
"I don't need to know him personally to know exactly what kind of man he is.
" My jaw tightens. "I've spent twelve years dealing with men who think money and position mean they don't answer to anyone.
I know how they think. I know how they move.
And I know how to make a man like that understand, very quickly, that Oakhaven isn't a place he gets to reach into anymore. "
Mia wanders out of her bedroom a little after that, rubbing her eyes, dragging a stuffed rabbit by one ear, apparently unable to sleep through whatever tension she picked up on even from behind a closed door.
She climbs straight into my lap without asking, the same unguarded trust she's shown me since the first night in the garage, and holds up a picture book she must have grabbed off her nightstand on the way out.
"Read me this," she says, already settling in like the matter's decided.
I glance at Selene, half expecting her to intervene, to reclaim her daughter and send her back to bed, still too raw from the conversation we just had to want an audience for it. Instead she just watches, something soft and complicated moving behind her eyes, and gives a small nod.
So I read. Some story about a bear looking for a home, my voice low and unpracticed at this, stumbling slightly over the rhythm of a children's book, and Mia listens with total absorption, occasionally interrupting to point out a detail in the illustrations I'd otherwise have missed.
By the time the bear finds his home and the book ends, Mia's fighting sleep, head heavy against my chest, and I carry her back to her bed without being asked, tuck her in the way I watched Selene do it that first dinner, the blanket pulled up just so, the rabbit tucked under one arm.
"Night, Uncle D," she mumbles, already half gone to sleep.
Something in my chest cracks wide open at the name, same as it did the first time she used it, and I stand there a second longer than necessary, watching her breathe slow and even, before I finally step back and pull the door mostly shut behind me.
Selene's waiting on the porch when I come back out, arms wrapped around herself against the cold night air, and I cross the small living room to join her without a word.
She doesn't say anything for a long moment, just stares out at the dark tree line, and I let the silence sit, because I've said everything I know how to say tonight already.
"I'm scared," she finally says, quiet, and it costs her something to admit it, I can hear that in her voice.
"Not for me. I stopped being scared for myself somewhere around the six-month mark, once I'd proven to myself I could actually survive alone out here.
I'm scared for her. If he finds us — if he actually gets to her —"
"He won't." I close the last of the distance between us and pull her against my chest, and she comes without resistance this time, folding into me the way Mia folded into her that first night in the rain, like some deep exhausted part of her has simply run out of the energy required to keep holding herself apart.
My arms come around her, solid, certain, and I feel her breathe out slow against my chest, something in her body finally allowing itself to unclench.
"He will never lay a hand on you again," I say again, lower now, my mouth close to her hair, and I mean every word of it with the full weight of everything I am — everything I built out of my father's wreckage, everything I've bled for over twelve years to earn the right to say something like this and have it mean something.
"I swear it on my patch, Selene. Whatever it costs.
Whatever it takes. You and Mia are under my protection now, and that's not a word I use lightly. "
She tips her head back to look at me, eyes bright in the porch light, something raw and unguarded finally breaking through two years of careful armor.
"I don't know how to let someone do that," she admits, voice barely above a whisper. "I don't know how to let go of needing to be the only one holding everything together. It's the only thing that's kept us safe."
"You don't have to let go of all of it," I say. "You just have to let me carry some of the weight. That's all I'm asking. Not control. Not ownership. Just — let me help carry it."
She doesn't answer in words. She just presses her forehead against my chest, and I hold her there on the dark porch, the cold mountain air sharp around us, and I think about the drawing Mia showed me four nights ago — three stick figures, one of them tall, a house that looked like this one — and I think, for the first time in twelve years, that maybe some things I thought I'd lost forever are still worth fighting to build.