Until You’re Mine (He Promised to Keep Her Safe. He Never Promised to Let Her Leave.)

CHAPTER ONE

Nadia — The Ordinary Hour

I used to believe that safety was a place. A locked door. A well-lit street. A city block you’d walked so many times your feet knew it better than your eyes did.

I don’t believe that anymore, but on the night this story really starts, I still did.

The gallery smelled like fresh paint and other people’s perfume, and I was standing in the corner doing what I always did at my own openings — pretending I wasn’t watching everyone else pretend to understand the work.

Six months of my life were hanging on those walls.

Canvases of water at night, black and silver, the kind of paintings people call “haunting” when they mean I don’t know what to say about this but I feel something.

“You’re doing the thing again,” said Priya, appearing at my elbow with two glasses of wine she had no intention of sharing both of.

“What thing.”

“The thing where you stand in the corner of your own show like you’re casing the building.” She pushed one glass into my hand anyway. “Smile. Rich people are about to give you money.”

I smiled. It wasn’t hard — I liked this part, actually, liked watching a stranger stop in front of a canvas and go quiet. What I didn’t like was the party after the quiet. The small talk. The way men in good suits asked if I’d always been artistic, like it was a diagnosis.

That was when I felt it. The first time.

Not a sound. Not a face. Just a change in the air, the specific pressure of being looked at by someone who wasn’t going to look away when I noticed.

I turned toward the far wall, where my largest painting hung — the pier at low tide, the water black as oil — and there was a man standing in front of it who was not looking at the painting at all.

He was looking at me.

Dark coat, unhurried stillness in a room full of people working too hard to seem relaxed. I couldn’t have said what color his eyes were from that distance. I could have told you, with total certainty, that he had been watching me for longer than the two seconds it took me to notice.

“Priya.” I didn’t look away from him. “Who’s that.”

She followed my gaze and came up empty. “Who’s who?”

When I looked back, the space in front of the painting was empty. Just black water and silver light, and no one standing in front of it at all.

I told myself it was nothing. I told myself that three more times before the end of the night, which should have been my first clue that it wasn’t.

My apartment was four blocks from the gallery, in a building with a temperamental buzzer and a landlord who believed radiators were a philosophical concept rather than an obligation.

I liked the walk normally. That night I found myself doing math with the streetlights, counting the gaps between them, the way you do when a rational part of your brain has quietly decided something is wrong before the rest of you catches up.

Nothing happened. That was the strange part I’d come to understand later — that the fear had arrived before any actual danger did, like my body already knew something my mind hadn’t been told yet.

I got inside, locked the door, and did the thing I always did and never admitted to anyone: I stood at the window for a minute before closing the blinds, looking down at the empty street like I was expecting it to answer a question I hadn’t asked out loud.

The street looked back at me, ordinary and lit and empty.

Almost empty. There was a car parked across from the bodega on the corner — dark, unremarkable, the kind of car you’d never notice unless you were already looking for a reason to be afraid.

I watched it for thirty seconds. It didn’t move.

No one got in or out. I told myself it belonged to someone visiting a neighbor, closed the blinds, and made myself a cup of tea I didn’t finish.

When I looked again, twenty minutes later, telling myself I wasn’t going to and doing it anyway, the car was gone.

Kael — The Distance I Keep

There’s a version of tonight where I don’t go. Where I stay three streets over, in the dark, the way I’ve trained myself to for four years, and let her walk home without knowing I exist.

I didn’t take that version. I haven’t taken it in nine days.

I watched her stand in the corner of her own opening like she was casing an exit, which told me two things I already knew and one thing I didn’t.

I knew she was smarter than the room she was standing in.

I knew she hated being looked at by people who wanted something from her.

What I hadn’t known — what put something cold and unfamiliar in my chest — was that she’d feel me before she saw me.

Four years I’ve been careful. Four years of distance, of angles, of never standing anywhere twice.

And in eleven seconds, standing in front of a painting of black water that made my throat tight for reasons I’m not going to examine tonight, she turned and looked directly at the place I was standing like she’d been told exactly where to find me.

I left. I always leave. That’s the rule, the only one that’s kept her alive this long without her ever knowing what she’s alive from.

But I sat outside her building anyway, because leaving the gallery was not the same as leaving her, and I’ve stopped pretending to myself that it is.

She stood at her window for a long time.

Looking down at the street like she could see through the dark if she tried hard enough.

I don’t know what she thought she saw. I know what she should have seen, if the universe had any interest in giving her the whole truth: a man who has spent four years making sure nothing in this city gets close enough to hurt her, sitting in a car he’ll never park in the same place twice, wondering how much longer he can keep calling this protection instead of what it actually is.

She closed the blinds. I stayed another twenty minutes, because the men who are watching her don’t announce themselves with a parked car, and I needed to be sure that tonight, at least, it was only me.

Then I drove away, because if I stayed until sunrise — and some nights I want to — there would be no version of this where I’m still the one keeping her safe instead of the reason she isn’t.

She doesn’t know my name yet.

She will. That’s the part I haven’t figured out how to want less.