CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Nadia — Eleven Days Later
The story ran on schedule, exactly as planned, three separate outlets publishing within hours of each other, and the version of my life I’d been quietly protecting for two months became, over the following week, something considerably more public than I was fully prepared for.
Reporters called the gallery. Marguerite, bless her, developed a sudden and total inability to remember my schedule whenever a stranger asked for it.
Priya fielded most of the actual press, better at that particular kind of chaos than either Kael or I could have managed, and somewhere in the flood of coverage, my mother’s name — her real one, the one she’d buried under Kessler and every alias before it — finally appeared in print as something other than a case file, a woman who’d risked everything she had to keep a decade of corruption from disappearing into silence.
I cried reading that particular article, alone in my apartment, in a way I hadn’t let myself cry through any of the actual danger. It felt, finally, like grief instead of fear — the kind you can only really feel once the thing you were afraid of has stopped actively threatening you.
Kael was there for most of it, in whatever way I needed him to be — quiet when I needed quiet, present when the noise of the last two weeks threatened to overwhelm everything else.
We hadn’t talked, yet, about what came after the immediate danger passed.
Some conversations, I was learning, needed the ground to actually stop shaking before you could have them properly.
“I keep waiting to feel like myself again,” I told him, one evening about two weeks after the story broke, sitting on my own couch for the first time in what felt like a very long time, in an apartment that finally, genuinely, felt safe.
“And then I remember that the person I was before this started didn’t actually know the whole truth about her own life.
I’m not sure there’s a version of myself to go back to. Just a version to go forward as.”
“For what it’s worth,” Kael said carefully, “I don’t think the version of you now is worse than the one before. Frightened of things she couldn’t name, maybe. But she’s not that anymore.”
“No,” I agreed. “I’m not.”
I looked at him, this man who’d spent four years of his life orbiting mine in secret, who’d broken his own rules and unlearned his own worst habits and stood in an open street between me and a gun rather than watch from a safe distance one more time, and felt something settle in me that had nothing to do with the danger finally being over.
“What happens now,” I asked. “Between us. Now that there’s no crisis left to define it.”
He was quiet for a moment, and I watched him choose his next words with the same care he’d brought to every difficult truth since the storage unit.
“I’ve spent four years defining my relationship to you entirely around protecting you from something.
I don’t actually know how to do this the ordinary way — dinner, conversation, no danger requiring a getaway plan.
I’d like to find out, if you’d let me. Slowly.
On your terms this time, instead of mine. ”
“That’s a good answer,” I said, and meant it, and reached for his hand the way I’d started to without thinking somewhere in the last month of danger, except this time there was nothing chasing us, nothing to survive, just two people finally allowed to want each other without an emergency attached to it.