The word forms in my head and stays there, stuck, because my throat has closed entirely. His face is doing things I've never seen it do — this man who sat through funerals without flinching, who negotiated with killers over dinner without raising his pulse — his face is completely open. Raw in a way that frightens me a little because I don't know what to do with a version of my father that looks like he might come apart.
His jaw works.
My eyes are burning.
Say something,I tell myself.Walk toward him. Do something. You've been missing him for months, you've been missing him every single day, stop standing here—
He takes another step.
That's all it takes.
Something in my chest just gives way, a dam wall deciding it's done, and I'm moving without deciding to move, crossing the distance between us in something that probably looks ridiculous and I don't care at all, and his arms come open and I run into them like I'm twelve years old and I did something frightening at school and he's the only person in the world who makes things smaller.
He catches me so hard it lifts me slightly off the ground.
His arms lock around me, crushing tight, and he buries his face in my hair, and the sound he makes is one I've never heard from him in my entire life, a broken thing from somewhere deep in his chest.
"My little princess." His voice is wrecked. Barely holding together. "Are you okay? Are you okay?"
"I'm okay." I'm crying already, both arms wrapped around his neck, face pressed into his shoulder. "I'm okay, Papa."
"Are you okay?" He pulls back to look at my face, both hands cupping my jaw, his eyes moving over me frantically like he's checking for damage. "You're sure? They didn't—"
"I'm okay." I cover his hands with mine. "I promise. I'm okay."
His eyes are wet. I've seen my father cry exactly once in my life, at my mother's funeral, and he turned away so I wouldn't see it. He's not turning away now. He looks at me, tears fall, and he doesn't do a single thing to stop them, and somehow that undoes me more completely than anything else.
I start crying properly. The ugly kind, the kind I've been holding in since the moment that third shot hit Axel and everything became unthinkable.
"I missed you," I manage. "I missed you so much."
"I know." He pulls me back in, one hand pressing my head to his shoulder. "I know, bambina. I know. I missed you every day."
We stay like that for a long time. This hallway with its antiseptic smell and its fluorescent light, and neither of us caring even slightly.
He came. The thought keeps hitting me, surprising me anew each time. He came. He drove here, brought men, and stayed.
I pull back eventually, wiping my face with the back of my hand. He watches me do it, and something in his expression is so achingly familiar — that particular look, attentive and a little helpless, that my father always got when I cried as a child. Like he wanted very badly to fix the thing and wasn't sure where it was.
"Why are you here?" I ask. "How did you even know where—"
"Since the first attack, I've always known something like this would happen." His voice goes quiet. "Since the first attack on his estate. I've known where you were every day." He looks at his hands briefly, then back at me. "I wanted to come then. I almost did, a hundred times."
"But you didn't."
"No." He says it without excuse. "I was proud and stubborn, but I was wrong." Each word is deliberate, and it costs him something. My father does not say those words easily. "Sending you away was wrong. What I said to you was wrong. I was afraid, and I took it out on you instead of the problem, and I have thought about that every single morning since you left that house."
My chin is wobbling again. I press my lips together.
"I'm sorry, Aurora." He reaches out, tucks a strand of hair behind my ear, the same way he did when I was small. "I'm asking you to forgive me. I know —"
"Stop." I catch his hand and squeeze his fingers. "You're my father. You always will be." A breath. "I'm sorry too. I never wanted any of this to touch you. I never wanted to make things complicated or dangerous or—"
"Nothing happening is your fault. You hear me?"
I nod, not trusting my voice.
He looks at me for a long moment, his thumb moving back and forth across my knuckles the way he's done since I was a little girl.
