“Contain what we can. Roman’s team is working to identify every contact the faction has used so far, which gives us a map of how they communicate and through whom. Lena’s security stays where it is. Yours increases, starting tonight, though I’m not restricting your movement, only adding coverage you won’t necessarily see.” I pause. “If they make contact, and I believe they will, I’ll know within hours. I have people positioned to ensure that.”
“And when they make contact?”
“I deal with it directly. Not through intermediaries, not through anything that gives them room to negotiate around me.”
She’s quiet for a long moment. The office holds it, the lamp throwing long shadows across the desk between us, the city dark and indifferent through the window behind me. I’ve given her everything I have. There’s nothing left in the folder, nothing I’m holding back this time, and the not knowing what she’ll do with all of it sits uncomfortably in my chest in a way that very little does anymore.
“Thank you,” she finally says.
It isn’t what I expected.
“For telling me,” she adds. “All of it. Even the part where I don’t get to do anything about it except wait.”
“You’re not powerless in this.”
“I know. I’m just tired of being the last to find out things that happen to me.” She looks at the desk for a moment, then back at me. “But you told me. Tonight, you actually told me.”
I don’t have a clean response to that. I’ve spent most of my life being the person who decides what other people need to know, when, and in what order, and being thanked for finally abandoning that instinct sits strangely, like praise for the bare minimum of what should have been true from the beginning.
“I should have told you about Lena before I moved her,” I say. “Not after. I know that now, in a way I think I only understood intellectually before tonight.”
“I know you know it.”
“That doesn’t fix it.”
“No,” she says. “It doesn’t. But it’s something.”
She stands. I think she’s going to leave, the way she’s left every other conversation in this office, decisive and final, and some part of me braces for the door closing the way it has closed a dozen times before.
She doesn’t walk to the door.
She comes around the desk instead.
I look up at her, and whatever is on my face must tell her I have no idea what’s about to happen, because something in herexpression softens, not pity, nothing close to that, something gentler and more deliberate.
“I’m not doing this because of fear,” she says. “Or because I don’t know what to do with everything you just told me. I want to be clear about that, because I think you’ll try to talk yourself into believing it’s something simpler than it is.”
“What is it, then?”
“You gave me the truth tonight. All of it, even the parts that don’t make you look good. Even the part where you admit you’d choose speed over including me again, if the same situation came up.” She’s close enough now that I can see the exact shade of her eyes in low light. “I’m choosing this with everything I know about you. Not despite it.”
I don’t move. I let her be the one who closes the last of the distance, because for the first time since the night in this kitchen, since the dinner in Connecticut, since every single time before, this is entirely hers to decide.
Her hand finds my jaw, the same way mine has found hers a dozen times, and something in that small reversal undoes me more than I expect it to. The simple touch undoes something in me. No one has ever touched me like this after knowing the worst parts of who I am.
“Celine.”
“Don’t talk me out of it,” she says. “Just this once, don’t.”
I don’t.
I look up at her, and for once I don’t have the right words. I stand from my chair, pull her against me, and kiss her.
The kiss starts slow, almost careful, like we’re both afraid of what this means. But then her fingers slide into my hair, and she makes a soft sound against my mouth, and everything shifts.
I kiss her deeper, tasting the quiet determination in her. She chose this. She heard everything I told her tonight and still chose me.
“Celine,” I murmur against her lips, my voice rough.
