Page 109 of The Endless Want

“And what’s that?” she whispers.

“That I was angry because I thought I’d already lost you. And I didn’t know how to lose you without destroying everything around me.”

“Declan,” she says quietly, “I never wanted to be lost to you.”

The table between us suddenly feels both too small and too vast. “Come with me,” I say after a long moment.

She blinks. “Where?”

“To dinner. Not now. Tonight. Somewhere quiet.”

Her brow furrows. “Declan, the Italians⁠—”

“I don’t care about them.” I lean back, exhaling. “We’ve spent months shouting at each other, hating each other, circling each other like wounded animals. We’re finally talking like humans. I want more time like this. I need it.”

She studies me for an impossibly long moment before she says softly, “Okay.”

The word hits like a warm gust of air, unexpected and grounding. I stand, bring our mugs to the sink, and she rises too. For a moment we stand inches apart, close enough that I feel her breath. Close enough to remember every bad decision we’ve ever made together and every good one we never let ourselves have.

She breaks the moment first, stepping back, brushing her hair behind her ear. “We should both shower and get ready for the day,” she says, but there’s something new in her voice. Lightness. Anticipation.

“Yeah,” I murmur. “We should.”

She disappears into the bathroom, and the sound of the shower starts a moment later. I stand in the kitchen, hands braced on the counter, letting the steam and her closeness settle into the cracks inside me.

We’re still at war, still drowning in danger, still carrying too much history between us. But for the first time, I think we might have a chance.

The day is the longest one I've had in months, and none of it is difficult.

I leave her at ten and don't get where I'm going until eleven, because I take the long route and catch myself doing it. Two hours at the club with the Italians' accountant, who wants the door counts broken out by night and gets them. A walkthrough of the new cameras with Conor, who looks at my face once, says nothing, and then can't help himself. "You slept," he says. I tell him to check the alley angles.

Liam's men have the manifests reissued under a new code by two. Ryan calls at three with nothing on the trace and promises something by tomorrow, which is what he said yesterday. I don't chew him out for it, and he notices that too.

At four I stop in a shop I have walked past two hundred times and buy nothing, because everything in it is the kind of thing you buy a woman when you want her to know you spent money, and that isn't what I want her to know.

By evening, the city feels like it’s holding its breath. Not storm-still, not quiet—just waiting. Ailish meets me at the foot of the townhouse stairs wearing a simple charcoal dress that fits her gently, leaving space for her growing belly. It’s understated but elegant, the kind of thing she would’ve worn long before any of this chaos. Seeing her in it pulls something low in my stomach, steady and warm.

“You look…” I stop myself before I say the wrong thing. She isn’t looking for flattery. She’s looking for honesty. “You look like yourself.”

It’s the right choice. Her lips tug upward, faint but real. “Good,” she says. “I want to feel like myself.”

We leave out the back to avoid the guards stationed at the front. The evening air is cool, not cold, and when Ailish falls into step beside me, it strikes me how natural this feels.

The restaurant is one of those blink-and-you-miss-it places at the end of a narrow street—no sign, no windows, no promises. Just a door with chipped paint and a man near it who knows me well enough to nod without questions. Inside, the lighting is warm and dim, the air thick with spices and simmering broth. But it’s not the restaurant itself that matters.

It’s the stairs.

The host leads us up a single narrow flight, then through a kitchen passage that smells of garlic and heat, and finally out onto the roof. The rooftop is small, barely wide enough for three tables, all shielded from the street by low walls lined with crawling vines. Above us, the city glows in fractured amber. The hum of traffic rises below like a lullaby.

Ailish stops at the threshold. “Declan… this is beautiful.”

“It’s quiet,” I answer. “We needed quiet.”

There’s one table set for two under a string of dim lights. Nothing fancy. Nothing designed to impress. Just a place where no one can interrupt us.

She sits, smoothing her dress over her stomach, and I take the seat across from her. The server brings water and disappears again without speaking. This place is built on silence.

Ailish looks around, exhaling slowly. “How did you even find this?”