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“Good.” She gathered the sheet around herself with more dignity than the situation strictly required and looked back at him — a proper, measured look, the kind that weighed and reconsidered and tucked things away for later use. “For what it’s worth — last night wasn’t nothing.”

“It wasn’t nothing to me either.”

“Yeah. That’s sort of the problem.” She didn’t explain further, and he found he didn’t need her to. He understood it better than she probably realized — the vertigo of discovering that a thing meant to be simple had turned out to matter far more than either of them had budgeted for.

TWELVE

ROMILY

By the time Romily had showered, dressed in yesterday’s clothes, and made it as far as the entry hall, she’d almost convinced herself the walk back to normal life was going to be simple.

Norden was waiting by the door, jacket on, keys in hand, and the sight of him fully dressed and ready to move derailed the plan she’d been building since the shower. He looked like a man heading into a board meeting rather than a man who’d spent the previous night arguing, kissing, and eventually sleeping beside a contractor he’d been protecting without her knowledge.

He crossed the entry hall before she’d finished processing the look on his face, tipped her chin up with two fingers, and kissed her — slow, easy, not remotely concerned that she still had one shoe in her hand.

“Good morning to you too.”

“You looked like you needed convincing it happened.” He took the shoe out of her hand and set it down so she could put it on properly. “I don’t intend to let you talk yourself out of any of it before we’ve even left the building.”

“Victor can take me. You don’t need to⁠—”

“I’m driving you myself.” Final, not a request dressed up as one. “Victor has a morning already full of things that aren’t chauffeuring, and I find I’m not finished with this conversation yet.”

“We haven’t started a conversation.”

“We’re about to.”

He held the door for her without waiting for further argument, the courtesy of someone who’d already decided the outcome and was simply allowing her the dignity of walking through it under her own power.

The sports car, unlike the fancy sedan from last night, was low, dark, and too quiet for a man who apparently intended to have a serious conversation while merging onto a six-lane avenue at rush hour. Romily buckled in, studied the dashboard like it might explain him, and gave up.

“So,” she said, because the silence had gone on long enough that someone needed to break it, and it clearly wasn’t going to be him until he’d finished the internal negotiation happening behind that composed profile. “You always personally chauffeur your contractors home the morning after you kidnap them?”

“Only the ones being followed by organized threats,” he said in the tone a man might use to mention traffic, both hands steady on the wheel, eyes forward. No flinch. No performance of guilt to smooth it over.

“That’s a remarkably narrow category, all things considered, given the size of your enterprise.”

“You’re the only member currently enrolled in it.”

“Lucky me, apparently.”

“That’s not sarcasm I’m choosing to hear, for the record.” He glanced at her once at a red light, present in a way she wasn’t used to from men who drove like this — not managing her reaction, not filling the silence to control it. There, simply, waiting for her to react the next thing he was about to say.

It unsettled her more than charm would have. Charm she knew how to read.

The light changed. He didn’t move immediately, a full second of hesitation that read, on him, like an entire paragraph of second-guessing he’d never admit to out loud.

“You could ask me to pull over. Take a minute before I say the rest of it.”

“I don’t want a minute. I want the rest of it.” She said it steady, meaning every word, arms crossed against a chill that had nothing to do with the car’s climate control. “Whatever’s coming, I’d rather have it moving than sitting still waiting for it.”

“Understood.”

“I’d rather you hear it from me than assemble it yourself from what’s left unsaid.” The light turned green, and his voice dropped into the register she was starting to recognize as the one he used when he’d run out of reasons to keep managing information. “The men in the alley were professionals — trained, coordinated, paid far more than an ordinary job like that would warrant. And the person behind it has been studying your work. Not what it looks like. What it does.”

Romily went very still in the passenger seat, hands folding in her lap the way they folded around a piece of glass she no longer trusted herself to hold.

He found her hands at a red light, one of his covering both of hers, brief and grounding, before he needed both back on the wheel.