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Blood on her sleeve. Her sleeve, not her skin — someone else’s. Her hair is loose. Her bad hip is listing left, the weight favoring her right the way it does when she’s pushed it past its limit and the compensation has run out of runway. Her eyes find mine across the room and they’re glassy, wide, the composure stripped back to something raw and young and terrified.

Not terrified of me. Terrified of the quiet.

Twenty years of rooms. Twenty years of missions and handlers and the next target and the next city. The body always in motion because stillness meant the things she’d done would catch up. The things she’d lost would find her.

The quiet just found her.

I don’t calculate. I don’t assess.

“Come here.”

Spoken now, in this room, with my hands open on my knees and the lamp making my bruises look worse than they are, the words land like an invitation that doesn’t have an expiration date.

She crosses the room. Three steps. Her hip catches on the second and I see the flinch she doesn’t let reach her face. She stops in front of me — standing, my knees almost touching hers, close enough that I can smell the night on her. Concrete dust. Sweat. The copper ghost of someone’s blood. And underneath — her. The scent I learned in a room with chains on the wall, the one my body locked into like a frequency I didn’t know I’d been scanning for.

“Isadora.”

Her name in my mouth and the taste of it makes my chest ache in a way that has nothing to do with cracked ribs.

“We have time.”

Her breath catches. A small sound — barely there, barely audible over the hum of the house settling around us. But I hear it the way I hear everything about this woman. With my whole goddamn body.

“We’ve never had time,” she says. Her voice is rough. Scraped. The voice of a woman who’s been giving orders and taking relay points and putting men on floors for the last hour, and the operational register hasn’t fully released its grip on her throat.

“We do now.”

I reach for her hand. Slowly. The way you reach for something that might bolt — not because it’s afraid of you but because it’s been running so long it’s forgotten what standing still feels like.

Her fingers are cold. Her knuckles are bruised — the right hand worse than the left, the marks of a woman who leads with her strong side because the weak side can’t be trusted. I bring her hand to my mouth. Press my lips to the bruised knuckles. The skin is rough. Calloused. These are not soft hands. These are hands that have held guns and throats and chains and, four hours ago, my face while her mouth found mine against a steel door and the world shrank to the twelve inches between our bodies.

She makes a sound. Low. Not a word — a release. The sound of twenty years of holding cracking along a fault line she didn’t know she had.

“Sit down,” I say against her knuckles. “You’re favoring the hip.”

“I’m fine.”

“You’re shaking.”

“I said I’m fine.”

I pull her gently. She resists for one second — the reflex of a woman who doesn’t get pulled, who controls the distance because distance is the only currency she’s ever spent freely. Then the resistance breaks. She sits beside me. The mattress dips. Her thigh presses against mine and the heat of it runs through me like a current I don’t want to redirect.

I don’t redirect it. Every other time — the concrete room, the steel door — there was a reason to stop. A countdown. A mission. A chain that needed breaking or a corridor that needed clearing.

There is no reason to stop.

The realization moves through me slowly. Not desire — desire I know. Desire is the easy part. This is something underneath. Quieter. More dangerous.

This is what it feels like to choose someone without a gun to your head.

I turn to her. My hand finds the side of her face. My thumb traces the line of her jaw — the hinge, the tension she carries there, the place where Isadora Ferretti holds everything she will not let herself say. Her skin is warm. Her pulse hammers beneath my fingertips.

“Dante.” My name in her mouth is a warning and a prayer and the space between the two is where I want to live.

“I’m not running a calculation,” I tell her. “I’m not analyzing what happens next. I’m not assessing risk or measuring outcomes or doing any of the shit my head does when it’s trying to keep me safe.”

Her eyes search mine. Looking for the lie. Twenty years of men who said things and meant other things and used their mouths as tools instead of truth.