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“You already have me.”

Something flickered in his eyes. He wore an expression that looked dangerously close to hope. He brushed his thumb across my cheek.

“I don't know what happens next.”

“Neither do I.”

“I don't know where we'll live. I don't know what I'll do with the rest of my life. I don't even know if I'm capable of becoming the man I want to be. The man you need me to be.”

“You don't have to have everything figured out, Demi.”

His eyes searched mine.

“I only know I don't want to find out who I am without you.”

My throat tightened. For so long, my life had been measured in things I had lost. My father. My home. The truth I thought I knew. The future I had once imagined for myself. Now, for the first time, I could look ahead and see something I hadn't expected.

Nothing was certain. It wasn’t a perfect promise that nothing would ever hurt again.

But it was a life. Messy and dangerous and completely unknown. But it was mine. Ours.

I slipped my fingers between his and smiled. His hand tightened around mine.

“I'll stay.”

He pulled me against him, and I closed my eyes as his arms wrapped around me.

Outside, the world was still turning.

There would be consequences for what we had done. Questions we hadn't answered. Enemies who might survive the fall of Coccico. A future neither of us could predict. But for the first time, I wasn't afraid of the unknown.

I had spent enough of my life looking backward. It was time to see what happened when we finally walked forward.

43

DEMITRI

Marcello kept his injured arm close to his body, though he insisted the wound had become a minor inconvenience rather than a limitation. Whenever he reached for something too quickly, pain tightened his mouth before he smothered it beneath irritation.

Samira noticed every time. She never asked whether he needed help. She simply moved whatever he wanted closer to his uninjured hand and continued speaking as though she had done nothing at all.

Across the table, Tone sat with one hand curved beneath the swell of her stomach. She tired more easily now, though she denied she was exhausted whenever anyone commented on the matter.

Before dinner, she had fallen asleep against Archie in the sitting room. He had remained perfectly still for almost forty minutes, one arm around her while Marigold colored on a sheet of paper balanced across his knee. Now Archie’s hand rested along the back of her chair. Whenever Tone shifted, his attention moved to her before returning to the conversation. He did not hover. He did not ask whether she felt well. He watched. With Archie, vigilance had always been another form of devotion.

Atlas had checked the security screens twice since sitting down. The first time, no one commented. The second time, Neve took the phone from his hand and placed it facedown beside her plate. He looked at her. She lifted one eyebrow.

Izzy kept Rose against her chest until Raze reached for the child. Even then, her gaze followed their daughter from her arms into his, as though the distance of half a table remained too far.

No one spoke about any of it. They had found ways to live around the fear without giving it a name.

Perhaps that was what survival looked like after the danger passed. The body continued to listen for gunfire long after the house fell silent. Hands remained close to weapons. Eyes checked doors. Mothers counted breaths in sleeping infants.

Every chair around the dining table was occupied.

Zeno and Ayla had arrived before sunset with two bottles of wine, a box of pastries and enough armed men to make the estate appear like it was under occupation again.

Ayla had barely crossed the threshold before Izzy pulled her toward the nursery to see Rose.