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They’re the color of a sky that can’t decide whether to storm or clear, so right now, they’re doing both at once. He looks at me like I’m something he maimed and killed and tore to bits and burned and scattered to the wind, only to find it standing in front of him again. A miracle. Or a ghost.

“You lied,” I accuse in a hoarse croak.

Lukas shakes his head. “No. That, Rae, was the first time I’ve told the truth in eighteen years.”

“No. Youlied.In the holding cell. When Kir asked if you loved me.”

The officers flanking him have stopped walking. The attorneys have gone library-quiet. They’re all watching and waiting to see what the crazy barefoot girl will do next.

“You said I was a distraction,” I continue. “You said I wasnothing.”

Lukas doesn’t say anything right away. He just looks at me.

No, notjustlooks at me. He looks at me the way he looked at me across the ballroom at the gala, when I stood alone in that red dress and his eyes found mine through five hundred bodies and a thousand points of chandelier light. He looks at me the way he looked at me in the wine cellar in Bordeaux, standing close enough to taste the tannins on his breath while centuries-old dust swirled between us and the air hummed with all the things we weren’t saying yet. He looks at me the way he looked at me the very first night we ever met, when he materialized from the shadows of the fiftieth floor, and his gaze landed on me—rumpled, lipstick-smeared, terrified little Rae Everett with her blouse untucked and her dignity in tatters—andsawme.

Notthroughme. Notpastme. Not at thesurfaceof me.

Intome.

“I would have said anything to keep Kir from using you against me,” he sighs. “I didn’t know you were watching.”

His hand rises slowly, the way you’d reach for an animal you’re afraid of startling, and touches my face. His scarred fingers cup my jaw and his thumb traces the line of my cheekbone where dried tears have left salt trails on my skin.

“I’m sorry for that,” he murmurs. “I’ll spend the rest of my life being sorry.”

Then he bends down and kisses me.

I kiss him back, like I’m trying to pour six years of loneliness and grief and self-denial into his mouth. When his arms finally close around me—one hand splayed across my back, the other buried in my hair, pulling me tightly against his chest—I understand, with a clarity that cuts through every doubt and fear I’ve ever carried, that this is exactly where I’m supposed to be.

Here.

Nowhere else.

Here.

81

RAE

MILES & KAGAN LLP

CASE STRATEGY MEMO

Re: People v. Lazarev (Ind. No. 2025-NY-48891)

PRIVILEGED & CONFIDENTIAL

We end up in the back of a black sedan that was waiting to take Lukas away from the precinct now that he’s out on bail. One of the attorneys holds the door open. I climb in first. Lukas follows. The door shuts behind us and the noise cuts off.

Lukas pulls me against his chest and buries his face in my hair. I can feel him breathing me in with deep, unsteady pulls.

I press my cheek against his chest. His heartbeat is loud and strong beneath the pressed cotton of his shirt. Each breath lifts me up and lets me back down. Up and down. Up and down.

We don’t talk.

There’s too much to say. Elena’s journal pages are still crumpled in my jacket pocket. Kir’s face as he shoved through the crowd keeps flashing behind my eyes. There’s a trial coming, and it’ssure to be ugly. There are a hundred fires burning and not a single one of them is out.

But right now, his arms are around me and mine are around him.