Page 38

I find her on the back terrace, arms wrapped around herself against the evening chill, staring out at the tree line like it might offer an answer to something.

She’s beautiful standing there, even from behind. That thought catches me off guard, the way it shouldn’t after weeks of knowing exactly how I feel about her.

The wind’s caught her hair, pulling loose strands across her shoulder. She hasn’t bothered fixing it.

I think about the child before I’ve decided to. Not prompted by anything she’s doing right now, just there, the way it’s been there most hours of most days since the doctor said it out loud.

A daughter, maybe. A son. Something of mine that exists now because of her, growing whether either of us is ready for it or not.

She doesn’t turn when I step outside, though I know she’s heard me, the door swinging shut behind me loud enough in the quiet. Her shoulders stay tight, braced, and I recognize that posture, the same one she wore the very first night I questioned her in that other house, back when neither of us could have predicted how far this would go.

“I’m not here to argue with you again.” I stop a few feet away, giving her the space she clearly still wants, hands loose at my sides rather than reaching for her the way I usually would. “I’m here to tell you everything. All of it. No editing this time.”

“That’s a start.” Her voice is flat and guarded. She still doesn’t look at me, eyes fixed on the dark line of trees at the edge of the property.

“You were right earlier. About all of it.” I keep my voice steady, with no defensiveness in it.

She finally turns, arms still crossed, studying my face. “Then tell me. All of it, like you said.”

I take a breath. I’ve never had to say out loud to her directly, not in these terms, not with this much clarity. “You’re not a target because of who you are to me. You’re a target because of what you might know.”

Her brow furrows. “What I might know?”

“The night you walked into 12A, you saw things. The monitors. The weapons cabinet. To anyone in my world, that means you saw enough of my operation to be dangerous, whether you actually understood any of it or not.” I hold her gaze, unflinching, refusing to let myself soften this the way I’ve softened everything else for months. “The Sokolovs don’t care whether you know anything useful. They care that I believe you might, because that belief alone makes you worth taking.”

“That’s insane. I don’t know anything at all. I saw a locked room and some guns.”

“It doesn’t matter what you actually know. It matters what they think you know, and what they think I’d pay to get you back safely.” My jaw tightens at the thought, at how coldly the calculation reads once it’s said out loud in the open air between us. “You’ve become leverage, Harper. Not because of anything you’ve done. Because of what you witnessed that day.”

She’s quiet for a moment, her arms loosening slightly from around herself, some of the fight visibly draining out of her posture as the pieces settle into place. “So this was never really about protecting me from random danger. It’s about protecting me from what I saw.”

“Both. They’re not separate anymore.” I step closer, close enough that she doesn’t retreat from it, the two of us standing near enough now that I can see her breath fogging faintly in the cold evening air. “If you walked out of here today, unprotected, the Sokolovs would move on you within days. Not to hurt you outright, not at first. They’d take you to extract whatever you know, however long that takes, however far they need to go to get it.”

Her face pales slightly, the reality of the words landing harder than the abstract fear she’s carried up to now. “Extract it how?”

“However works.” I don’t soften the words. “Interrogation isn’t gentle when the people doing it don’t particularly care whether you survive the process, only whether you talk before you stop being useful.”

“And you think that’s actually going to happen. Not just could happen. Would happen.”

“I know it would happen, because it’s what I would do in their position if the situation were reversed.” The admission costs me something to say out loud, the plain ugliness of the world I’ve built my life inside of laid bare between us on this terrace. “This is not just a threat. It’s just the truth of who they are, the same way you’d expect me to protect what’s mine by any means necessary.”

She wraps her arms back around herself.

“My protection is the only thing between you and people who would hurt you to get information you don’t even have. This is the whole truth and nothing but the truth.”

The wind picks up slightly, and I watch her shiver, though I don’t think it’s entirely from the cold. I want to reach for her, offer my jacket, close the last of the distance between us, and I stay exactly where I am instead, letting her set whatever pace she needs tonight, however long that takes her.

She’s quiet for a long moment, watching me the way she did in the study earlier, except the anger’s shifted into something else now, something more like reckoning with the new form of her life rather than raging against the parts of it she couldn’t see clearly. Her eyes stay fixed on mine, searching for something I can’t fully name, and I hold still and let her look.

“I still needed you to tell me yourself.” Her voice comes out steadier now, less raw than it was an hour ago. “Not because the truth changes. Because I need to be able to trust that you’ll give it to me, even when it’s ugly.”

“I understand that now.” I mean it more fully than I’ve meant anything in longer than I’d like to admit, the weight of months finally landing where it should have landed from the start. “You’ll have it from me directly going forward. All of it, whatever it costs either of us.”

“Okay,” she says finally, the word carrying more weight than its size would suggest, an acceptance rather than a resolution, something settling between us for the first time in hours. “Okay.”

I close the last of the distance between us then, slowly, giving her every chance to step back if she wants to, and when she doesn’t, I pull her into me, careful of the cold still clinging to her skin, my hand settling low against her back. She lets me hold her there on the terrace, both of us quiet, the tree line dark and unmoving beyond the edge of the property, and for the first time since I found her standing out here, some of the distance between us finally closes.

“We should probably go inside,” I say eventually, my hand still resting against her back. “You’re freezing.”