Page 188 of The Silent War

“We’re already closing that hand. They’ll sign because their neck is tired.”

“And then, they’ll try to kill her.”

He didn’t lie to me. “Yes.”

I pulled her closer because there was nothing else to pull. “Over my body.”

“That’s the plan,” he said, and somehow it was not dark humor. It was logistics.

We didn’t raise our voices, our girl needed sleep. We made vows under our breath and in the shape of our hands instead. I kissed her, again, and again. Each kiss a vow.

The dream still crawled at me.

“Tell me what you saw,” he said after a while. He wouldn’t let it stick. He was cruel in all the ways that saved us.

“Flowers,” I said. “The white kind that smelled like wax. Candles. Someone hung velvet and forgot to open a window.” The words came easier the more I made them stupid. “A stupid strand of pearls. A dress she would hate.”

He exhaled. “We’re burning those flowers in the morning. Just to tilt the scales.”

“She was cold,” That part had to be said because it was the part that would haunt me if I didn’t.

“Not now,”

“Not now,” I agreed. “Now she’s hot and between us where she belongs.”

He made a sound that was like a laugh. “There he is.”

Her breath marked time for a while. I felt her hand shift on my chest again, finding the place just above my heart.

“Bas,”

“Mhm.”

“You want me to sleep?” He meant, did I want him to make his body go still in the way that told mine it was allowed.

“No,” I said, because the truth was messier. “I want to keep watch.”

He nodded. “We do that.”

The war room would be there in the morning.

Damius would sit and watch us say the part men like him heard in a different pitch. It wasn’t love, it was Dynasty, bloodline, the future of our crest and power our family hadn’t had before. The city would need violence and Luca’s control to put it back into line.

But none of that was allowed here.

“Bas,” he said again. “You hear her?”

It took me a second to know what he meant. Then I did. The small noise that wasn’t quite a snore, the little catch on the second breath, the hush that followed when she changed sides in the middle of night and tucked closer to whichever of us was closer. “Yeah,” I said, and I had to close my eyes because my chest squeezed. “Yeah.”

He tapped his ring once, twice. “Good.”

I thought of the chapel again, because I was stubborn and because you broke a thing best by touching it after you had learned its weaknesses. Coffin. Blue. Brass. Then I layered over it, with her mouth parting under my kiss because she was breathing. Her hand, asleep, moving toward me because that was where it belonged. Luca’s hand pulling me from the darkness.

“They’ll call it a merger,” I said, voice gone rough because of these words. “They’ll write notices and put white flowers on tables and sip expensive drinks and pretend to discuss markets.”

“They can throw parties,” he said. “We take vows.”

I nodded. “Ink.”