CHAPTER FIVE

I could not stop crying.

That was the part that humiliated me most — not the firing, not the twenty-four hour deadline, not the image of Gerald Watts' cold, satisfied expression as I walked out of his office. It was the crying. I had spent years training myself out of it, years teaching myself that tears were something you saved for the truly private moments, and here I was, sitting on Priya's bed with my knees pulled to my chest and my face completely falling apart while she rubbed circles on my back and said nothing because there was nothing to say.

Eventually she handed me a tissue and I pressed it against my eyes and breathed.

"We will figure this out," she said quietly. "I promise you, Nora — we will figure it out."

"How?" I pulled the tissue away and looked at her, and I knew my face was a mess and I could not bring myself to care. "I have no savings, Priya. Every spare cent I have made for the past three years has gone toward paying off the debt I accumulated getting through school. I have nothing sitting in an account somewhere waiting to save me." My voice cracked on the last word and I pressed my lips together until it steadied. "In forty-eight hours I am going to be standing on a pavement with my bags and nowhere to put them, and I genuinely do not know what comes after that."

"That disgusting, worthless—" Priya stopped herself, pressed her fingers to her mouth, and visibly reined in the next four things she wanted to say about Gerald Watts. "He cannot do this. What he did in that office was harassment, Nora. You could report him."

"And spend the next six months in a legal process I cannot afford while being homeless?" I shook my head. "I cannot fight that battle right now. I just need somewhere to land."

She was quiet for a moment, and I recognized the particular quality of her silence — the kind where she was deciding whether to suggest the thing she already knew I was not going to like.

"Your mother," she said carefully. "She offered. The house is large, you said so yourself, and she told you the door was open for as long as you needed." She met my eyes. "It would only be temporary."

"No."

"Nora—"

"I cannot be in the same house as him, Priya." I stood up from the bed because I could not have this conversation sitting still. "Do you understand what I am saying? Not in the same building. Not under the same roof. I cannot do sixty days of that while I am already this broken — I will not survive it."

"You are the strongest person I know," she said simply. "And you are also about to be homeless in forty-eight hours. Sometimes survival looks like accepting the option you did not want."

I stood at her window and stared out at the street below and said nothing for a long time.

Then I picked up my phone.

The mansion looked different at dusk than it had in the afternoon, and I stood on the front steps with two bags at my feet and my vision swimming enough that the edges of the building blurred softly, and I told myself very firmly that I was not going to cry again. I had used up my allocation for the day. I was done.

The door opened before I could ring the bell.

My mother came through it at something close to a run, and she wrapped both arms around me before I had fully registered she was there, pulling me in close the way she had not done since I was small enough to fit entirely against her chest, and I stood in it for a moment with my eyes shut and my bags on the ground and let myself be held.

"I have you," she said against my hair. "I have you, baby. You are here now and that is all that matters. You can stay for as long as you need — this house is yours for as long as you want it to be."

"Two months," I said into her shoulder. "That is all I am asking for. Two months to get back on my feet and find something stable, and then I will be out of your way."

She pulled back and cupped my face in her hands and looked at me the way she had at lunch — like she was trying to memorize me, like she was afraid I would disappear again if she looked away too long.

"You could never be in my way," she said quietly. "Never."

She showed me to my room herself, carrying one of my bags up the stairs without asking, pointing out the bathroom at the end of the hall and the linen closet beside it, telling me where she had put extra towels and that the kitchen was always open. She talked in the soft, continuous way of someone who was terrified that silence would break the fragile thing they were trying to build, and I let her talk, and I unpacked slowly, and by the time she kissed me on the cheek and told me to come down whenever I was ready, something in my chest had released slightly.

Not healed. But fractionally less raw.

I found him in the kitchen.

I had come down for a glass of water because my throat was sore from crying and my mother had gone to make a phone call, and I had rounded the corner expecting an empty room and instead found Damien Hale leaning against the kitchen counter with his arms folded and an expression that shifted into something unreadable the moment he saw me.

"Hey," he said.

I went directly to the cabinet, found a glass, and filled it from the tap.

"I heard what happened," he said. "With your job. I am sorry, Nora — genuinely. If there is anything you need while you are here, I want you to know—"

"I do not need anything from you," I said, setting the glass down on the counter. "I appreciate the sentiment, but I want to be very clear — I do not need anything from you, and I will not be asking you for anything. Not now, not in two months, not ever."

He said nothing.

I turned and faced him, because what I had to say next deserved to be said properly, and I needed him to hear every word of it.

"I am going to ask you something," I said, and I hated that I had to ask, hated every syllable of the asking, but I was exhausted and hollowed out and I did not have the energy for warfare right now. "My being in this house has nothing to do with you. It does not change anything I said. It does not mean anything except that I ran out of options." I kept my voice level. "I am asking you — please — to stay out of my way while I am here. Sixty days. That is all. Do not come looking for conversation. Do not bring up the mate bond. Do not mention any of this to our parents." I exhaled. "Please, Damien. I am genuinely asking you. Please just let me get through these sixty days in peace."

He looked at me for a long moment, and something moved behind his eyes that I could not fully read.

"Fine," he said slowly. "I will respect that. I promise."

I exhaled and reached for my glass again.

"On one condition."

My hand stilled.

"What," I said flatly, "could you possibly—"

He moved.

I did not process it fast enough — one moment he was across the kitchen and the next his hand was at my jaw and he had closed the distance between us and pressed his mouth against mine with a certainty that knocked every single thought clean out of my head.

I meant to push him away.

I told my hands to push him away.

But the mate bond ignited the moment his lips touched mine, rushing up through my chest like a lit fuse, and my body made its decision before my brain had finished forming the objection. My fingers curled instead of pushing, and I kissed him back with a helplessness that horrified me even as it was happening — a warmth spreading from my sternum outward, a pull so deep and complete that it felt less like desire and more like gravity.

Then he broke the kiss.

I stood completely still. I could not move. I could not think. I could feel my own heartbeat in my fingertips and the warmth of him still radiating across the small distance he had put between us, and I stood there frozen and furious and entirely unable to produce a single coherent word.

He smiled.

Slowly. Deliberately. In a way that reached his eyes.

He ran his tongue lightly across his lower lip, tilted his head, and said, "I have wondered about that for a long time." His voice was quiet and entirely too calm. "It was better than anything I imagined."

He picked up his coffee from the counter.

And he walked out of the kitchen whistling.