Chapter 4: Always Real

I heard it before I understood what I was hearing.

Luca's voice first, low, controlled, with that particular edge underneath it that I had learned meant something had interrupted a plan he'd already made, and he was deciding how much it was going to cost whoever was responsible. Then another voice answered him, and the moment I heard it every single nerve in my body went completely still, because I knew that voice. I had known that voice for six years. I would have recognised it through walls, through sleep, through the end of everything, it was wired into me in a way I had never examined too closely because examining it would have meant admitting things I wasn't ready to admit.

Bryan.

Bryan Rollins was in this house.

I was off the bed before I even made the decision to move, across the room in four steps, hands on the door handle, locked, still locked, of course it was locked, it was always going to be locked, I pressed my ear flat against the wood and held my breath and listened so hard it hurt.

"I don't care whose house this is." Bryan's voice, tight and controlled in the specific way it got when he was holding something very large and very heavy and trying not to drop it. "I want to know she's okay. That's all I'm here for. That's the only reason I'm standing in front of you right now."

"She's fine." Luca. Flat. The voice of a man who had faced more dangerous things than a university student at his door at midnight and had never once lost sleep over any of them.

"I want to hear her say that."

"That's not happening."

A pause. Long enough that I pressed harder against the door, like somehow another inch of closeness would let me see through it.

"She's locked in a room," Bryan said. Not a question, he already knew, I didn't know how he knew but he did, and the knowing of it was in his voice like something worn down to the bone. "You locked her in a room in your house and you're standing here telling me she's fine."

"She's safe."

"Those aren't the same thing."

I closed my eyes.

In the silence that followed those four words, I could feel the weight of everything that wasn't being said pressing down on the house, the six years Bryan was carrying, the twins I was carrying, the gun on the kitchen counter downstairs, the fact that two men who had never asked to exist in the same world were standing in the same room at midnight because of choices I had made in the dark when I thought no one was keeping track.

"Go home," Luca said. Still calm. That absolute, terrifying calm of someone who has already decided how everything ends and is simply waiting for the other person to arrive at the same conclusion. "You can't do anything for her here. You showing up at my gate doesn't change what she told you."

"She didn't tell me anything," Bryan said, and something cracked in the last word, small, barely there, but I heard it and it went through me like a current. "You told me. You answered for her. You packed her bag and carried it to your car and drove her here and locked the door. That's not her making a choice. That's you making it for her and calling it the same thing."

The silence that followed was so heavy I could feel the weight of it through solid wood.

"Natalie made her choices long before tonight," Luca said finally. "You just didn't know about them."

I pressed my forehead against the door and breathed very carefully through my nose.

Don't, I thought. Bryan, please don't push him. Please just go home and be safe and be smart about this one thing, just this once, because Luca Wolfe is not someone you push in his own house at midnight and walk away from without consequence. Please just go.

"If she wanted to leave right now," Bryan said quietly. "If she came out now and said she wanted to go, would you let her?"

The pause that followed was a different kind of pause. Not Luca's usual calculated silence. Something else. Something that felt, even from the other side of a locked door, like a man deciding whether to answer honestly or strategically.

"She doesn't want to leave," he said.

"That's not what I asked." Bryan's voice was so steady it made my chest ache. "I asked what you would do if she did."

Luca didn't answer.

That was the answer.

I stood in the dark with my hands pressed flat against the door and I understood, in the way you understand things that you can't unfeel once you've felt them, exactly what kind of situation I was in. Not in the dramatic way, not handcuffs and threats and cinematic danger. In the quiet way. In the way of a door that was locked from the outside and a man who hadn't answered a direct question because the answer would have told me something he didn't want me to know yet.

"Go home, Bryan." Luca's voice had changed, not louder, never louder, but something had shifted in it that made the air feel different. "I won't say it again."

A long moment. Longer than the others. Long enough that I held my breath until my lungs started to protest.

Then footsteps. Moving toward the front of the house.

Bryan was leaving.

I wanted to knock on the door. To call out. To do something, anything, that would let him know I was there, twelve feet above him, that I had heard every word he'd said and I was okay, I was going to be okay, that he should go home and sleep and not come back to this place where the door was locked from the outside and there were guns on the kitchen counter. I wanted to say his name through a closed door and let that be enough.

I didn't. Because I didn't know what Luca was watching. Because I didn't know what it would cost Bryan if I did. Because some part of me that was still thinking clearly understood that the safest thing I could do for Bryan Rollins right now was let him walk out of this house.

The front door opened. I felt the change in the house even from upstairs, the brief rush of cold night air, the shift in pressure. Then it closed. An engine started somewhere outside, the familiar sound of Bryan's truck, the one that wheezed going uphill and had a crack in the dashboard he'd been meaning to fix for two years. I listened to it until I couldn't hear it anymore.

The house was completely quiet.

I stood at the door for a long time after that. Not crying, I had run out of that earlier, wrung myself out so thoroughly that there was nothing left, just standing in the dark in Bryan's hoodie with my hands at my sides, breathing in the smell of fabric softener and old cotton and the life I had been living before all of this.

Footsteps on the stairs. Luca's. I was already learning the sounds of this house without choosing to, his footsteps, the way the third stair creaked, the particular silence of the hallway outside my door.

He stopped. Didn't open it.

"He's gone," he said through the door. "Go to sleep."

I didn't answer for a moment. "I heard everything."

"I know."

"You didn't answer him." I kept my voice level. "When he asked if you'd let me leave. You didn't answer."

A pause. "No."

"Why?"

Another pause. Longer. "Because some questions don't have answers that help anyone."

I didn't know what to do with that. I turned it over in my mind, looking for the edge of it, the place where it started to make sense, and I couldn't find one.

"The twins," I said. "You called them threats."

"I called them liabilities." A slight correction. "In my world, everything you care about is a target. The people who want to hurt me will look for the things I can't afford to lose. Those two..." a pause, brief, "...I can't afford to lose."

"So you do care about them."

Silence.

"Go to sleep, Natalie."

His footsteps moved away down the hall. A door closed somewhere deeper in the house, and I was alone again in the specific silence of a place that had never held any warmth and wasn't planning to start.

I went back to the bed. Pulled the hoodie tighter around me. Lay down in the dark and stared at the ceiling and turned his non-answer over and over in my mind until I couldn't tell anymore whether it was more frightening that he wouldn't let me leave or that some small, exhausted, confused part of me wasn't entirely sure I wanted to.

My phone was still under the pillow. I turned it on and waited for it to wake up, watching the notifications arrive one by one, missed calls from my mom, three from a number I didn't recognise, two from Maya that I was not ready to open yet.

And one text from Bryan. Sent twenty minutes ago, while I had my ear pressed against a locked door listening to him try.

"I stood outside his gate for twenty minutes before they let me in. I asked him to let me see you and he said no and I couldn't make him say yes and I didn't know what else to do. I'm sorry, Nat. I tried".

I read it once. Read it again.

I don't know the rules of his world and I don't know how to fight someone like him. I just know that you're in there and I'm out here and that's the worst thing I've ever felt in my life.

My hand was shaking slightly. I pressed it flat against the mattress.

"But I need you to know something before I go. Because I should have said it a long time ago and I'm not going to not say it now just because the timing is the worst it's ever been".

I stopped breathing.

"I love you. Not like Maya's best friend. Not like the girl who stole my hoodie. I love you the way that matters, the real kind, and I have for longer than I'm going to admit in a text message. I know it doesn't change tonight. I know it doesn't change any of it. But I needed you to know that it's real".

It was always real.

Take care of yourself in there. Please.

I set the phone down on the mattress beside me and looked at the ceiling and felt something in my chest come apart so slowly and so completely that it almost didn't register as pain. Almost.

The hoodie smelled like him. I pulled the sleeve over my hand and pressed it against my mouth and stayed very still.

And then, from somewhere downstairs in the deep quiet of the house, I heard something that made every thought stop mid-sentence.

A woman's laugh.

Low. Easy. Comfortable in this place in a way that I was not and might never be. The laugh of someone who knew exactly where she was and had been here before.

And then Luca's voice, quieter than I had ever heard it. Almost soft. Almost like a different person entirely.

I sat up slowly in the dark.

Luca Wolfe had someone here.

And from the sound of it, she hadn't just arrived.