LOGINEMBER’S POVThe fire is still burning when Knox says it.He’s staring into the flames with an expression I haven’t seen before, and the orange light is catching the planes of his handsome face, making the shadows under his eyes look like bruises and the bruises look like shadows.Five seconds.That’s how long I played the footage before I slammed the laptop shut, and those five seconds are still living inside my skull like an unwanted tenant.The ballroom. The golden lighting. The laughter of people who had minutes left to live and didn’t know it.And then the sound — the sound that came from the far corner of the frame, the thing that was Knox and wasn’t Knox, the guttural growl that belongs in a nightmare.I closed it before I saw what he became. But I heard the beginning of what he did, and the beginning was enough.The man beside me, holding my hand, watching a fire consume the evidence of his worst night, this man is not that sound. This man is not that night.I need to believe t
KNOX’S POVThe dead man’s trigger first. I enter Logan’s code into the server interface — the alphanumeric sequence, exactly as he recited it in the storage room with that smile I still can’t decode.The system prompts for confirmation. I confirm. The screen flashes once, a progress bar runs, and then a single line of text:DISTRIBUTION PROTOCOL DEACTIVATED. TRIGGER OFFLINE.The kill switch is dead.Ember exhales beside me. I didn’t realise she’d been holding her breath.I pull out the diagnostic device Nathaniel gave me.Military-grade, designed for intelligence operations — it scans for duplication signatures, verifies whether data has been copied or transferred to external devices, and confirms whether the physical drive is the original or a clone.I plug it in, and the scan takes four minutes while Ember stands beside me with her arms crossed, tracking the progress bar with sharp, untrusting focus.She has been burned by half-measures before, and she refuses to look away until it
KNOX’S POVI kiss her standing on the shoulder of a dark highway in Alaska with her legs around my waist and the stars above us and the cold biting every inch of exposed skin and neither of us caring because the heat between us has always been enough.And it is enough now, and it will be enough tomorrow and next week and next year and for every year after that until I run out of years.When we break apart, she’s breathless, and her cheeks are flushed, and her eyes are bright and alive in a way that has nothing to do with silver or Sapphire and everything to do with being a woman who just said yes to a man she loves on a road in the middle of nowhere.“Take me to the flash drive,” she says. “I want to burn it as your fiancée. It’ll feel better.”“Everything feels better as my fiancée.”“Don’t push it.”I carry her back to the car because the ground is still frozen and she’s still in hospital socks.I set her in the passenger seat and her feet go immediately back on the dashboard and th
KNOX’S POVI press my lips to her knuckles again because once wasn’t enough.“So no, I’m not going to stop loving you when life gets easier. I’m going to love you when it’s boring and quiet, and nothing is on fire, and I’m going to love you when you’re annoyed with me because I’ve left my shoes in the hallway AGAIN, and I’m going to love you on Tuesday nights on the couch when neither of us has anything to say and the silence is just silence and not a crisis. I’m going to love you in every version of our life that exists, including the ones where absolutely nothing interesting is happening, and you’re going to get sick of hearing it, and I’m going to say it anyway.”She doesn’t respond immediately.Her mouth opens and closes and opens again, and nothing comes out, which is a first for a woman who has had a comeback for everything I’ve thrown at her since the day we met.Her eyes are filling, and her chin is doing the trembling thing she hates because she thinks it makes her look weak.
KNOX’S POV“He won’t talk, Ember.”“What if we should have—”“No.” The word comes out harder than I intend. “No, we should not have. Logan is a man who just lost the person he loved, and I am not murdering him for being in the wrong room at the wrong time.”“What if James already knows? What if his guards felt the house shaking and they’ve already reported it and there’s a file somewhere with my name on it and—”“The guards were outside. They felt vibrations and saw structural damage. The official report says incendiary bolts. There is no file with your name on it because there is no evidence that anything beyond a conventional weapon was used in that house.” I reach across and take her hand because her fingers are starting to shake the way they do when the spiral is building momentum. “Ember. Look at me.”She looks.“I have spent years hiding what I am from people who would destroy me if they knew. I am very, very good at it. And I am going to be just as good at hiding what YOU are u
KNOX’S POVEmber sleeps for an hour in the hospital chair beside Maurice’s bed with her hand wrapped around his on the blanket and her face finally, mercifully slack in a way that tells me her body has overruled her brain and forced a shutdown.I watch her for a while. The rise and fall of her breathing, the way her fingers stay curled around Maurice’s even in sleep, the smudge of dried blood she missed on her jaw.She sleeps the way she does everything — completely, without half-measures, surrendered to it in a way that makes me want to build a wall around this room and post guards and let her stay here until her body decides it’s had enough rest, which, based on the last seventy-two hours, would be approximately next week.But the flash drive is still waiting, and every hour it exists is an hour I spend carrying a weight I’m ready to put down.I almost leave alone.I consider letting her sleep in that chair with Maurice’s hand in hers, knowing Queenie is curled up safely down the ha
EMBER’S POV(PRESENT)We stay tangled together for a long time, neither of us willing to be the first to let go. His hand strokes through my hair.My fingers curl into the fabric of his shirt. The room is quiet except for our breathing and the distant hum of something mechanical — a generator, mayb
KNOX’S POVHe blinks, the picture of innocence. “I’m not sure I understand. I explained the purpose quite clearly at the beginning of the evening. Conflict resolution. Closure. An opportunity for all parties to—”“Bullshit.”The word is deadpan, and I see Logan’s head snap up, see Gale’s sobbing st
EMBER’S POVI slump back into my seat unconsciously, not realizing how rigidly I’d been holding myself until the tension drains away.Knox lifts our entwined hands to his lips and presses a kiss to my knuckles, his eyes on me.It slows the tightening in my chest. Loosens the knot that Harrison’s qu
EMBER’S POV“Because I saw you on the news.” His voice cracks again. “During a press conference. I saw you standing up there, speaking to the camera, saying five words they have haunted me every night. You are dead to me. And though it wasn’t directed at me, I felt it so much. I felt it down to my







