Chapter Six

I did not sleep. I sat on the edge of my bed with my phone in my hand, staring at those three words until they stopped looking like language and started looking like a shape, something with teeth.

Damian had taken the phone from me within seconds of me showing it to him, his face going through a series of small, controlled shifts I was learning to read, alarm quickly folded away beneath something colder and more useful. He had called Marcus immediately, put the phone on speaker, and the two of them had spoken in the clipped, efficient shorthand of people who had done this before, tracing carriers, checking whether the number matched anything in Cross's known network, none of it landing anywhere conclusive before Marcus finally admitted the number was almost certainly routed through a burner, untraceable within any timeframe that mattered tonight.

"I see you both," I said out loud, mostly to hear it in my own voice instead of just my head. "Both. Not just me."

"I noticed that too," Damian said. He was standing near my bedroom door, close enough to be present, far enough to respect a boundary neither of us had ever named out loud, and something about the careful distance he kept made the word both sit heavier between us than it might have otherwise.

"They're watching the house," I said.

"They might be. Or someone at the gala saw us together on that terrace and reported back." His jaw tightened, some private frustration moving behind his eyes. "Either way, this changes things. I'm doubling patrol on the perimeter tonight, and tomorrow I want the exterior camera coverage expanded past what we already installed."

"Damian." I said his name and he stopped, whatever he had been about to say next dying in his throat, and for a moment neither of us moved, the room quiet except for the tick of the old clock on my nightstand and the distant sound of wind moving through the trees outside. "Are they going to hurt you too? Because of me?"

Something shifted in his face, quick and complicated, gone before I could fully read it. "That's not something you need to worry about."

"That's not an answer."

"It's the only one I have right now," he said, and something in his voice had gone rough at the edges, the careful control fraying just slightly. "I've done this job for four years. I know how to keep myself alive. Worrying about that is a distraction neither of us can afford, and I need you focused on staying safe, not on protecting me."

I wanted to argue, some stubborn instinct rising in my chest that hated the idea of him standing between me and every possible danger while expecting me to feel nothing about the risk that put him in. But I recognized, somewhere underneath the argument, that pushing him on it tonight would only make him retreat further behind the careful professional wall he kept building and rebuilding every time something real passed between us, and I was too tired to watch that wall go back up again after everything the night had already cost me.

"Fine," I said instead. "Then at least stay. Tonight. Not in the guest house."

The words left me before I had fully decided to say them, and I watched something flicker across his face, surprise, then something warmer, then the careful retreat of a man reminding himself of a rule he had built his entire life around.

"Sera."

"I'm not asking for anything inappropriate," I said quickly, heat rising in my face despite myself. "I just don't want to be alone in this house tonight, not after that message. There's a couch downstairs in the study. You could stay there. Close enough that if anything happens."

He was quiet for a long moment, and I watched him weigh it, watched the exact machinery of his self control working through the decision in real time, and some part of me understood that whatever he decided in the next few seconds was going to matter far beyond tonight.

"Alright," he said finally. "I'll stay in the study. But Sera, this doesn't change anything about how this assignment works."

"I know," I said, even though some traitorous, hopeful part of me suspected that was already a lie, that something had been changing between us since the moment his hands folded around mine on that terrace, slow and quiet and entirely outside either of our control.

He did his final perimeter check while I lay in bed listening to his footsteps move through the house below me, methodical and unhurried, and somewhere around two in the morning I finally drifted into something resembling sleep, comforted in a way I did not fully want to examine by the knowledge that he was somewhere in the house instead of alone in the guest house across the lawn.

I woke to raised voices.

Not shouting exactly, but urgent, low and fast, coming from somewhere downstairs, and I was out of bed and moving before I had fully processed what I was hearing, my bare feet silent on the hardwood as I made my way to the top of the stairs.

Damian stood in the front hall in yesterday's clothes, phone pressed to his ear, and even from the top of the stairs I could see the tension radiating off his shoulders, something sharp and controlled and entirely unlike the careful calm he usually wore like a second skin.

"When," he said into the phone. "How long ago."

A pause. I gripped the banister, my heart already climbing into my throat before I understood why.

"Is he alive," Damian said, and something in his voice cracked just slightly on the last word, and I understood, standing at the top of those stairs in my bare feet with the morning light barely breaking through the windows, that whatever had happened, it was bad enough to shake a man who had spent the entire week refusing to let anything shake him at all.

"Damian." I said his name and he turned, saw me standing there, and for one unguarded second I watched something raw and frightened pass behind his eyes before the professional mask slid back into place, too late to hide what I had already seen.

"Wallace was attacked this morning," he said. "Outside his apartment. He's alive, but it's serious."

The floor seemed to tilt slightly beneath me. Wallace, who had driven me home a hundred times, who had fought the wheel of a spinning car to keep us both alive less than a week ago, who had insisted on driving me himself the night of the accident because he refused to let anyone else take the risk instead.

"Why," I said, though some cold, sinking part of me already understood the answer before I finished asking the question.

"Because he was a witness," Damian said quietly. "He saw the car that hit you. He gave a statement to police. And now someone wants to make sure he never gives another one."

I sat down hard on the top step, my legs no longer entirely willing to hold me, and Damian was moving before I fully registered it, crossing the distance between us in a handful of strides and crouching in front of me on the stairs, his hands finding my shoulders, steady and warm and entirely unlike the careful distance he had maintained just hours earlier.

"Look at me," he said, and I did, and something in his eyes had gone fierce and certain in a way that settled something frantic and spiraling in my own chest. "This is not your fault. Whoever did this made a choice. You didn't put that choice into their hands."

"They're going to keep hurting people around me," I said, my voice breaking on the last word. "Everyone who gets close to me is in danger now. You, Wallace, Marcus, my father."

"Then we stop them," Damian said, simple and absolute, his hands tightening slightly on my shoulders. "Before they get the chance to hurt anyone else. I promise you that."

I searched his face for any sign that the promise was empty, the kind of reassurance people offer because the alternative is too frightening to sit with honestly, and found instead something solid and unshakeable, a certainty that had nothing to do with comfort and everything to do with a man who had clearly decided, somewhere in the last twenty four hours, that he was not going to let anything happen to me even if it cost him everything he had built his life around protecting.

"Okay," I whispered.

His thumb moved once, briefly, against my shoulder, an accidental gesture of comfort that lingered half a second too long before he caught himself and pulled back, the professional distance reasserting itself even as something new and undeniable sat unspoken in the space between us.

His phone buzzed again. He glanced at the screen, and whatever color remained in his face drained away entirely.

"Marcus found something," he said. "In Wallace's apartment. Before the ambulance arrived."

"What."

"A note," Damian said. "Addressed to you."

I sat with that for a long moment on the top step, the morning light finally breaking properly through the front hall windows, and something about the ordinary brightness of it felt obscene against the weight of what he had just told me.

"Show me," I said.

"Sera."

"Show me, Damian. I need to see it."

He hesitated, and I watched him weigh the same decision I had seen him make once already tonight, the instinct to shield me warring against the understanding that shielding me had already cost him more of my trust than it protected. He pulled up a photograph on his phone, Marcus having sent it the moment he found the note tucked beneath Wallace's doormat, and held the screen out for me to see.

The handwriting was different this time, not typed like the others, an actual human hand pressing hard enough into the paper that I could see the indentation even through the photograph, uneven and slightly slanted in a way that suggested urgency or anger or both.

YOU THINK A DRIVER MATTERS TO ME. HE DOESN'T. YOU DO. STOP DIGGING OR THE NEXT LESSON WON'T BE SOMEONE ELSE'S BLOOD.

I read it twice, my stomach twisting tighter with each pass, and when I finally looked up at Damian, something in his face had gone carefully, deliberately blank in the specific way I was learning meant he was working very hard to control something underneath it.

"They're escalating," I said.

"Yes."

"And they're doing it faster than we expected."

"Yes." He took the phone back, his jaw tight. "Which means we need to move faster too. I want you dressed and ready to leave for the hospital within twenty minutes. I want eyes confirming the route is clear before we take a single step outside this house."

I nodded, already moving toward the stairs, and it was only halfway up that I realized my hands had stopped shaking entirely, the fear from moments earlier burned away by something harder and more useful, the same cold clarity I had felt reading the first note stapled to my own front door. I was done being frightened into stillness. Whatever came next, I intended to meet it standing.

Damian was waiting in the front hall by the time I came back down, dressed and composed, his phone already pressed to his ear again, Marcus's voice audible faintly through the speaker giving updates on the hospital security sweep. He glanced up when he heard me on the stairs, and something in his expression shifted, quick and unguarded, before the professional mask reasserted itself.

"Ready," I said.

"Almost." He ended the call and pocketed his phone, studying me for a moment longer than strictly necessary. "Before we go, I need you to understand something. Whoever wrote that note knows Wallace matters to you. That means they've been watching closely enough to know who you care about, which means anyone close to you could become the next lesson they're threatening to teach. I need you to be careful about who you let close from here on, myself included."

Something in that last phrase landed strangely, and I studied him for a moment, trying to read whether he meant it as simple caution or something more specific, some quiet acknowledgment of exactly how close he had already let himself get.

"Including you," I repeated.

"Including me," he said, and something rough moved beneath the words, gone before I could fully name it. "I'm the person standing closest to you every hour of every day right now. If they're willing to hurt a driver to send a message, I am not naive enough to think I'm exempt from that calculation."

The thought of anything happening to him settled cold and sudden in my chest, sharper than I expected, sharper than professional concern for the man protecting me should have accounted for, and I understood, standing there in my own front hall with danger pressing in from every direction, that somewhere in the last few days I had stopped being able to separate my fear for myself from my fear for him.