Chapter 005

I couldn't sleep that night.

I sat on my kitchen floor until the sun came up, the photograph still face down on the counter above me, and by morning I had convinced myself it was a message, nothing more. A scare tactic. Jake wanting me to know he was still breathing before he decided what to do about it.

I was wrong about the timeline.

The first attempt came two days later, on my way home from the office. A car that drifted too close at a crosswalk, close enough that I felt the heat of the engine against my leg before I threw myself backward onto the sidewalk due to the brakes failing. It didn't slow down.

By the time I had scrambled up, cataloging the plate, the make, the driver's silhouette, it was already three blocks gone.

I told myself it was a drunk driver. I had survived worse accusations of coincidence.

The second attempt wasn't a coincidence.

I noticed him the moment I stepped off the elevator into the parking garage. A man by the pillars who straightened too fast when he saw me, his hand moving toward his jacket with the particular economy of someone who had done this before.

I didn't run.

Instead, I went for the nearest exit at an angle, putting concrete between us, my own hand already reaching for the blade I kept strapped to my thigh out of habit rather than expectation.

He got one shot off before I closed the distance. It went wide, close enough that I heard it crack the pillar behind me, close enough that my ears rang through everything that came after. I don't remember deciding to close the gap. I remember the knife, and the weight of him going down, and the sudden, total silence of the garage once it was over.

I stood over him, breathing hard, blood on my hands for the second time that week, and understood, with a clarity that scared me more than the gun had, that this wasn't going to stop.

Jake wasn't just sending messages anymore. He was testing how close he could get.

Next time, someone's aim might be better. Or it might be him pulling the trigger.

I didn't go home. I couldn't, knowing someone had already proven they could find me there, that the walls I had spent years building around Emily Vance meant nothing to a man who had known Cora Prescott since before either of us had a name worth hiding.

I drove straight to Thane's penthouse instead, hands still shaking faintly on the wheel, the decision made somewhere beneath conscious thought in the exact same place that had decided, eight years ago in an alley, to pick up a broken bottle instead of running.

He opened the door before I finished knocking, like he had been waiting, like some part of him always knew this moment would come eventually.

He took one look at me. The blood, the blown pupils, the tremor I couldn't quite master. And whatever calculation usually ran behind his eyes went still.

"Who did this?" he said. Not a question. A verdict already being written.

"Someone from my past." My voice came out steadier than I felt, though barely. "He's not going to stop. I handled tonight, but I can't keep handling it alone."

Something shifted across his face. Satisfaction, maybe, or the particular hunger of a man finally being handed the one thing he had spent weeks failing to take by force.

"I offered you everything once," he said quietly, stepping aside to let me in. "You said no."

"I'm not saying yes to that." I stepped past him into the apartment I had refused to set foot in for weeks. "I'm asking for protection. That's all this is."

"Is it?" It wasn't a question either.

I didn't answer, because I didn't fully trust what my answer would be.

"There's one condition," Thane said, "if you want my protection to actually mean something."

"Name it."

"Marry me."

I almost laughed, would have, if I hadn't seen exactly how serious he was. "That's a stretch, even for you."

"It's not a negotiation, Emily. It's the condition." He started walking toward me, slow, unhurried, like I was some prey caught out in the open. "A wife is protected in ways an employee never will be. My name on you is the only wall they can't get through."

"There are other ways to protect someone."

"Not ones I'm offering."

He kept coming, and for the first time since the night he had gripped my wrist in his office, I didn't step back. I stood still and let him close the distance, some old, exhausted part of me finally too tired to keep running from every direction at once.

I hadn't survived my family, survived becoming whatever he needed me to be, survived numerous attempts on my life in a single week from Jake and other enemies I've made from working for him, just to let someone from my past drag me back into a cage.

If this was the only door left standing, I'd walk through it on my own feet.

"Fine," I said. "I'll marry you."

Something lit behind his eyes I had never seen there before. Not satisfaction this time, something closer to victory, raw and unguarded. He closed the last of the distance with a kiss just as rough as the first time, his hand slid from my waist down to my thighs. I tried to push him away and he pulled me flush against his chest, catching me before I could build another wall.

"You'll be Mrs. Rivers in two days," he murmured against my hair, his hands locking around my waist with the unbreakable grip of a man claiming his final prize. "And you won't be able to refuse me anymore."