CLAIM ME, DON のすべてのチャプター: チャプター 71 - チャプター 80

It came out of nowhere on a Sunday evening.We were in the library, the comfortable version of it, him at the reading desk and me in the armchair with Biscuit and a book I had actually been reading rather than using as a prop for thinking. The lamp was on and the estate was quiet and it was the kind of evening that asked nothing of either of us and we had been sitting inside it for an hour without needing to say much.Then I looked up from my book."If I had just stood still," I said. "That night in the alley. If I hadn't run. Would you have let me go."He looked up from his papers.The question sat in the room between us and I watched him take it in and I watched him not answer immediately and the not answering immediately told me something before he said a word.He set his pen down.He looked at the desk for a moment. Then at the freesia painting. Then at me."No," he said.I held his gaze. "Why not."He was quiet again. Not avoiding it. Something more like a man choosing his words

The message arrived on a Wednesday morning. Not through any of the usual channels. Not an intermediary or a coded communication or any of the careful architecture Viktor typically used to keep his hands clean. This came directly. A single page delivered to the estate gates by a courier who was gone before anyone thought to stop him. Dante read it in the study with the door open which meant he wasn't concerned about me hearing and I was in the corridor when Nico brought it in so I stayed where I was and waited. The study was very quiet for a long moment. Then Dante read it a second time. I watched him through the doorway. His face was doing the completely still version that I had learned to read not as calm but as something being held very carefully in place over something considerably less calm underneath. He set the page on the desk. Then he picked up the lighter from the drawer and burned it. Held it over the ashtray and watched it go to ash without looking away and when it

Nico found the message at six in the morning.He brought it to Dante without reading it himself, which was Nico's way of saying he already knew what it contained and had decided that some things needed to be delivered intact rather than summarized. He placed it on the desk and stepped back and stood by the window and looked at the garden.Dante read it.His face did nothing for a long moment. Then he set the page down with the careful precision of a man placing something he intended to deal with completely and looked at Nico."How long ago," he said."The timestamp puts it at midnight," Nico said. "She used a relay. It took us until now to trace it back.""But you traced it.""Yes," Nico said."And the information she passed.""The Thursday timeline," Nico said. "The compound approach route. The coalition contact names."The study was very quiet.I was in the doorway because I had been passing on my way to the library and had seen Nico's face when he came through the front door and fo

He reached for me first.Not urgently and not desperately but with the slow certain quality of someone who had made a decision a long time ago and was simply arriving at it now, his hand finding my face in the dark and turning it toward him and looking at me for one long moment before he kissed me.I kissed him back the same way.Nothing driving it except the two of us and the night and the full weight of what tomorrow carried. His hands moved over me with an attention and a warmth that had nothing performed in it, completely present and completely focused and entirely mine in a way that made everything outside the room stop existing.I gave him everything back.All of it. Every carefully managed distance and every part of myself I had been protecting since long before the alley. Gone. Just the two of us in the dark being as honest with each other as two people could possibly be.He said my name once.I pulled him closer and he came.He was tender, searching and paying attention to ev

The call came at two in the afternoon.Nico took it in the corridor and I heard the quality of his voice change through the library door before I heard any words, that specific register shift that told me something had happened before he appeared in the doorway with his face arranged into the careful neutral of a man carrying information he did not want to deliver.I put the book down."Tell me," I said."Marco is down," he said. "Caught in the crossfire on the second front. He is alive and being moved to a secure medical location right now."The words landed one at a time and I stood up and walked to the window because standing still was not something my body was willing to do with that information sitting in it."How bad," I said."We don't have the complete picture yet," he said. "What we know is he went into the line of fire to pull one of the coalition men out of an exposed position. The medical team reached him within four minutes of the call going out.""Four minutes," I said.