Page 138 of The Endless Want

I’m standing over a table with Mackenzie, marking a supply corridor in red pen, when Declan storms in. I don’t hear him at first; no one ever hears him at first. He moves like he was built out of shadow and quiet threats. But the second he’s fully inside the room, everyone feels the shift—the sort of gravitational pull that makes heads turn before they realize why.

Mackenzie elbows me softly, brows lifting. “Your man walks like he’s about to start a war.”

I whisper, “He always walks like that.”

But my pulse speeds up anyway.

Declan hasn’t looked at me this directly in days. He’s been busy with Liam, busy with the Russians, busy trying to keep a lid on the chaos that spirals wider every hour. So, I don’t take it personally, as much as I weakly crave him.

I feel his attention when it lands on me, heavy and unguarded. There’s something in his eyes I can’t name. Something fierce, but soft beneath it.

He doesn’t break eye contact as he crosses the room—not even when Liam calls his name, not even when one of the Italians tries to hand him a folder. He ignores all of it. The entire room goes still, slowly realizing he’s not coming in to give orders. He’s coming for me.

“Declan,” I say quietly, straightening, the pen still in my fingers. “What’s⁠—”

He stops in front of me, breathing hard, as if he ran here straight from a battlefield. Maybe he did. His hair is a little messy, his shirt half buttoned, his jaw tense like he’s been grinding through an impossible choice.

“Ailish,” he says.

My heart clenches. “Are you alright?”

He nods once, then shakes his head, then huffs a breath that sounds like a man giving in after fighting himself for too long. “No. I’m not alright. And I’m not waiting anymore.”

Before I can ask what he means, he drops to one knee.

The pen slips from my fingers and hits the map with a dull clatter.

A collective gasp ripples through the room. Someone swears. Someone else whispers, “Finally.” Mackenzie chokes on her own spit. Nadia actually claps a hand over her mouth like she’s watching a soap opera live.

But all of it fades the second I look down at Declan.

He’s kneeling in the war room. On a concrete floor stained with oil and boot prints. Maps and guns and radios buzzing behind him. His broad shoulders squared, his gaze locked with mine. And in his hand—God, in his hand—is a small ring box. It looks almost comically soft in a place built on blood and steel.

“Ailish.” His voice is rough, low, shaking not with nerves but with the force of everything he’s trying to say at once. “I’m not a good man. I’ve never pretended to be. I’ve made mistakes that I’d bleed for twice over if it meant undoing them.”

My throat tightens. He keeps going.

“But I love you.” The words hit the air like gunfire—loud, final, irreversible. “I love you more than I can carry, more than I can fight, more than I know how to hold without destroying it. But I’m trying. I swear to God I am.”

The room doesn’t breathe.

He swallows hard, eyes flicking briefly—not to my belly, but to where the baby is resting inside me, safe for now. “I want to protect you both. Not because it’s duty. Not because I’m scared. But because you’re my family. And I choose you. Every day. Even when I’m an idiot who makes everything worse.”

A laugh bubbles out of me, broken and wet.

He opens the ring box.

The ring is simple, beautiful, a smooth band with a single stone. It looks like us—unpolished, imperfect, painfully sincere.

Declan takes a breath that sounds like it’s costing him something. “Marry me, Ailish. Not because of the baby. Not because of the war. But because I’m in love with you, and I want to spend the rest of my life trying to deserve you.”

My vision blurs.

The room leans in.

I lift a hand to my mouth and shake my head once—not in refusal, but in disbelief, in overwhelmed joy, in sheer stunned chaos that this man, this impossible, infuriating, beautiful man, is kneeling for me in the middle of the damn war room.

“You’re a bastard,” I whisper, voice trembling.