Page 28 of The Endless Want

For a fraction of a second, he turns his head toward me. That sliver of hesitation is the only thing preventing the attacker from dying right then.

But the man makes one fatal mistake: he reaches for a knife. Declan sees the movement. And ends it.

Effortless. Efficient. A snap. A collapse, and the alley goes still.

Declan breathes. Broken, ragged breaths, like he's coming down from a blackout. Then he looks at me, and the rage goes out of him all at once, the way a fire dies when someone shuts the door on the air.

He crosses to me in three long strides. His hands hover over my arms, my shoulders, my face, like touching me will make it worse.

"Ailish." His voice is shredded. "Look at me."

I do.

He scans my face, my arms, the marks already darkening across my skin. His jaw tightens at every one.

"Did they cut you?"

"No." My voice isn't steady. "They tried to grab me."

"You're hurt."

"I'm alive. And I can walk."

It's the wrong thing to say. Something in him softens at it, and softness is worse. His eyes flick toward the shape on the ground behind him, then back to me, and when they land they stay.

"Hospital," he says.

"No."

"Ailish."

"No." Sharper this time, because I can already see him deciding. "Not tonight. Not with questions, not with a chart, not with someone in intake connecting a Russian corpse in an alley to a woman who works for Liam Costello."

He swears under his breath, something vicious and helpless.

"You should have called me." He isn't looking at me now. "The second the meeting moved. The second the time changed. You should have."

"I didn't know." My hands won't stop. I watch them shake like they belong to somebody else. "I didn't know anything was wrong until it was already happening."

"We need to get further from here. Before someone else comes looking."

And there it is, the thing I've been bracing for since the moment I recognized his voice. A safehouse. A door that locks from the outside. Groceries delivered by whoever's least busy. Nadia sitting on a stairwell floor saying I'm stuck here waiting for Liam to decide I exist again.

"Give me a minute," I say. "Not a car. Not a room. A minute."

"Walking isn't safe right now."

"Neither is anything else."

He rubs a slow hand down his face, and for a second I watch him lose the argument he was never really having. He exhales, a sound full of resignation and fear and something dangerously close to relief that I'm still breathing at all.

"All right." Quiet. "We'll walk. Just for a minute."

He offers his hand.

I take it. His fingers wrap around mine, warm and steady, and he doesn't let go as we step out of the alley and into the street, past the blood drying on his knuckles and the thing behind us neither of us is going to name tonight.

That's when I feel it.