Page 67 of The Rook’s Obsession

“Because last time he didn’t show up. This time he will, and you’ll be alone in a room with him.”

She watches me for a moment. Something moves through her expression. Not defensiveness. Not the sharp edge she would’ve given me a month ago if I’d said something like this. It’s something quieter now. “I’m not used to this,” she whispers.

“To what?”

“To someone worrying about me.” She says it simply, like she’s talking about the weather, but I hear the slight tremor in her voice. She would hate it if she knew how easy she is to read sometimes. “Nobody else ever worried. Not Vincenzo or my handlers. Worrying implies you care about another person, not just the asset.”

She pauses, her brow wrinkling. “I was always the asset.”

“You are more than an asset,” I tell her, brushing hair away from her shoulder, letting my fingers linger there.

“I’m learning that.” She reaches out and traces a line along my jaw with her fingertip, light enough to barely register. “But when someone’s never worried about you before, it’s strange to feel it coming from someone else. I don’t always know what to do with it.”

“You don’t have to do anything with it. It’s up to me to carry that.”

“That’s very noble, but that’s also not how it works.” The corner of her mouth lifts in a smirk, but there’s no fresh light in her eyes. They’re still flat, pensive. “Your worry affects your focus. Your focus affects your performance. If you go in tonight distracted, you become a liability. I can’t afford liabilities.”

She’s right. She’s also deflecting, turning the emotional into the tactical because the tactical is easier to manage. I recognize the move because I’ve used it myself more times than I’d care to admit.

“I’ll be fine tonight,” I tell her. “I’ll do my job. You know I will.”

“I do know that.” She holds my gaze like she’s daring me to look away. “So trust me to do mine.”

This woman has surprised me in every way a person can be surprised. She’s dismantled every assumption I brought with me to Prague and replaced it with something more complicated, more real. A few days ago, I watched her kill a man in an alley and carry groceries home in the same hand. She made dinner afterward, standing at the stove with steady hands and distant eyes, and I held her that night while she slept while not sleeping much myself.

I’ve spent the past week getting to know Ivy. Not Laura, not the ghost, but Ivy. Who walks through Milan like it belongs to her. Who carries a blade in her jacket the way other women carry lip balm. She took me to her favorite restaurant, introduced me to her ex-lover without flinching, then stood on a bridge at sunset and told me she’d never done that with anyone else.

Every day I know her better, and every day it gets harder to let her walk into danger. That’s the paradox. The closer she gets, the more I want to protect her. The more I want to protect her, the more I risk becoming something she doesn’t need: another man who thinks he knows what’s best for her.

She’s watching me think. I can see her reading my face, all of it, because I stopped trying to hide things from her somewhere around day three in Milan. There’s no point. She sees through everything I put up.

“After tonight,” I begin, then stop myself, because I’m not sure how to finish the sentence. After tonight, we have the footage. After tonight, we go home. After tonight, we take what we have to Vincenzo and force his hand, and then…

Then what?

For me, the answer has been obvious since before we got on the plane. We go home together. She stays. We build something. I’ve been operating under that assumption, so naturally it didn’t occur to me until right now, lying in this bed, looking at her face, that she might not be operating under the same one.

“After tonight?” she repeats, waiting.

Oh, to hell with it. “What happens? With us.”

The change in her is subtle, but I feel it. She’s pulling back slightly. Not physically—she doesn’t move away or break eye contact. But something in her eyes changes. Like the question caught her off guard, which means she hasn’t been thinking about it, which means the thing I assumed was obvious wasn’t obvious to her at all.

“Let’s get through tonight first,” she says.

It’s reasonable. It’s practical. And it’s exactly the kind of thing a person says when they don’t want to answer the actual question. “But…”

“I mean it,” she insists firmly. “Tonight matters. What comes after—” She stops and looks away for the first time. Her gaze drifts toward the window. The morning light catches the green in her eyes and turns them translucent. “I don’t know how to plan for after. I’ve never had an after. Every part of my life has been about the next mission, the next job, the next city. When you’ve lived like that long enough, you stop thinking in terms of what comes next because what comes next was always someone else’s decision.”

“It’s your decision now.”

“I know.” She says it quietly, and the quietness is the part that worries me. Not because she’s shutting me out—she isn’t, not completely. It worries me because I can feel the edge of something she’s not ready to say yet. The sort of hesitation that has nothing to do with how she feels about me and everything to do with whether she believes she’s allowed to feel it.

Every part of me wants to take her by the shoulders and tell her this is real, that I’m not going anywhere, that she doesn’t have to earn the right to want something for herself. I want to lay it all out—the future I see so clearly, it’s practically a photograph. The two of us. A place that’s ours. Something ordinary and permanent, and safe.

But I’ve watched her long enough to know that pushing is how you lose her. She doesn’t retreat from threats or confrontation. She retreats from pressure she never asked for. The wall she’s built isn’t made of hostility. It’s made of twelve years of survival. You don’t dismantle that by demanding she open the door. You stand on the other side, and you wait, hoping she decides to open it herself.

It’s the most goddamn frustrating thing I’ve ever experienced in all my life, and I’ve been shot in the leg by the woman I love.