It took months for them to find their way back to something resembling trust, and neither of them pretended the process would be simple. Xavier spent that first week recovering from the cold that had settled dangerously into his chest, and Ari, despite every instinct telling her to protect the careful, hard-won peace she'd built for herself, found she couldn't quite bring herself to turn him away. She nursed him back to health with the same stubborn, practical care she brought to everything else in her life, and somewhere in the quiet, unhurried hours of those days, they finally began talking — really talking — about everything that had happened, everything that had gone wrong, everything neither of them had been honest enough to say when it might have mattered most. Xavier told her about Alyssia, about the slow, disturbing transformation he'd witnessed, about the moment her name had slipped from his lips in a room that should have belonged entirely to someone else. He told her about