Nathan's POV:"Lock the door," I said again. "Do not open it for anyone. I am coming.""Okay," Claire said. Her voice was still tight but it held. "Okay, Nathan. Hurry."I hung up and called Vivienne before the screen had even finished dimming.~.~She picked up on the second ring, and the moment I heard her voice I knew this was a different kind of frightened than Claire's.Claire had been scared and controlled underneath it, counting minutes at a window, still herself even shaking.Vivienne sounded broken open."Nathan." My name came out of her in pieces. "There are people outside the house. I do not know how many. I need to tell you something and I am sorry, I am so sorry, please just stay on the phone with me.""Vivienne, listen to me," I said, keeping my voice flat and even because I could hear what was happening to hers and one of us needed to stay steady. "Lock every door. Every window. Go to a room with no outside wall if you can. Someone is already coming to you.""Nathan, pl

Third Person's POV:The doorbell rang less than ten minutes after Vivienne had hung up the phone with Nathan.She froze at the kitchen counter, both hands flat on the wood, and for a moment she did not move at all. Then she thought about the men outside, about how a threat did not usually knock politely, and she made herself walk to the door.Through the side window she saw a man and a woman standing on the step. Ordinary clothes. Nothing about them announced anything, except the way they stood, weight balanced, eyes moving once across the street before settling back on the door.She opened it only as far as the chain allowed."Mrs. Cole," the woman said. Calm. Even. "We are here on behalf of someone who wants you safe tonight. That is all I can tell you right now.""Whose behalf," Vivienne said."I am not able to say that yet," the woman said. "But you called Nathan Cole seven minutes ago. We are already here because of that call."~.~Vivienne looked at both of them for a long momen

Nathan's POV:"Someone inside my circle," I said. "Say that again, slower.""The Hollow Court had someone inside your orbit," Roman said. "Before I was ever recruited. Before I even knew your name existed on a list somewhere. Someone you already trust.""Do you have a name," I said."No," he said. "I only know the role. Someone with consistent access to your location. Your schedule. The kind of access that does not come from watching you on a street corner."I sat down slowly at my kitchen table, phone still against my ear, and looked up at the drawing without really seeing it.~.~My mind went through the list on its own, faster than I wanted it to.Daniel, who had known where I was every single day since the hotel lobby. Claire, who had access to nothing before the ledge but had been close to me constantly since. Adrian himself, though that thought did not sit anywhere comfortable and I moved past it quickly.I did not say any of those names out loud to Roman."How did you find this

Third Person's POV:Roman Shaw did not come back for love. He came back for a job. And the job was never finished.The words were still sitting in Vivienne's chest when she pulled into her own driveway and saw his car already parked there.She sat behind the wheel for a moment. She thought about turning around. She thought about calling the number the woman at the cafe had given her, some emergency line, some protection Adrian's people had left with her.Then the front door opened and Leo came running down the path with his arms already up."Vivienne!" His face was lit up completely, the particular unguarded joy of a child who had decided long ago that she was safe ground. "You are home! We made pasta again!"She caught him because there was nothing else to do. Her arms went around him before her mind had finished deciding whether they should.~.~Dinner was at the kitchen table.The same table where Nathan had once laid out signed divorce papers in the dark, where she had picked up t

Third Person's POV:Vivienne's footsteps faded upstairs and the house went quiet.Roman sat alone at the kitchen table, the plates still stacked by the sink where she had left them, and for the first time in a long while he did not reach for his phone or run a number in his head or plan the next careful sentence he would need for tomorrow.He just sat there and looked at the room.~.~The shelves. The hallway. The chair he had been sitting in for months, at a table that had never belonged to him, in a life he had entered with a specific job and had somehow started treating like it was actually his.He made himself look at it honestly.Not the version he told himself when he needed to sleep at night. Not the version where he had simply been doing a job that happened to overlap with real affection along the way. The real version, the one he had spent eight months avoiding because looking at it clearly meant admitting what it had cost, and who had actually paid for it.He thought about L