Mine To Watch

Chapter Four:The Name That Isn't A Lie

Nora didn't remember leaving the restaurant.

She remembered Julian's hand at the small of her back, steering her past tables of people who hadn't noticed anything wrong.

She remembered the cold air outside hitting her face without mercy.

She remembered standing on the curb with her arms wrapped around herself while he tried to flag a cab down like this was a normal night ending normally.

"I can walk," she said.

"You're shaking too hard to walk three blocks."

"I'm shaking because you just told me I'm a target now." She stepped back when he reached for her arm. "Don't touch me right now."

He dropped his hand immediately. There was no argument. No second attempt. And something about how fast he obeyed — no fight in it at all — made her chest hurt in a way she didn't want to look at too closely.

They walked anyway, then three blocks stretched into six. Neither of them spoke, and the silence wasn't the comfortable kind — it was the kind that came right before something, and she could feel him building toward it the whole way home.

"Say it," she finally snapped, when they were two blocks out and she couldn't stand the quiet anymore. "Whatever you're working up to. Just say it."

"My family runs money through legitimate businesses," he said. "Security firms. Real estate. A few restaurants. Underneath that, there's a lot that never touches paper." His voice had gone flat, worn thin in a way that made him sound more tired than he had an hour ago.

"Marcus took over from our father eight years ago. I was raised to take over after him. I didn't want it."

"So you left."

"You don't just leave a family like mine. You negotiate an exit, and then you spend the rest of your life being reminded how generous they were to let you have it."

A humorless huff of breath. "I do consulting now. Real consulting. Some of it still crosses paths with them, because it has to, that's the price of the door they let me walk through."

"And the case file. The photo."

Her voice cracked despite herself. "Was any of it real, Julian, or was that just the version of the truth that got me to trust you faster?"

He didn't answer right away, and the silence told her more than any answer could have.

"The case file was real," he said finally. "I asked for it specifically. I'd been looking for you for months before it ever landed on my desk." He stopped walking, and it made her stop too, just by the weight of stopping in front of her.

"The part I left out is that I didn't find you through a client, Nora. I found you because eight months ago you pulled a man out of a burning car on a service road and gave him mouth-to-mouth on the pavement before the ambulance got there, and then you left without ever giving anyone your name."

The street noise around them seemed to drop away.

"That was you."

"That was me."

He looked at her directly, and for the first time she saw something raw behind his eyes that hadn't been there in any version of him she'd met so far — not the calm neighbor, not the man with the wrench, not the mouth that had found hers in the rain. "I spent eight months trying to find the person who saved my life. When I finally did, you were being stalked by someone, and I used that as the reason to get close instead of just walking up and telling you the truth — because the truth sounds insane, and I didn't think a stranger would believe a man who claimed she'd saved him once, in the dark, without ever learning his name."

"So you moved in across the hall instead."

"I bought the building."

His voice had gone quiet, almost ashamed of itself. "Most of the units on your floor are empty because I own them and I haven't rented them out. I wanted to control who else got close to you until I understood who was sending those messages."

The ground shifted slightly under her feet. It was too much arriving too fast — each piece worse than the one before it — and she couldn't tell anymore which parts of the last three weeks had been real and which had been built, brick by brick, before she'd even signed the lease.

"You've been managing my entire life since before I moved in."

"I've been trying to keep you safe."

"That's not the same thing, Julian."

Her voice cracked on his name, and hated that it did. "That is not even close to the same thing."

He didn't argue.

He just stood there and let the accusation land without flinching away from it, and somehow that — the not-flinching — was worse than if he'd fought her on it.

For one unbearable second neither of them moved, close enough on the empty sidewalk that she could feel the warmth coming off him, could feel the old, dangerous pull of him even now, even furious, even lied to.

His eyes dropped to her mouth once, quick, like the pull went both directions and he hated that as much as she did.

He didn't reach for her. He'd learned that lesson an hour ago. But she felt the want of it anyway, hanging in the cold air between them, and it made her angrier than anything he'd said all night.

Her phone rang before either of them could break it.

Theo's name lit up the screen at an hour he never called. Her stomach dropped before he even said a word.

"Nora." His voice came out thin, panicked, nothing like his usual easy tone.

"I need you to not freak out."

"Theo, what's wrong."

"I owe some people money. A lot of money, and I thought I had more time to pay it back but they showed up at my apartment tonight and they said—" His voice broke before he could finish the sentence.

"They said it's handled, that someone already paid it off. I didn't ask anyone to do that, Nora, I don't know who did it, and now they're saying I owe someone else instead, and I don't understand what's happening."

Nora's stomach dropped straight through the sidewalk.

She turned slowly to look at Julian, who had gone very still beside her, his expression carefully, deliberately blank in a way that told her everything before she'd even asked the question out loud.

"Theo." Her hand was shaking around the phone. "Who paid it off, do you have a name?”

There was a pause and a sound of papers rustling in the background.

Her brother's breath shaking audibly through the speaker.

"Some guy left a card," Theo said. "It just says Voight Holdings.”