Wren decided, after a sleepless night turning Gideon's proposal over carefully in her mind, that she wasn't willing to retreat to some distant, isolated property while the people she'd come to think of as family faced down Whitfield's escalating threat without her.
"I want to stay," she told him the following morning, finding him already awake in the kitchen, dark circles beneath his eyes suggesting he'd slept even less than she had. "Not out of stubbornness. I've thought about it carefully. But I don't think isolating myself somewhere else actually makes either of us safer, Gideon. It just means facing whatever comes next separately instead of together."
He studied her for a long moment, old protective instinct visibly warring with reluctant understanding.
"I don't love this decision,"
