The silence between them wasn’t empty.
It was charged — pulsing like a heartbeat, thick with everything unsaid but deeply understood.
Amelia stayed pressed against him, arms around his waist, face buried in the crook of his neck. She could smell the cold metal on his skin, the faint burn of gunpowder that still clung to his coat, and the deeper scent beneath it all — him. That strange mixture of pine, smoke, and danger that had become as familiar to her as her own breath.
But it wasn’t the scent that made her eyes sting.
It was the way he held her now.
Like she wasn’t just someone he wanted.
But someone he had almost lost.
“I couldn’t breathe,” he murmured against her hair. “When I got the call. When Luca said there was movement.”
She pulled back slightly. “Why didn’t you take me w
