Enforcer's Bargain

Chapter Twenty Three: Four Days

Delaney

Grief, it turned out, didn't observe wedding timelines, and the four days between the goodbye in the park and the ceremony itself became a strange, suspended stretch of both mourning and preparation, seating charts and centerpieces sitting alongside a quiet, unspoken ache neither of them fully named out loud.

"You don't have to be okay for the wedding," Delaney told him, the night before, finding him standing on his apartment balcony, staring out at the city lights with the specific stillness he got when something sat too heavy to put into words yet.

"I know. I think I mostly am, though. Not okay exactly. But steadier than I was four days ago." He turned to look at her, something soft and certain in his face despite the residual grief still visible underneath it. "I keep thinking about what my grandmother said. About choosing, again and again, being the actual definition of family. I lost that with Mia, through no fault of my own, and it's going to ache for a long time, I think. But tomorrow I get to choose you, properly, in front of everyone who watched us get here. That's not nothing. That might be the exact thing I need right now, honestly, more than I realized."

"Come here," Delaney said, and he crossed the balcony to her, pulling her close, the city lights spread out gold and distant behind him.

"I love you," he said, quiet, the words carrying a weight they hadn't quite had before this year of blackmail and injury and grief had tested them thoroughly enough to prove they'd hold. "Tomorrow, and after tomorrow, and every ordinary day that isn't dressed up as a wedding or a crisis. Just you, in the regular days. That's what I actually want, underneath everything else."

"You have it," Delaney said. "You've had it for a while now. I just don't think either of us fully believed it yet, until tonight."

He kissed her then, slow and unhurried, nothing like the careful, cautious kiss from the photo line all those months ago, nothing like even the desperate, relieved kiss in the tunnel after Portland. This one carried the whole weight of the year behind it, every hard won piece of trust, every fear worked through instead of avoided, and when he pulled her inside, away from the balcony and the city lights and the last four days of quiet grief, she went without hesitation, certain in a way she'd spent the whole year slowly, carefully learning how to be.

Roman

He'd waited for this, he realized, longer than he'd let himself fully admit, not out of any deliberate restraint so much as the simple, accumulating weight of a year that kept handing them crisis after crisis before either of them had the space to just be together, uncomplicated, present, without a blackmail scheme or an injury or a stolen daughter standing between them and the ordinary, aching want that had been building quietly since a hallway conversation eight months ago.

Tonight, finally, there was nothing standing between them at all.

He undressed her slowly in the low light of his bedroom, reverent in a way that surprised even him, a man who'd spent his whole career being anything but gentle, learning, piece by piece, exactly how careful he wanted to be with her, how much he wanted this to feel like everything the rest of the year hadn't been able to give them, unhurried, uninterrupted, entirely theirs.

She pulled him down to her with a certainty that matched his own, murmuring his name, the real one, the one only his grandmother had used until tonight, and he felt something in his chest crack open wider than even the grief over Mia had managed, something that had nothing to do with loss at all.

What followed belonged only to the two of them, unwitnessed, unrecorded, the first truly private thing either of them had shared all year in a relationship that had started under cameras and blackmail and had somehow, slowly, become the realest thing either of them had ever built.

Delaney

She woke before dawn, tangled together with him in a way that felt less like exhaustion and more like arrival, the specific stillness of a body finally, fully at rest after a year of bracing for the next crisis.

Roman stirred beside her, pulling her closer without fully waking, murmuring something soft and half formed against her hair, and Delaney lay there in the gray early light, listening to his steady breathing, thinking about the version of herself who'd once written this exact moment in fiction, years ago, imagining what it might feel like to be loved by a man capable of both violence and this particular, devastating tenderness.

She hadn't imagined it accurately, she realized now. The real version was better, messier, harder won, and entirely, irreplaceably theirs.

"You're thinking loudly," Roman murmured, eyes still closed, voice rough with sleep. "I can feel it."

"I'm thinking about the wedding. In about eight hours."

"Regretting the timing?"

"Not even a little." She kissed his shoulder, settling back against him, unhurried, certain. "I think this might be the best possible way to walk into it, actually. No performance left. No countdown. Just us, finally, entirely, before we make it official in front of everyone else."

"Just us," Roman agreed, pulling her closer, the early light slowly filling the room around them, gold and quiet and entirely, finally theirs. "I could get used to just us. I think I already have."