IN YOUR ARMS

RULE NUMBER ONE

The argument started over something small enough that neither of them could later agree on what had actually begun it, which was, Amara would come to realize, usually how their worst arguments started.

She had gone to the pharmacy two blocks from her apartment, alone, on foot, in broad daylight, for something as mundane as aspirin and a bottle of vitamins, a trip that would have registered as nothing at all three weeks earlier and now apparently constituted a breach significant enough that Roman was waiting in her living room when she returned, standing exactly where he'd stood the night after the warehouse, hands loose at his sides in a way that had stopped, for her, ever really meaning calm.

"Ashford said you left without him."

"I walked two blocks to a pharmacy in the middle of the afternoon." She set the bag down harder than necessary on the counter. "I didn't realize I needed a security detail to buy vitamins."

"That's exactly what you need right now, and you know it."

"I don't know it, actually. Nobody's explained it to me. You keep handing me rules and expecting me to treat them like facts instead of demands, and I'm tired of doing that without a reason."

Something tightened in his face, the particular expression she'd started to recognize as the one he wore right before he decided, again, not to tell her something. "The reason is that I can't guarantee your safety if you won't let me."

"Then guarantee it by telling me what I'm actually in danger from. Not vague warnings. Not rules with no explanation. Something real."

"I can't."

"You keep saying that like it's an answer instead of a wall." She crossed her arms, aware even as she did it that the gesture made her look younger and more defensive than she wanted to, and unable to stop herself anyway. "Do you know how insane this looks from where I'm standing? A man who heals from a knife wound in an evening.

A house full of portraits of people who apparently stand exactly like you do. A grandmother who asks me if strange things have happened to me like it's a perfectly normal question to ask a stranger over tea. And you, standing here, telling me I can't walk two blocks alone, and still refusing to tell me why."

Roman was quiet for a long moment, and when he spoke again his voice had lost some of its earlier hardness, replaced by something closer to exhaustion.

"You've been to the house twice and you've already found three threads to pull on. That's exactly what worries me."

"Then stop treating curiosity like a symptom and start treating it like what it is. I'm trying to understand the person I'm apparently in a relationship with, fake or otherwise. That's not dangerous. That's normal."

"Nothing about this is normal, Amara. That's the entire point I'm failing to make you understand." He dragged a hand through his hair, an uncharacteristically human gesture from a man who rarely allowed himself visible frustration.

"The rule isn't about controlling you. It's about the fact that I have enemies who would use you to hurt me without a second thought, and every unescorted minute you spend outside is a minute I can't account for if something happens."

"Then tell me who they are. Give me something to actually watch for instead of just fear."

"I will," he said, and for a moment she almost believed the sentence would continue into something real. Instead it stopped there, unfinished, the same way his sentences had been stopping for weeks now, right at the edge of whatever truth waited on the other side. "When I can. Not today."

She wanted to push further, and some old, stubborn part of her almost did, but she recognized, watching his face, that she had reached the exact edge of what he was capable of giving her tonight, and that pushing past it would only cost her ground rather than gain it. So instead she said, quieter, "One day you're going to run out of not today."

"I know," he said, and the honesty in that admission, small as it was, felt like more progress than anything else he'd told her in weeks.