Beautifully Dangerous 🔞

Chapter 11

"He didn't tell me how bad it was until it was already over," she said. "He was protecting me. Which was — kind, and also meant I had no time to prepare. One day the studio existed and the next it didn't and six months later he was gone."

Damien's hand moved to her shoulder. She felt the weight of it — steady, present. Not trying to fix anything. Just: I am here. In this room. With this.

She had not known until that moment how much she had needed exactly that.

— ✦ —

She told him about Raymond.

This was the harder telling. Not because she felt loyalty to Raymond — that had burned away completely in the archive on a Wednesday morning — but because telling it required her to account for herself. For the choice she had made, at twenty-three, to be recruited. For the four years of choices that followed.

"He found me at the reception after the funeral," she said. "Not the funeral itself — the reception. Which was — very Raymond. He understood instinctively that the funeral is too raw, too watched. The reception is where people are three drinks in and the initial shock has worn off and the grief has settled into something that looks like need." She paused. "He came and talked to me about my father's films. He had seen two of them. He said things about them that were true — perceptive things, the kind of observations that make you feel seen, that make you feel your father was seen. I was twenty-three and wrecked and he was exactly the right person saying exactly the right things in exactly the right moment."

"He knew what he was doing," Damien said. Not a question.

"He always knows what he's doing," she said. "That's what made him so effective. And so dangerous." She looked at her hands. "He gave me a name and a purpose and a direction for the anger. He told me what he told me about your family and I believed him because I needed someone to blame and because the evidence he showed me looked real." She paused. "I was a willing instrument. I want to be honest about that. I didn't have a gun to my head. I was grieving and furious and twenty-three years old and he offered me a shape to pour it into and I poured."

"You were twenty-three," Damien said.

"That's not an excuse."

"It's not an excuse," he agreed. "It's a context. There's a difference." He paused. "He spent years building you into something useful to him. That's not the same as you choosing to be a weapon."

"I made choices inside it."

"Yes. And you made a choice at the estate." His voice was quiet. Even. "You could have run. The moment you found what you found in the archive — you could have disappeared. New city, new name, new cover. You knew how. He taught you." He paused. "You didn't run."

She was silent.

"That choice," he said, "is the one I keep coming back to."

She looked at the window. The city, grey-skied and rain-streaked.

"I was tired," she said. "Four years is a long time to be someone else. I was tired of it. And I—" She stopped.

"Say it," he said.

"I wanted you to know me," she said. "Even if knowing me meant losing you. I wanted to exist, fully, in front of one person, and you were — you were the person I wanted it to be." She paused. "That probably sounds—"

"It sounds true," he said.

She looked at him over her shoulder.

He was looking at her the way he always looked at her. Completely. As if she were the only problem worth solving. Except she understood now that she was not a problem to him — she was simply a person, and he was giving her the full weight of his attention because that was how he loved. Not with grand gestures. With presence. With the totality of his focus, offered freely, sustained without drama.

She turned fully to face him.

"I'm going to need to figure out who I am," she said. "Without the cover. Without the mission. I don't entirely know what's left."

"I know," he said.

"That's going to be — messy. Probably. I'll be in therapy for a significant amount of time. I have a lot of unpacking to do and some of it is going to make me difficult to be around."

"I'm aware."

"And you have your own things. The memory. Sophie. The—"

"I'm aware of my own things," he said, with the flicker of dry amusement that she had come to love specifically because it appeared so rarely and landed so precisely. "I'm not under the impression that either of us is arriving at this without luggage."

"Some of my luggage is — quite a lot."

"So is mine." He leaned forward, elbows on knees. "Celeste. I'm not asking you to arrive already unpacked. I'm asking if you want to be in the same place while you unpack."

She looked at him.

She thought about the terrace. About rain and a kitchen and his arm across her waist in the dark and the way he had listened, for months, with his whole self, as if what she was saying was always worth hearing. She thought about a battered poetry book and a thermos of coffee and a scar he touched without drama. She thought about four days of silence and then a phone call and bare feet on kitchen floors and the word deciding used as the most intimate thing she had ever been offered.

She crossed the room.

She put her hands on either side of his face — the way she had the night of the library, the first time she had kissed him without strategy, without calibration, with nothing but the whole of herself and nowhere left to hide — and she kissed him. Slowly. Completely. The way you kiss someone when you are not performing desire but simply feeling it, in the unreduced and uncurated way, in the way that starts in the chest and moves outward.

He kissed her back the same way. His hands came up to her waist — warm, steady, certain — and she felt the specific quality of his certainty move through her like something settling. Like a building finding its foundation. Like the moment a structure stops being assembled and starts being real.

When they broke apart he pressed his forehead to hers.

"There she is," he said softly. His voice low and warm and sure.

"Here I am," she said. And meant it in every possible way — here, in this room, in this life, in this self. Present. Fully. For the first time in four years without anything between her and the moment.

Celeste Voss. Her father's daughter. Her own person. Finally, entirely, here.