Buried Vows

Chapter Nine: Rules of Engagement

Damian's Pov

"I want the number traced by morning," I told Farrow, the second Wren's phone went dark in her hand. "Both messages. I want to know who's been watching her long enough to know things that never made a police report."

"On it." Farrow didn't move yet. He was looking at her the way he looks at a threat he can't quite place the shape of. "You should know, I already ran a trace on the first batch, from a few nights ago. Burner. Untraceable through the carrier. Whoever's doing this knows exactly how to disappear."

"Then find another way in." I didn't look away from Wren, sitting rigid on the couch with her arms wrapped around herself in a way I hadn't seen her allow before not performance, not stillness. Just cold, honest fear, and something in my chest tightened at the sight of it that I didn't have time to examine.

Farrow left. I sat down across from her, closer than the rules I hadn't stated yet technically allowed, and said the only thing I actually knew how to offer her in that moment.

"We need rules. Not aspirational ones. Enforceable ones, or this arrangement gets one of us killed the first time convenience makes it inconvenient to keep them."

She looked up. "Fine. Say them."

"First. In public, always, you're Wren Hale. Not even in private moments where you think no one's listening, because someone is always listening. The habit has to be absolute."

"I've survived on that discipline for five years, Damian. I don't need the reminder."

"You've survived hiding. You're about to start surviving visible, standing beside me in rooms full of people whose entire business is finding inconsistencies. It's a different discipline. I need you sharper, not just careful."

She didn't argue that. "Second?"

"No real feelings." I said it plainly, because plain statements survive scrutiny better than careful ones, and because some part of me needed the discipline of hearing myself say it out loud. "Whatever we perform in public stays performance. The moment either of us confuses the role for the reality, we hand Silas exactly the weakness he's spent his whole life learning to find."

"Convenient rule for a man who's spent five years making sure he never has to feel anything long enough for it to matter."

I didn't have a ready answer for that. She wasn't wrong, and I was beginning to understand that stating a rule and enforcing it against myself were two entirely different disciplines.

"Third," I said instead, retreating into logistics because it's always been easier for me than examining anything else. "You trust no one in my circle beyond myself and Farrow, not fully, not yet. Someone leaked your identity out of a system I control. Until I know who, everyone around me is a variable, including people I've trusted for years."

"That's a lonely way to live."

"It's the way I've survived five years without ending up like my brother."

Something shifted in her face not pity. Recognition. The look of someone who's built her own version of the same lonely architecture. "Fourth. We're both allowed to say when something's too much. Not weakness. Information. If either of us is about to break character in a way that risks the operation, we say so, plainly, and the other adjusts."

"Agreed."

"Fifth." Her voice went quieter, and I understood whatever she was about to say cost her something to admit. "If either of us starts feeling something real underneath the performance, I'm not saying it will happen, we tell each other. Not to act on it. Just to name it. I'm not doing this if the foundation is another lie."

I extended my hand across the table, the same gesture that had sealed our first agreement three nights ago, and when she took it, I let myself notice, for exactly as long as I could afford, that her hand was steadier than mine.

"All five," I said. "Starting tomorrow, in public, you're Wren Hale, my fiancée, and nothing else. In private, we tell each other the truth about everything else."

Everything else. I heard the words leave my mouth and understood, even as I said them, how much I was already planning to keep locked behind that particular sentence, the bike, the club, the name Julian Voss had come close enough to almost saying out loud tonight. I told myself it wasn't a lie. Withholding wasn't lying. I'd told her that once already and I still half believed it.

Her hand tightened slightly in mine, and I felt something in my chest do exactly what rule two was apparently already failing to prevent, less than a minute after we'd agreed to it.

My phone rang before either of us could name it. Unfamiliar number. I almost let it go to voicemail. I've wished, every day since, that I had.

The voice on the other end was calm, precise, utterly certain of itself in a way that told me instantly I was speaking to a man who'd been planning this exact call for a very long time.

"Mr. Kade." Silas Cross said my name the way a man says a word he's already decided he owns. "I understand congratulations are in order. I do hope you'll let me be the first to meet my niece properly before Friday. It would mean so much to the family, having her home again."