Buried Vows

Chapter Six: The Offer

Damian's Pov

"Who's Julian Voss?"

"Someone your father promised you to when you were six years old." I said it flat, because there was no gentler way to say it and I've never trusted gentleness to survive contact with the truth for long. "A contract marriage. Two families' shipping interests, sealed with paperwork instead of feeling. He's spent five years looking for you. Apparently harder than I gave him credit for."

She went very still. "I don't want him. I never wanted any of it."

"I know." And I did, I'd read that much in her face the moment I said Elias's name and watched her flinch like the guilt of it belonged to her too. "But wanting nothing doesn't make you invisible, Ms. Cross. It never has. You're about to have two men from your old life converging on the same city inside the same week, and neither of them is going to wait patiently while you decide what you want."

"So what's your solution? Hand me to whichever one asks first?"

"My solution," I said, "is to make sure neither of them gets to decide your next move for you. I want to announce our engagement."

The silence lasted exactly as long as I expected.

"You want to parade me in front of the man who may have had his own niece killed, and the man my father sold me to at six years old, wearing your ring, and call that protection."

"I want to make you visible in a way neither of them can touch without exposing themselves completely." I kept my voice level, kept every ounce of what I actually felt about the idea of Julian Voss laying any claim to her buried somewhere I didn't examine too closely. "Right now you're a rumor Silas can eliminate quietly and a contract Voss can enforce quietly. Standing beside me at the galas, in press photographs, in front of a board that asks questions if my fiancée disappears, you become expensive to touch. That's the only kind of safety that's ever actually worked for people like us."

"People like us."

"People who've spent years learning that hiding only buys time. It doesn't buy safety." I held her gaze. "I'm not offering to disappear you again. Hiding already failed you once. I'm offering to make you too visible to erase."

She was quiet a long moment, turning it over the way I'd watched her turn over every hard thing since I pulled her out of that security line. "And when it's over? When you've gotten what you want from Silas?"

"Then you disappear properly. With resources behind you this time, instead of a stolen number and a five-year gap nobody bothered to check closely enough. You have my word on that, for whatever it's worth to a woman who met me three days ago."

"I don't know what your word is worth."

"Then judge me by what I do instead of what I say. That's the only currency I trust either."

She looked at the photograph still sitting between us — nineteen, smiling a smile she'd been taught, standing on the steps of a house that had apparently taught her to run before it taught her almost anything else. Something decided itself behind her eyes that she hadn't spoken yet.

"I need time to think."

"You don't have time." Not unkind. Honest. "Julian Voss lands in under three hours. Once he's in this city, you have hours, not days, to decide whether you'd rather face both of them with resources behind you, or alone in whatever hiding place you can build in a single panicked night."

My phone buzzed against the table before she could answer, Farrow again, the same clipped urgency as before.

Voss moved up his arrival. He's already landed. His car is six minutes from your building.

I looked at her, and understood the decision I'd just given her hours to make had collapsed to something closer to sixty seconds instead.

"Say it plainly," I said. "Yes or no. Because in six minutes a man who's spent five years hunting you is going to be standing in this building, and I need to know which version of tonight I'm walking him into."

She held my eyes a long moment, and I watched every careful, exhausted calculation she'd made since the boathouse dock settle into something final.

"Yes." Steady. Certain, or close enough to it. "The engagement. Whatever it costs. But I want the truth, Damian all of it, eventually. Not tonight. But eventually."

"Eventually," I agreed, and didn't let myself think too hard about how much of eventually I actually intended to give her, or how much I was still keeping locked behind a door only I had the key to.

The buzzer sounded at the door four minutes later, early, sharper than I'd expected and Farrow's voice came through the intercom, tight in a way I hadn't heard from him in years.

"Boss. He's here. And he's not alone. He's got two men with him I don't recognize, and Wren, he's already saying her name in the hallway like he owns it."