Bound By Blood - A Dark Romance

Saturday

Saturday was the waiting kind of day.

The counter filing package was with the legal team. The signatures were in order. Everything that could be done before Monday morning had been done and the remaining work was the legal team's to complete over the weekend and file first thing Monday. There was nothing left for Sienna to act on until Monday and the absence of action after weeks of constant movement felt strange in the specific way that stillness felt strange to someone who had been in motion.

She went to Club Noir in the morning.

Not for any operational reason. Just because it was hers and she had not spent enough time in it recently and the particular smell of it in the morning, old wood and clean glasses and the ghost of a thousand Friday nights, was something she needed.

She sat in the back office for two hours doing the accounts she had left unfinished on Thursday and felt the club around her the way you felt a thing that had survived and continued. It had been her father's and then hers and it had weathered the months since she had moved to Blackthorn Terrace without her needing to be in it every day, which was a thing she had not been certain of when the arrangement began.

She thought about that. About the things she had been uncertain of at the beginning and what they looked like now.

She drove back to Blackthorn Terrace in the early afternoon.

Damian was in the garden when she came through the gate. She had never seen him in the garden before. He was standing under the wild tree looking up at it with the expression he used when he was not thinking about work, the quieter one, the one that was simply himself without the operational layer.

She came to stand beside him.

"It's bigger than it looks from the window," she said.

"I've been meaning to come out here for months," he said. "I never had time."

She looked up at the tree. The new growth she had noticed weeks ago had continued in the indifferent way of things that grew without asking permission, and the branches were fuller now and the light came through them in the uneven way of things that had not been trained into any particular shape.

"Don't cut it," she said.

He looked at her. "I wasn't going to."

"Good."

They stood under the wild tree in the pale spring afternoon and she felt the Saturday settle around them, the specific quality of a day that was not requiring anything of them for the first time in weeks. The city was on the other side of the walls and the port was doing its ordinary work and somewhere Renn was preparing for a Monday that was not going to go the way he had planned and none of that required her attention right now.

Right now there was the garden and the tree and the man beside her.

He reached over and took her hand in the easy way that had become ordinary, the way the most reliable things became ordinary.

"When this is over," she said.

"When this is over," he agreed.

She looked at him. "I keep saying that."

"I know."

"I think I've been using it as a placeholder," she said. "For things I could say now but have been waiting to say until the situation was resolved." She looked at the tree. "I'm not sure the situation ever fully resolves. There's always a next thing."

He was quiet in the listening way.

"So I'm going to say the thing I've been waiting to say," she said. "Without the placeholder."

He turned to look at her.

She looked back at him under the wild tree in the garden in the afternoon light and felt the complete certainty of someone who had thought about something clearly and was about to say it out loud for the first time.

"I love you," she said. Simply, with the directness she brought to everything that mattered. "I've known it for a while and I've been keeping it in the when this is over category and that's a category I'm closing."

The garden was very quiet.

He looked at her with the open expression and something more than that, something that had been waiting behind it with the patience of a man who had learned not to reach for things before they were ready and was now being told that the waiting was done.

"Sienna," he said.

"I know," she said, for the third time in this house. Because she did.

He brought her hand up and held it against his chest the way she had done to him once in the kitchen, flat against him, feeling the beat of it, and he looked at her with the complete attention that was simply who he was.

"I love you," he said. "I have loved you since the morning I remembered how you take your coffee and realized I had been paying attention to you in a way I hadn't paid attention to anything in a very long time."

She felt the words settle into the warm certain place where the things he said to her lived. She thought about day seven and the coffee and the moment she had identified as the point where the strategy had stopped working.

She thought that they had both been lost from very early on.

She stepped closer and he met her without hesitation, his free hand coming to her face the way it had in the sitting room weeks ago, the same careful warmth, except this time there was no forehead against forehead, no almost.

He kissed her in the garden under the wild tree in the pale afternoon light and she kissed him back with the complete attention she brought to everything that mattered and the city existed somewhere beyond the walls and the port was doing its ordinary work and the Monday filing was in capable hands and none of it required anything of either of them right now.

When they separated she stayed close and looked at him in the garden light and felt the full weight of what it meant to have arrived here from where they had started.

A kitchen. A knife. A folder left on a counter for her to pick up on her own terms.

"Day seven," she said.

He looked at her with the warmth. "Day seven," he agreed.

She took his hand and they walked back toward the house through the garden that was showing its spring growth and she thought about the contract and the six months and the word after.

After was already here.

It looked like this.

It looked like the kitchen in the morning and the work in the afternoon and the evenings that belonged to them and the house that had stopped being unfamiliar a long time ago.

It looked like a wild tree growing in all directions at once, answering to nothing but its own nature.

She walked back into the house that was hers now in every way that mattered and felt, for the first time in a very long time, completely and entirely home.