LAYLA'S POV
He looks at me with those grey eyes, and his face is completely open for the first time since I've known him.
"I'd do it again tonight. I'd do it a hundred times. The oath can take whatever it wants."
Something clean and cold rises in my chest. Not at him. At my father – at Jack making a sixteen-year-old boy swear an oath about ME without asking me, without telling me, using someone else's loyalty as a cage for a woman he never gave the chance to choose freely.
"I don't care about a promise you made when you were sixteen. You were a child." I step closer. "And you don't get to use an old man's oath as an excuse to run from me."
The word lands. Run. Rafe Ashford does not run from anything and we both know it.
Something in his composure cracks just enough for me to see what
