Chapter 2
“You’ve been clean for fifteen years and they’re still coming after you.”
“The old world doesn’t believe in clean. They believe in weakness.” His eyes came back to hers. “A man without family is a man without hostages. For fifteen years that was my protection. And then you moved next door.”
Nia thought about this.
She thought about it while Leo slept upstairs. She thought about it while Thor made a low sound that wasn’t quite a growl but meant something, and Jyn went to the window, checked something, and came back with the specific calm of a man who has processed a threat and determined it hasn’t escalated yet.
She thought about the footage. The hand in the bushes. The cloth.
She thought about the fact that they had been inside her house, that the text said weeks, that she had been sleeping under the same roof as people watching her and her son and the routines of her ordinary, chaotic, beloved life.
“Gigi,” she said. “And Marcus. And Zoe.”
“My team is already moving,” Jyn said. “They will be relocated tonight. Viper is coordinating.”
“The scary woman in all black.”
“She is very good at her job.”
“She reached for her jacket when I came over.”
“She was checking her phone.”
Nia looked at him.
“She was also checking whether you were a threat,” Jyn admitted.
“Was I?”
Something moved through his eyes. “More than you know,” he said, and he didn’t mean it as a threat.
Nia picked up the velvet box. The ring was extraordinary — not ostentatious, not the kind of thing that announced its own cost the way insecure money did. It was elegant and specific and it looked exactly like something someone would choose for a person they had been thinking about for three years.
“You really spent three years looking for me,” she said.
“I had investigators on four continents,” Jyn said. “You used a pseudonym for the hotel room. You paid cash for everything. You were very difficult to find.”
“I wasn’t hiding from you. I was just — private.”
“I know.” A pause. “It was one of the things I remembered about you.”
Nia set the box down. Not closed — open. Just set it down between them.
“I need to call Gigi,” she said.
