“Me as a fourteen-year-old? Yeah, I was pickpocketing on the streets of Bogotá, and also hiding from the murderous bastards trying to claim the bounty put on my head because I’d gutted the asshole who’d had my mother killed. Do you have any idea what I would have done to have someone—just one person—who saw me as more than trash? Who loved me enough to push me the way Clare pushed you? Your mother can’t undo the past. Your brother can’t undo the past, but the past is where the best parts of you still live.”

He reached for the door handle.

She said, “Stay. Stay a little longer.”

Debate tore through him, agonizing debate.

He said, “You’re fascinating and brilliant, you’re funny, beautiful, and fucking insane, and I love every bit of that. But I respect myself and you enough that I won’t be complicit in your self-destruction.” He turned the knob. “I’ll be up on the roof. I’ll stick around long enough to see the night through, and then I’ll go.”

“Please,” she said.

Her voice had a tinge of desperation.

He stood there with the door open a crack.

She said, “You’re right.”

His shoulders sagged. With his back still to her, he said, “See, I want to believe you mean that, but I’ve already been on the receiving end of your play-pretend, and I can’t unknow what that’s like. You can say the words, act the act, and to me, it’ll still be you trying to keep from losing something just because you don’t want your brother to have it.”

She said, “I’m fucking hard to deal with, Chris, I know.

“And this thing with me and John, I don’t always understand it myself. But I can accept, okay? I accept that what he did in Prague was because he didn’t trust that I loved him enough to not sabotage him. And it wasn’t true, you know. At the time it wasn’t. But he couldn’t know, because I never let him. And if I can accept that, and let it go, then it means there’s hope I’ll eventually accept and let go of the rest.”

Holden glanced at her, and that one small movement splintered into several—a double take, a door slam, a roll toward the center of the room, a look.

He’d stay because he didn’t exactly have a choice right now.

Jill tossed him the X-Caliber.

He snatched it, looked at it, looked at her.

Heartbeats inflated into minutes.

“Okay,” he said. “Okay.”

CHAPTER 31

CHAPTER 31

JILL