“I’m terrified,” she said. She stepped forward, well inside his personal space, until her chest touched his. He pulled back, back to the closed door, and she didn’t pursue.

Instead, her hands went up, fingers pinching at the very edges of his shirt.

“Please,” she said. “You. My parents. My brother. This is the only way I get anything close to a happy ending.”

“You need to come with me. We’ll run. There’s going to be this war, anyway, and—”

She was already shaking her head.

“I can’t leave them. I lost everything. My family lost everything. If they lost me too? If I lost them? I couldn’t ever.”

“This place will destroy you.”

“Not if—not if we get that house on the outskirts. We’ll be far enough away, we won’t have a lot of involvement. Please. I see the way you look at me. I’m not dumb.”

“I can’t.”

“If you want me barefoot and in the kitchen, I can—”

Rain made a face, shook his head, looked away.

“No. I didn’t think you would. But…”

Her presence was overwhelming enough he worried he might do something stupid. Every look he’d averted, every thought he hadn’t completed, every time he’d jacked off and thought of her, but hadn’t ever been able to let himself imagine a scenario to go along with her, they were things that had been left incomplete, like a hole inside of him. Love with a missing letter.

She was, standing before him, promising that.

“That you’d suggest that… isn’t that the destruction I just talked about? That’s not you. That’s this fucking place.”

Mama Mather’s disconnected presence was like bird’s wings against the exterior of the house, rustling.

Erin was barely able to speak and barely audible as she said, “You want this. I want this.”

“Yeah.”

“Give me my family, Rain. Be my family.”

“It would destroy you,” he said.

She shook her head.

“And it would destroy me. It’s the one thing I can’t do.”

She went very still.

“I love you, Rain. I really think I do. It took me hours sitting in here and considering possibilities, but I do love you.”

“I love you too.”

“Don’t say that. Not when you’re also saying no, when they’ll marry me off to someone else instead.”

“You need to leave.”

“I can’t.”

“You need to leave. You can go. While everything’s going to pieces, I can get your parents and brother. The team will. We’ll kidnap them, we’ll get them out.”

He could see the glimmer on her face. The hope.

He could see it die.

“If it failed, I’d lose them. Unequivocally,” she said. “I can’t risk it.”

“Erin—”

“I can’t!” she raised her voice.

The murmur of discussion downstairs grew quieter. People were listening now.