Page 131 of Cruel Kiss

My exit.

My out.

The thing I clung to for months as proof that I could always leave.

"This was the escape clause," I whisper, almost to myself. "The whole time. I kept it because it meant I could always get out. Hand it back and you'd disappear, no follow-up, no chance encounter at my coffee shop dressed up as fate. That was the deal."

"You pulled the trigger. You still can, you know. The deal is still valid."

But I'm shaking my head before he's even finished talking. "I don't need an out anymore." I hold the napkin to the little flame of his lighter. It catches faster than the envelope did, thin and dry, and I watch his handwriting on it go up in smoke. His promise and my escape, both of them, gone in the same fire on the same step.

"There. Now, neither one of us has a way out. We're stuck."

He grins. "I like the sound of that."

The ash settles. The lighter clicks shut. It's full dark now and the streetlight throws the two of us into gold and shadow. I think about all the nights I sat on these steps by myself, and how none of them ever felt like this.

He turns to me. He puts his hand against the side of my face, his thumb at the corner of my mouth, the way he did in the dark hallway when he wouldn't let himself do anything else.

"You're beautiful, Calista Meadows," he rasps.

He's said it a hundred times. In text messages every morning. In the water of a tank hanging off the edge of a building. On his knees on my stoop. Against the glass of his apartment with the whole city behind me.

I've deflected it every single time.The blue light's forgiving. Stop. You'll get carpal tunnel.Every time, I rebuffed it, because I didn't believe him.

Not this time.

"I know," I say.

His breath catches. He waits.

"I know," I say again, and it's true, it's finally true. The engine of my self-worth has been running in the background all along and it just finished calculating. "Now, I do."

He kisses me on the front steps under the streetlight, slow. I feel it everywhere, head to toe, like shimmering fire racing through my veins. I'd kiss him like this for hours if he'd let me, necking in the shadows like teenagers. In fact, that's exactly what I intend to do.

But then he pulls away.

"I got you a present," he says.

I laugh in confusion. "You got me apresent?We just burned our whole tragic history off the front steps, and you got, what, a bouquet of daisies for the occasion?"

"Something a little more thoughtful than that. It's inside." He stands and pulls me up with him. "Come on."

"Ronan—"

"Trust me."

Okay, fine. I guess I will.

He leads me inside past the vault-heavy door and up the stairs. I'm confused on where he's taking me, especially when he pulls me into the master bathroom.

It's only when we stop in the doorway that I realize what he's done.

There's a box leaned against the wall. And beside it, tools laid out neat on a towel—a level, a drill, a little baggie of anchors and screws.

"It's a mirror," I say.

"Correct." He crouches and pulls the packing away, and there it is—not the old one he stole, not the one he crated in Red Hook and hung back overnight. A new one. Bigger. A beautiful frame, gilded and hand-crafted. "You broke the old one to pieces. Which I respected, for the record. But I thought maybe this time, instead of me deciding what glass you get to have?—"