Page 57 of Cruel Kiss

"Funny." She pushes off the rail. Her eyes flick to the kids, then back to me. "Take the children to the car," she says to Ronan. "This is a grown-up conversation."

"They stay with me," Ronan growls.

"Hm." Mercer looks at me instead. "Ms. Meadows. Or is it Mrs. Akov now?"

"None of your concern, I'm afraid."

She exhales through her nose. "You know what you just did in there? You want me to say it out loud in front of the kids, or you want to be smart about it?"

I turn from her. "Hayden, take your sister to look at the pigeons over there. Stay where I can see you."

Hayden, sensing something, herds Isabella toward the birds. She goes, but she keeps looking back, the box clutched to her chest.

Mercer waits until they're a few feet off. Then she turns the full weight of that stare on me.

"Spousal privilege," she says flatly. "That's what that was. You marry him, I can't compel you to testify. I can't touch anything you two say to each other now. My single best witness just walked into a clerk's office and made herself useless to me. On purpose." Her jaw flexes. "That's cute. That's real cute. Whose idea was it?"

"Mine," Ronan and I say at the same time.

She looks between us. "Right."

"You're the one who gave me my choices," I remind her. "Victim or criminal."

"That's right. Your only two choices."

"No." I lift my chin. "There was a third one. I just had to build it myself." I hold her eyes. "I'm real good at building things nobody else sees."

More tension ripples across her face. "You think you've won," she says, "but a piece of paper won't keep you safe from what's coming." She jerks her chin at Ronan without looking at him."He is who he is. And I am who I am. I've spent fifteen years exposing rot, and you two won't be any different. It'll take me longer. That's all a privilege wall does. It buys time." She leans in. "So enjoy your honeymoon. I'll see both of you again."

With that, she vanishes once again into the ether.

Ronan watches the corner she whisked around for a long moment. His face has gone somewhere cold, somewhere I don't like.

"She's good," he growls.

"That's what I'm worried about."

"She's not wrong, either. This buys time. It doesn't end the whole affair."

I turn to face him fully. "But we've got time now. You said so yourself. In there."

He looks down at me, ready to say something else. But before he can, Hayden hollers from the pigeons. "Mom! Can we go? Isabella's trying to catch one and it's not going great!"

Isabella is, in fact, chasing a very unbothered pigeon in a slow circle, the box tucked under one arm, offering the bird a formal medical consultation. The pigeon is not interested.

"Yeah," I call. "We can go."

Ronan holds out his hand. I look at it. The scarred knuckles. The old tattoos. The hand that shot a man on my stairs and made pancakes with Minnie Mouse ears and clasped an octopus charm around my wrist and never, not once, laid a finger on me that I didn't ask for.

I put mine in it.

"Take us home, Mr. Akov," I say.

His fingers close around mine, careful, then sure. "As you wish, Mrs.—" He stops himself. His mouth tips up at the corner. "Ms. Meadows."

"Mhmm. That's what I thought you were going to say."

But I'm smiling when I say it, and he knows it, and I let him see it, because we've got time now, and I'm done making myself small in front of a man who only ever wanted me big.