Page 74 of The Rook’s Obsession

I’m three blocks away from the restaurant when I feel it.

The awareness is instinctive. A change in the air behind me. A presence at the edge of my peripheral vision that matches my pace a half beat too precisely to be coincidence. Someone is following me.

My training kicks in before my brain does. I catalog without turning around. A single person, male, judging by the weight of the footsteps. He’s maintaining a consistent distance—close enough to keep visual contact, far enough away to avoid detection by anyone who isn’t me.

But I’m me.

I angle toward a shopfront with a wide glass window and let my gaze drift casually across the reflection. Dark hair. The outline of a jacket I’ve seen a hundred times. A stride I could identify blindfolded, because I’ve fallen asleep listening to it cross a room.

It’s Nick.

My heart has no right to do what it does. It doesn’t spike with alarm or go cold with anger. It lifts. Despite everything. Despite three days of silence and the wall I’ve built, and the lies I’ve been telling myself about missions and objectives.

I keep walking without speeding up or turning around. I let him follow me, the way I let him follow me in Prague all those months ago, when I was a different woman who thought she had everything figured out.

At the next window, I look again. He’s closer this time. And in his right hand, held low against his thigh and barely visible, is something small. A syringe.

Something cold and practical inside me registers the threat. The same syringe, the same play as Prague. He’s going to sedate me. He’s going to take me now the way he took me then, because I won’t go willingly, and he knows it, and he’s decided he doesn’t care.

I should be furious. Every rational part of me says I should spin around and disarm him, and break his wrist for even thinking about it. A month ago, I would have. I would’ve put the man on the ground without hesitating.

But then my heart has to go and do it again. That stupid, traitorous lift.

Because this is Nick. The man who doesn’t give up. Who doesn’t let go. I told him without saying a word to sit on the other side of my wall and wait, and he waited. But now he’s done waiting.

He’s coming for me. He will always come for me. That’s not a strategy or a mission. It’s just him. It’s who he is. He’s never going to stop. I don’t want him to either.

I slow my pace. Not enough for him to notice—or maybe enough, because he notices everything, doesn’t he? My hand relaxes at my side. My shoulders drop a fraction of an inch.

I keep walking, and I let him close the distance.

The footsteps behind me get closer. Ten feet, eight, five. I can now hear his breathing, controlled and deliberate. I feel the warmth of him at my back.

But I don’t turn around. I don’t fight. I only close my eyes.

The needle pricks the side of my neck, quick and precise, and immediately the world starts to soften at the edges. My knees loosen. My vision blurs. His arm is around my waist before I can sway, catching me, holding me against him with the practiced ease of a man who has done this before.

“I’ve got you,” he murmurs against my hair.

This time, I know. The last thing I feel before everything goes dark is his heartbeat against my back, steady and sure. The last thought I have is that Lucia was right.

I should have gone to him sooner.

NICK

Two hours and fourteen minutes. That’s how long Ivy is out. I know because I keep track while sitting in the seat across from her on the jet with my elbows on my knees and my eyes on her face, watching for the first sign of movement.

I used zip ties this time. Her wrists are secured to the armrests of her seat. Not tight enough to cut into her skin, but tight enough she won’t be free before I see it coming. I remember what happened the last time she woke up restrained. I’d rather not end up half-blind again.

We’re somewhere over the Alps by now. Liam arranged the flight within hours of my call—no questions beyond the ones that mattered, no judgment in his voice when I told him what I was planning. All he said was, “Bring her home.”

I spent the past three days watching her from a distance. Following her through Milan, keeping far enough away that she wouldn’t spot me but close enough that I could reach her if anything happened. Three days of standing on street corners and sitting in parked. I gave up the safe house when she didn’t come back to it and couldn’t bring myself to leave the city without her.

Three days of telling myself I was giving her space, when the truth is I was terrified.

Not of losing her. I’ve already lost her twice—once when she was fifteen and the world exploded, once on that cobblestone street when she turned the corner without looking back. I’ve survived losing her. I know what it feels like. I know the hollow feeling it leaves behind.

What terrified me was the possibility she was right. That the mission was the mission, and everything else was something I built in my own head because I needed it to be real. That I’d spent weeks falling in love with a woman who was never falling back, who was only tolerating my presence because I was useful. A woman who walked away the moment she no longer needed me because there was nothing left to stay for.