Chapter 2 - What He Knew and When
Declan was allowed inside twenty minutes later.
Not because he demanded it.
Because Wren asked.
Elena remained near the monitor. The door stayed open. A hospital security officer stood within sight.
Declan noticed every condition.
He accepted them without comment.
For several seconds, he looked at Wren as if he had reached the end of a road and discovered he had no right to enter the house waiting there.
Then his eyes moved to her stomach.
“Her?”
Wren looked away.
“Yes.”
His breath left him.
A small sound.
Almost nothing.
It hurt to hear it.
“Don’t make this beautiful,” she said.
He lowered his gaze.
“I wasn’t going to.”
“Start with how you found me.”
He pulled a chair toward the wall rather than toward her bed.
“A woman who manages a diner in Farmington called a number she’d been given.”
Wren went still.
“Rosa?”
“She was told you had people looking for you. She thought it was a family matter.”
“Who told her?”
“One of my investigators.”
Wren stared at him.
“You put strangers around me.”
“Yes.”
“Without speaking to me.”
“Yes.”
The honesty made her angrier.
“You watched me work double shifts.”
His expression changed.
“I received reports that you were safe. I didn’t receive every detail.”
“You could have.”
“Yes.”
“Why didn’t you come?”
Declan rubbed his thumb against a scar on his hand.
“Because I finally understood you were running from me.”
The room seemed quieter.
“I thought if I appeared, you’d run again. Somewhere my people couldn’t reach before Victor’s did.”
Wren recognized the name.
Victor Rourke.
Declan’s uncle.
He had kissed her hand at a charity dinner and called her refreshing, as though she were something served between courses.
“Why would Victor want me?”
Declan looked toward Elena.
Wren caught it.
“No,” she said. “You don’t get privacy from the people keeping me alive.”
He turned back.
“You saw what happened in the garage. Victor thinks you may also have seen a ledger taken from the man who died.”
“I didn’t.”
“I know.”
“How?”
“Because if you’d known what was in it, you would have gone to the authorities.”
She almost laughed.
“You don’t know what I would have done.”
“No,” he said quietly. “I don’t.”
For the first time, he looked exhausted enough to be ordinary.
Wren hated noticing.
She hated remembering the man who had sat on a kitchen floor eating cereal from a coffee mug while she cried over a failed exam.
“Did you shoot him?”
The question changed the room.
Elena remained still beside the monitor.
Declan’s face lost whatever softness had entered it.
“Yes.”
There it was.
No misunderstanding.
No convenient stranger behind a pillar.
The sound she had heard had come from the gun she had seen in his hand.
Wren swallowed.
“Then why are you sitting here?”
“Because there are things you didn’t see.”
“Everybody says that.”
“I know.”
“Was he threatening you?”
“At the moment I fired, yes.”
She looked at him.
“He was on his knees.”
“He reached for a weapon.”
Wren remembered rain blowing through the open ramp.
Blood on the man’s chin.
Declan adjusting his cufflink afterward.
“I didn’t see a weapon.”
“You were behind a concrete pillar near the service elevator.”
Her blood chilled.
“You saw me?”
“No. Security footage showed you later.”
“And you let me think—”
“I didn’t know what you thought. By morning, you were gone.”
Another contraction rose.
She reached for the rail.
Declan moved half an inch, then stopped himself.
“May I?”
Wren understood what he meant.
His hand.
Something familiar to hold while the pain made strangers of everything.
“No.”
He nodded.
Elena came closer instead.
When the contraction passed, Wren was crying.
Not from pain alone.
Declan looked at the floor.
“I’m not asking you to accept my account tonight. Ortiz has the footage. She has the records. There’s an attorney who can explain what’s been reviewed.”
“And the blood on his face?”
Silence.
That silence told her more than his explanation.
Declan lifted his eyes.
“My men hurt him before you arrived.”
“On your orders?”
He held her gaze.
“Yes.”
Wren’s hand moved across her stomach.
There was no relief clean enough to stand on.
Perhaps he had not executed a helpless man.
He had still been the man who decided another person could be beaten in a garage.
Outside, a radio crackled.
Declan stood.
“I’ll answer everything. But you don’t owe me a conversation while you’re in labor.”
He reached the doorway before she spoke.
“Did you know about her?”
He turned.
“No.”
His voice broke on the smallest word.
“No, Wren. I didn’t know.”
May you like
She believed that.
It was the first thing about him she had believed without fear in eight months.
