Chapter 85 WHAT HE OWES

Chapter 85 WHAT HE OWES
Dominic's POV

I let Roan in and closed the door and we sat across from each other and I looked at him and he looked back at me and neither of us said anything for a moment.

"Tell me," I said.

"When you left my faction," Roan said, "you made me a promise. You said that whatever came after, whatever world you built for yourself, if I ever came to you needing protection you would give it. No questions, no conditions."

"I remember," I said.

"I've never called it in," he said. "Thirty years and I've never once used it. I handled everything myself, rebuilt what I could, protected my own network. I never asked you for anything."

"I know that," I said.

"I'm calling it in now," he said. "Not to ask you to protect me. To ask you to stand down and let me protect myself. That's what I want. That's the debt repaid."

I sat there and turned it over and the problem was it was logical and the problem was I didn't care about logic right now and the problem was I had spent thirty years knowing this conversation was somewhere in the future and I still wasn't ready for it.

"What you're asking me to give up is not the same as protection," I said.

"It's exactly the same," Roan said. "You want to keep me here because it's safer for you emotionally. That's not protection. That's possession."

That landed hard and I didn't respond because he wasn't wrong.

"I've made peace with what I'm choosing," he said. "I need you to make peace with it too."

I looked at him for a long moment and then I got up and went to the bedroom and Ava was awake, sitting up against the headboard with her knees pulled up and her eyes on the door, and I sat on the edge of the bed and she didn't say anything and I didn't say anything and after a moment she moved over and I lay down and she curled against my side and put her hand flat on my chest.

"Tell me," she said quietly.

So I did. All of it. The promise I'd made when I left, the thirty years of it sitting between us unspoken, what Roan was asking for and why refusing it would be wrong and why I still wanted to refuse it.

Ava listened the whole time without interrupting and when I finished she was quiet for a moment and then she said, "so you've been carrying this promise for thirty years and he's never used it once."

"No," I said.

"And now he wants to use it not to ask you for something but to give you permission to let him go," she said.

"Yes," I said.

She was quiet again and then she said, "that's not a debt anymore. That's a gift."

I looked at the ceiling and felt the thing in my chest shift slightly, not dissolve, just shift into a shape I could breathe around.

"I don't want to lose him," I said.

"I know," she said.

"He made me," I said. "Every version of me that exists came from what he taught me."

"I know that too," she said, and pressed her face to my shoulder and stayed there.

We lay like that for a long time and neither of us slept and at some point she lifted her head and looked at me and kissed me slowly, no urgency in it, just her mouth on mine and her hand still flat on my chest and the bond between us doing that thing it did sometimes where it felt less like a thread and more like warmth that started from the inside.

I pulled her closer and she came willingly and we didn't rush anything, just stayed close in the dark while the hotel went quiet around us and I let myself feel all of it, the grief of what was coming and the certainty of what I had and the difference between the two.

When I finally slept it was with her face against my neck and her breathing slow and even and Roan's words still somewhere in the back of everything, not resolved, but held.

\---

Morning came fast.

Ava was already up when I woke, sitting at the small table by the window with coffee and her phone and she looked at me when I sat up and said, "Roan knocked at six. He said he'll wait until noon for your answer."

I nodded and got up and showered and dressed and was on my second coffee when Adrian's door opened down the corridor and he came out and looked at both of us and I could see from his face that he'd slept badly.

"She's downstairs," he said. "My sister. She got here an hour ago."

He said it quietly, not with worry exactly, but with something unsettled in it that I hadn't heard from Adrian before, not in twenty years, and I looked at him and waited.

"She said someone contacted her before she came," he said. "Told her I was in danger and that she needed to get to New York. She doesn't know who it was." He held up his phone and showed me the screen. "I traced the number this morning."

I looked at the screen and the trace result was on it and I recognized the network prefix immediately.

"That's Kade's network," I said.

"Yes," Adrian said, and his jaw was tight. "He used my sister to get to me.”