Chapter 99: After The Storm

Chapter 99: After The Storm
Amelia's POV

Grayson was through the front door before Morrison's people had finished securing the path.

He came in fast and stopped when he saw me standing and his whole body did something I'd only seen once before, that moment in the hospital after I'd been shot when he'd walked in and found me awake, where everything he'd been holding in the space between not knowing and knowing released all at once and left him briefly, completely human.

He crossed the room and put both hands on my face and looked at me like he was checking every part of me was still there and I let him because I understood it and I needed it too, and then he pulled me in and held on and I pressed my face into his shoulder and just breathed for a moment.

"I'm okay," I said into his jacket.

"I know," he said, and held on anyway.

Morrison came in behind him and his people moved through the house quietly and efficiently and Victoria went with them without a single word of protest, without theatre or final statements, just a woman who had run out of road and was walking the last of it with whatever dignity she had left, which was more than I expected and somehow made the whole thing sadder.

Thomas hadn't moved from the armchair.

He was watching Grayson and me with an expression I couldn't fully read, something between relief and something older and heavier, and when Grayson finally stepped back and turned to look at him the two of them regarded each other across the room in that complicated way of men who have every reason to distrust each other and no simple way to resolve it.

"Can you stand," Grayson said to Thomas, not unkindly, just practically.

"Yes," Thomas said, and proved it, pushing himself up slowly with the particular stiffness of someone who'd been sitting in one position for too long.

He was thinner than I remembered and there was something exhausted in the way he held himself that went beyond just physical, it was the exhaustion of a man who had been carrying the weight of his own choices for a very long time and was finally too tired to keep pretending otherwise.

He looked at me and I looked back at him and neither of us said anything for a moment because there was too much to say and this wasn't the right moment for any of it, so I just said "let's get you to a hospital" and he nodded and that was enough for now.

\---

The hospital kept him overnight for observation and I stayed for two hours and then Grayson made me go back to the safe house and rest because my blood pressure had been slightly elevated when they'd checked it at the scene and he was not going to let that go without comment, which was fair.

Elena was awake when we got back, sitting at the kitchen table with her laptop and three empty mugs and the particular wired energy of someone who had been running on worry for hours and hadn't found a way to come down yet.

She stood up when she saw us and I said "he's okay, she surrendered, it's done" and Elena sat back down and put her face flat on the table for a moment which was her way of processing large things, and then she lifted her head and said "okay" and that was that.

Grayson made tea and we sat at the kitchen table and he told Elena the short version of what had happened and she listened carefully and asked one or two sharp questions that showed she'd already been thinking through the legal implications of Victoria's surrender, which was very Elena, and then she said, "What happens to her now."

"She faces everything she did," Grayson said simply. "There's no negotiating around the evidence we have."

"Will she fight it," Elena asked.

"No," I said, and I knew that the same way I'd known she'd open the door when I knocked. "She's done fighting."

Elena looked at me and then nodded like she could hear something in the way I said it that told her more than the words did.

We sat there a while longer and the kettle was re-boiled twice and at some point the conversation slowed into comfortable silence and I leaned against Grayson's shoulder and he shifted to accommodate me without breaking his train of thought in the conversation he was having with Marcus on his phone, just made room for me automatically the way you do for someone you've stopped thinking of as separate from yourself.

I thought about my mother again, about that phone call she'd made to Victoria years ago, about the way she'd moved through the world quietly doing the right thing when no one was watching and never asking for credit, and I thought about two small heartbeats on a monitor screen, and I thought about how the night I walked into the wrong hotel room had set off a chain of events that had led here, to this kitchen table, to this man beside me, to all of it, and I couldn't find it in myself to wish a single part of it had gone differently.

Not even the hard parts.

Maybe especially not those.

"You should sleep," Grayson said, and I realised I'd gone quiet long enough that he'd noticed.

"In a minute," I said.

He looked down at me. "Now," he said, but gently.

"Okay," I said, and stood up, and Elena caught my hand as I passed and squeezed it once and let go and I squeezed back and went upstairs.

I got into bed and lay there and the house was quiet and outside the city was doing what cities did, just carrying on, completely indifferent to the fact that something enormous had just finished in a small house in Staten Island and the world had not in fact stopped to notice.

I was almost asleep when Grayson came upstairs and got into bed beside me and said quietly into the dark, "It's over."

"It's over," I agreed.

He was quiet for a moment and then he said, "I need to tell you something and I need you to be awake enough to hear it properly."

I opened my eyes. "I'm awake."

"I was going to do this differently," he said, and his voice was different now, lower, stripped of the practical efficient quality it usually had. "I had a whole thing planned. Proper setting, something you'd remember."

I turned to look at him in the dark and could just see the outline of his face.

"But I've been waiting for the right moment for weeks," he said, "and I've realised there isn't going to be a perfect moment, there's just this one, and you, and the fact that I don't want another day to go by where this hasn't been said properly."

He reached past me to the nightstand and I heard a small sound and then he put something in my hand and I looked down and even in the dark I could see the ring.

"Marry me," he said. "Properly. Not for the company, not for the press, not for any of the reasons we started this. Just because I want to spend the rest of my life in the same room as you."

I stared at the ring in my hand and felt something fill my chest so completely there was no room left for anything else and I said the only thing there was to say.

"Yes," I said. "Obviously yes."

And then my phone rang.

I looked at the screen and it was Thomas, calling from the hospital, and the timing was so completely Thomas Raine that I almost laughed, and I answered it because he was my father and he was alive and that still meant something even after everything, and his voice came through rough and tired and he said, "Amelia. I need to tell you something about your mother. Something I should have said years ago."