Chapter 84

Chapter 84

Jessica's voice died in her throat.

She opened her mouth, reached for a comeback—and found nothing. Her throat had gone bone-dry, every clever rebuttal evaporating before it could form.

Because he was right. He'd landed directly on the truth she'd been burying for months, and the violence of her denial had already given her away.

She couldn't argue. She couldn't win. So she did the only thing left to her—she shut her mouth, lifted her chin, and fixed him with a stare that was equal parts fury and humiliation. Red-rimmed eyes. Jaw set. Silence as her last act of defiance.

Michael's gaze drifted past her, making a slow, unhurried survey of her apartment.

It was clean. Neat. Everything arranged with the quiet precision of someone who'd had to fight for order in a chaotic world. But no amount of careful organization could disguise how small it was—how sparse. His eyes moved across the secondhand furniture and the narrow windows, and something flickered in them. Not cruelty, exactly. Just the careless disdain of a man who had never once had to make do.

"This is where you're living?"

The words landed like a slap.

This apartment—this small, imperfect, hard-won apartment—was the first thing she'd paid for entirely on her own after leaving his world behind. Her first paycheck from the new job had gone straight to the deposit. It was hers. The only space that was entirely, unambiguously hers.

And he'd dismissed it in six words.

"Where I live," she said, her voice shaking with barely contained rage, "is absolutely none of your business."

"Come back with me." His tone didn't shift into a question. It never did. "Back to the estate."

"Michael!" Her voice cracked, tears burning at the corners of her eyes. "Haven't you humiliated me enough?!"

But something unexpected happened then.

The cool mockery on his face—that carefully maintained armor of arrogance—slowly dissolved. The sharp lines of his expression softened into something she had never seen on him before. Something raw, and uncomfortably sincere.

He looked at her the way people only look at someone they're terrified of losing.

"Jessica." Each syllable was deliberate, his voice dropping to that low, resonant register that always made her pulse do something inconvenient. "I'm in love with you."

The world stopped.

She stared at him, certain she'd misheard. The words just sat there in the air between them, too enormous to make sense of.

But Michael didn't give her space to recover. His dark blue eyes held hers with an intensity that bordered on reckless—all that iron self-control stripped away, leaving nothing but naked certainty.

"If you say yes," he continued, each word falling like a stone into still water, "I'll tell everyone. Publicly. That you're mine."

"You—" She blinked, taking a step back. "Have you completely lost your mind?"

"No." His voice was quiet and absolute. He reached toward her face, and she flinched away on instinct. His hand stilled in midair for a moment, then fell back to his side. Something almost like self-deprecation crossed his face. "I'm just telling you the truth."

He paused, his gaze steady and unrelenting, as though he could see straight through every wall she'd built. "Sarah and I are over. What we had—it was a mistake from the beginning. All of it."

A mistake.

Jessica's chest went cold.

A mistake that had lasted months. A mistake that had let Sarah swan around his estate like she owned it, while Jessica had stood outside a bar watching them leave together, swallowing her dignity whole.

She bit down on her lower lip until she tasted iron, and forced the most unconvincing smile of her life.

"Chief Sullivan." The title came out like a closed door. "I think we both know this isn't a good idea. We're just—" She exhaled. "We don't work. We never would."

She knew it down to her bones. Between them lay something wider than just one terrible, complicated night—it was the gulf between their entire worlds. He was untouchable. Decorated. The kind of man who occupied a different gravitational field entirely.

She was someone who'd spent her whole life scrambling for solid ground.

"We don't work?" The furrow between his brows deepened. That commanding edge crept back into his voice. "Say that again."

Her heart lurched. She steadied herself.

"We don't work," she repeated, keeping her voice flat. "Please leave."

She pointed toward the door. Her hand was perfectly still. She was proud of that, at least.

All she wanted was for this suffocating conversation to end. For him to walk out that door and let her breathe again.

But Michael didn't move. He stood like something immovable—broad-shouldered and impossibly still, filling the small entryway in a way that left her nowhere to go.

"We don't work," he murmured, and there was something almost dangerous in the softness of it. His eyes found hers again. "Look at me, Jessica. Look at me and tell me you actually believe that."

She looked away.

Her jaw tightened. She said nothing.

"You can't." His voice was low, unhurried, and utterly certain. "You won't even look at me—because you know what I'd see if you did."

He stepped closer. Just one step. But the air between them compressed, and she could feel the warmth radiating off him, that particular gravity he'd always had over her and that she'd never once been able to explain away.

"Stop lying to yourself." The words were barely above a whisper, but they cut like a blade. "You feel something. You've always felt something. So why won't you let yourself have this? Why won't you let me have a chance?"

Jessica's chest caved inward.

Every careful layer she'd constructed over the past months—the professional distance, the deliberate indifference, the practiced cool—crumbled all at once, and she was left standing in the wreckage of it, unable to speak.

Did she feel nothing?

The question was almost laughable.

She thought of that night at the estate—his weight pressing her into the sheets, that kiss that had punished and undone her in equal measure, the heat of his skin, and the scent of him that had stayed with her for weeks no matter how hard she'd tried to scrub it from her memory.

She thought of the scar on his shoulder. The way he'd looked in that bar, glass in hand, something fractured behind his eyes. The moment on that rooftop when he'd moved without thinking—putting himself between her and a bullet.

Every single memory was a wound she'd never quite let heal.

And standing here now, with him looking at her like she was the only thing in the room that mattered, she felt every one of them tear open again.