Chapter 15: The Charity Event

## Emily

December 14th, 2021

The dress was green.

Not a quiet green — not sage or olive or any of the muted, apologetic greens that hid behind other colours and hoped nobody would notice them. This was emerald. Vivid. The kind of green that demanded attention and then stared you down when you gave it, daring you to look away.

Ash had picked it out. Or rather, Ash had dragged me to a boutique downtown, shoved me into a dressing room with seven options, and informed me that I was attending Calloway University's Winter Charity Gala whether I wanted to or not, and I was going to look like "someone who has decided to rejoin the living, which, frankly, is long overdue."

"I don't go to galas," I'd said through the dressing room curtain.

"You also didn't go to parties, didn't eat proper meals, didn't leave your apartment, and didn't fall in love with your professor, and yet here we are."

"She makes a point," Syn called from the bench where she was reviewing fabric swatches for her and Ash's new curtains with the meticulous attention of a woman who understood that a home was built one deliberate choice at a time.

The emerald dress won. Not because it was the prettiest — though it was — but because when I put it on and looked at myself in the mirror, I didn't recognize the person looking back. She was thin. She had shadows under her eyes. She had scars on her wrists that the long sleeves almost covered and a bruise on her cheekbone that makeup had reduced to a whisper.

But she was standing straight. Her chin was up. Her eyes — blue, the same blue as always — had something in them that hadn't been there six months ago. Not light, exactly. Not yet. But the shadow of light. The echo of it. The space where light might go if it was given permission.

"That's the one," Ash said, peering around the curtain. "Grey is going to lose his entire mind."

---

The gala was held in the Calloway ballroom — a wood-paneled relic from the university's founding era, all chandeliers and wainscoting and the particular pretension of institutions that believed mahogany was a personality. Students, faculty, donors, and the university president milled about in formal wear, making the kind of conversation that existed solely to fill silence with the appearance of substance.

Grey was already there when I arrived with Ash and Syn. He was standing near the bar in a black suit — properly tailored, sharp-shouldered, the kind of suit that turned heads and raised questions about the salary of a creative writing professor. His tie was dark green.

The same green as my dress.

I hadn't told him what I was wearing. He hadn't asked. But Jeremy — who apparently functioned as Grey's intelligence network, personal assistant, and fashion consultant — had texted Ash, and Ash had texted back a photo, and the conspiracy had resulted in a coordinated colour scheme that I would have found romantic if it weren't also mildly unsettling.

He saw me from across the room. I watched his eyes track from the door to Ash to Syn to me, and when they landed, his entire body changed. Not obviously — Grey didn't do obvious. But his shoulders dropped a fraction. His jaw relaxed. The almost-smile appeared and, for the first time in my observation, tipped over into an actual smile.

Small. Private. A smile meant for one person.

I crossed the room. He met me halfway.

"You look—" He stopped. Recalibrated. The man who had a vocabulary for everything — collapsing stars and flooding Niles and the philosophical weight of faith — was searching for a word.

"Like someone who has decided to rejoin the living?" I offered.

"Like someone who never left." He took my hand. Lifted it to his lips. Pressed a kiss to my knuckles with a formality that was both old-fashioned and devastating. "You're extraordinary."

"You're biased."

"Thoroughly."

We moved through the gala together. Not as professor and student — that performance had ended with the semester, with Diamond's network, with the careful dismantling of every pretense that had allowed us to exist in the same orbit. We moved as partners. As the thing we were, undisguised, in front of the university and its donors and its mahogany-paneled expectations.

Some people stared. Let them.

Ash and Syn danced. Cam and Katelyn appeared, slightly drunk, enormously supportive. My novel had reached 180 pages and word had spread through the creative writing department that Emily Glass — the quiet one, the one who sat in the back row and never spoke — was writing something that made professors cry.

I found Grey by the bar during a lull, his jacket unbuttoned, a glass of whiskey in his hand that he wasn't drinking. He was watching the room with that habitual awareness — scanning, assessing, cataloguing threats that didn't exist in a university ballroom but that his body couldn't stop looking for.

"You're surveilling the catering staff," I said.

"The new server by the door has a suspicious bulge in his left pocket."

"That's his phone."

"Or a knife."

"It's his phone, Grey."

He almost smiled. "Probably."

I leaned against the bar beside him. Our shoulders touched. The point of contact was warm and electric and I wanted to expand it — to press into him, to fold myself against his side, to exist in the space where his cologne and his warmth created a microclimate that felt like home.

"There's something I need to tell you," he said.

My stomach tightened. The last time he'd said those words, he'd told me about The Family, about Malachi, about the guns and the missions and the part of his life that existed in the dark. I braced.

"Malachi is here."

I blinked. "Here? At the gala?"

"He arrived this afternoon. He wanted to meet you."

"The head of your criminal organization wants to meet me. At a charity event."

"Malachi appreciates irony."

Before I could respond, a man appeared at Grey's elbow. Not appeared — materialized, with the silent grace of someone who had spent decades entering rooms without being noticed and was now choosing to be noticed, which was infinitely more unsettling.

He was older than I expected. Late sixties, maybe. A bald head that gleamed under the chandeliers, a neatly trimmed beard, and eyes that were the bluest I'd ever seen — a deep, oceanic blue that reminded me, painfully, of Charlie's eyes in certain light. He was wearing a three-piece suit in charcoal with a pocket square in emerald green, and his smile was the warmest thing in the room.

"So," he said, extending a hand. "This is the famous Emily."

His voice was like aged wood — rich, solid, the kind of voice that made you want to sit down and listen to stories that lasted for hours. There was a faint accent underneath the English — European, I thought, but smoothed by years of practice into something that belonged everywhere and nowhere.

"Emily Glass," I said, taking his hand. His grip was firm but careful. The handshake of a man who understood the difference between strength and gentleness and chose both.

"Malachi," he said. Simply. No last name. No title. "I have heard a great deal about you. Greyson has been... unusually verbose."

"Greyson is never verbose."

"Exactly." His eyes twinkled. Actually twinkled, the way eyes did in fairy tales and nowhere else. "The fact that he has been speaks volumes about you, my dear."

I liked him immediately. Not cautiously, not strategically — immediately, with the instinctive trust that I'd learned, through years of reading people for threats, to recognize as rare and reliable. Malachi radiated a specific kind of energy: the energy of a man who had done terrible things and used the guilt to fuel extraordinary goodness.

"I understand you're writing a novel," he said. "About loss and recovery."

"About a girl who loses her sister and has to learn who she is without her."

"And is she learning?"

I glanced at Grey. At this man who had given me paper roses and grounding techniques and a cat named after the brightest star in the sky. "She's getting there."

Malachi smiled. It transformed his face — the lines around his eyes deepened, his whole expression opened, and for a moment he looked not like the head of a criminal organization but like someone's grandfather, the kind who kept butterscotch in his pockets and told stories about the war.

"Greyson," Malachi said, turning to Grey with the casual authority of a man who expected to be listened to. "Walk with me."

They stepped away. I watched them cross the ballroom — the tall, sharp-edged younger man and the compact, warm-eyed older one — and disappear through a door that led to the university gardens.

Ash appeared at my side. "Was that him? The crime boss?"

"He has a pocket square."

"Crime bosses can't have pocket squares?"

"He looked like someone's grandpa."

"Someone's grandpa who controls a network of assassins and intelligence operatives."

"Yes. But a very nice grandpa."

---

## Grey

December 14th, 2021 — 9:47 PM

The garden was cold. December cold. The kind that cut through suit fabric and reminded you that comfort was a temporary state.

Malachi didn't seem to notice. He walked the gravel path between dormant rose bushes with his hands clasped behind his back and his breath forming clouds that dissolved the moment they formed.

"She's remarkable," he said.

"I know."

"She's also in danger."

I stopped walking. "Louis Nelson is dead."

"Louis Nelson is dead. Louis Nelson's network is not." Malachi turned to face me. The garden lights cast his shadow long across the gravel, a dark shape that extended further than the man who cast it. "Azrael intercepted communications last week. Someone within Nelson's former operation has been reaching out to contacts. Rebuilding. The target is still you, Greyson, but the method has changed. They're not coming for Emily again — they're coming for you directly. And they're patient."

"Who?"

"We don't know yet. Azrael is working it. But until we do, the situation is fluid. And fluid situations are the ones where people get hurt."

I absorbed this. Processed it with the clinical detachment that Malachi had trained into me — assess the threat, calculate the risk, determine the optimal course of action. The training was effective. It had kept me alive for sixteen years.

But it didn't account for Emily.

The training said: distance yourself. Cut the connection. Remove the vulnerability. Go dark, go mobile, become the weapon instead of the target.

Everything else said: no.

"What do you need?" I asked.

"I need you to come in. Not permanently — a mission. Azrael and I have identified Nelson's successor. He's operating out of Europe. We need to find him, and we need to end this before it circles back to her."

"How long?"

"Unknown. Weeks, possibly months. Possibly longer."

The word "months" landed on my chest like a stone.

"And Emily?"

"Jeremy and Matthew will stay. They'll watch over her. She'll be as safe as we can make her without you here."

"That's not safe enough."

"No. It's not. But it's the best option among a collection of bad options, and you know that." Malachi studied me. His blue eyes were gentle but immovable. "Greyson. You found her in a concrete room. You carried her out. You kissed her scars and held her while she cried and you are the reason she is standing in that ballroom wearing an emerald dress and looking like someone who has decided to live. But the threat to her is you. As long as Nelson's people are active, she is a target. The only way to remove the target is to remove the threat."

He was right. He was always right. That was the most infuriating thing about Malachi — his rightness was absolute, empirical, verified by decades of experience and a track record of decisions that had kept every member of The Family alive through situations that should have killed them.

"When?" I asked.

"December 21st. One week."

One week with Emily. And then darkness. Separation. The mission — the endless, grinding, necessary work of hunting men through unfamiliar cities and sleeping in places without names and wondering, every minute of every day, whether the girl with the paper roses and the stuffed bear and the wire in her chest was still singing.

"I'll tell her tonight," I said.

"Be gentle."

"I'm always gentle with her."

"I know." Malachi placed his hand on my shoulder. The weight of it — physical, emotional, paternal — was the heaviest thing in the garden. "That's why I worry."

He walked back inside. I stood in the garden among the dormant roses — the real ones, thorned and sleeping, waiting for spring — and I thought about collapsing stars and burning debris and the magnificent, terrible cost of loving someone in a world that punished love.

Then I went back inside to find Emily.

She was on the dance floor with Ash. Not really dancing — swaying, mostly, laughing at something Ash had said, her head tipped back and her emerald dress catching the chandelier light and turning it into something that looked like joy.

I watched her for a long time.

Then I crossed the room and took her hand and pulled her close, and we danced — slowly, badly, to music that was too fast for what we were doing — and she looked up at me with those blue eyes and said, "You look like you're about to tell me something terrible."

"Not terrible. Necessary."

"In my experience, those are the same thing."

I told her. In the middle of the dance floor, with Ash and Syn twenty feet away and Malachi watching from the bar and the university president giving a speech about charitable giving that nobody was listening to. I told her about the mission. About Louis Nelson's successor. About the weeks or months of separation that would begin in one week.

She didn't cry. She didn't argue. She held my hand and looked at me with an expression that I had never seen on another human face — a combination of love and fear and fury and the absolute, unshakable refusal to let any of those things win.

"You'll come back," she said. Not a question.

"I'll come back."

"Promise me."

"I promise."

"Grey." Her hand tightened on mine. "I've already lost everyone. My mom. Charlie. Jordan, in a different way. I can't — I won't —" She stopped. Breathed. Regrouped. The resilience of a woman who had been to the bathroom floor and the concrete room and the other side of grief and had decided, each time, to stay. "Come back to me. Whatever it takes. Whoever you have to be. Come back."

"I will come back to you," I said, and I meant it with every atom of my being, with the same certainty that I meant the paper roses and the grounding techniques and the fifteen letters in the leather notebook that she still hadn't read.

"I will always come back to you."

She kissed me. In front of everyone. In front of the chandeliers and the mahogany and the university president. A kiss that tasted like champagne and tears and the ferocious, unstoppable will of a girl who had been through hell and was still, impossibly, standing.

Ash cheered. Malachi smiled. The university president paused his speech.

And the wire — my wire, the one I'd stopped believing I had, the one that had been dead since a sixteen-year-old boy with blood on his hands was brought to a man in a fedora and told that he was home now — hummed.

For the first time.

Because of her.