Glass exploded across the marble floor of the winter room. And for one frozen second, nobody breathed.
Eloise Price was on her knees behind an overturned banquet table, her palms pressed flat against cold stone, her heart slamming so hard she could feel it in her teeth.
Somewhere above her, wood splintered. A chandelier swung on its chain, throwing broken light across the ceiling like something out of a nightmare she hadn’t agreed to have.
Six hours. That was the number running through her head, though she couldn’t have said why yet, couldn’t have explained how a woman who spent her nights shelving paperbacks and wiping coffee rings off library copies had ended up crouched in a bulletproof stairwell of thought, praying to a god she hadn’t spoken to since her father’s funeral.
Beside her, close enough that she could feel the heat coming off him even through his ruined dinner jacket, Roman Calder pressed two fingers to his ear and murmured something low and lethal into a hidden microphone.
His voice didn’t shake. His hands didn’t shake. Only his eyes did, and only when they landed on her.
“Stay down,” he said. Not a request. Never a request from him, not really, not even now.
“Yeah,” Eloise breathed. “I got that memo about four bullets ago.” A ghost of something crossed his face, not quite a smile, something that lived in the same neighborhood as one.
Outside, past the frosted windows of the old hotel, snow kept falling as if none of this were happening, as if Christmas Eve in Salt Lake City were still just twinkling lights and carolers and families walking home with their arms full of wrapped boxes.
Inside, the winter room had become something else entirely, and Eloise understood, with a clarity that felt almost peaceful, that she had six hours left before someone decided whether she lived to see Christmas morning.
She would think about it later, assuming there was a later, and she would realize that the whole impossible mess had started 3 weeks earlier with something as small and stupid as a single empty chair.
3 weeks before any of that, Elouan Price’s biggest problem in life had been a returned paperback with a coffee ring shaped suspiciously like a smiley face.
She worked the night shift at Winter and Pine Books, a narrow crooked little store two blocks off downtown, wedged between a shuttered print shop and a bakery that always smelled like cinnamon no matter the season.
She’d taken the job 4 years earlier back when her father was still alive to tease her about smelling like old paper, and she’d stayed on after he passed because the store had become the one place in the city that still felt like something solid under her feet.
Her mother had left when Elouan was young enough that the memory came in fragments, more perfume than face.
Her father raised her and her younger sister Marisol mostly alone, mostly with love, mostly with terrible cooking and worse jokes.
And when the cancer took him 3 winters back, it had taken something in Elouan, too, some quiet certainty that the people you loved got to stay.
Marisol was getting married in the spring. She was spending this Christmas Eve with her fiance’s family in Park City, eating prime rib in a house with a real fireplace and real snow globes, and presumably a real sense of belonging somewhere.
Elouan had told her to go, had insisted, had smiled the whole time she said it.
She was 26 years old, and she had gotten disturbingly good at smiling through things.
That particular night, the store closed at 7:00 an hour early for the holiday, and Elouan took her time locking up, straightening the little wooden shelf of staff picks, turning off the fairy lights strung along the front window, one bulb at a time like she was tucking the place in for the night.
She had leftover soup waiting for her in a plastic container in her apartment and a couch and a rerun of some movie she’d already seen four times.
And that, she had decided somewhere around Thanksgiving, would be enough. She pulled her coat tighter and stepped out into the cold.
Downtown Salt Lake City on Christmas Eve was its own kind of beautiful. String lights zigzagging over Main Street, a brass quartet playing somewhere she couldn’t quite locate.
The Wasatch Mountains standing dark and enormous at the edge of everything like they were keeping watch.
Families rushed past her in both directions, arms loaded with shopping bags, cheeks red from the cold, laughing about things Elara couldn’t hear and didn’t need to.
She decided to walk instead of catching the bus. The cold felt honest, at least.
The cold didn’t pretend to be anything other than what it was. She was three blocks from her apartment when she passed the Cliff Rose Hotel.
A beautiful old stone building with a doorman in a long wool coat and windows glowing amber against the dark.
Through the tall glass of the ground floor restaurant, The Winter Room, its name spelled out in gold script above the entrance, she could see white tablecloths, candlelight, the whole soft glow of people having somewhere warm to be.
And one table where nobody was smiling at all. A man sat alone near the back, half shadowed by a heavy velvet curtain.
Dressed in a black suit that fit him the way expensive things fit people who never had to think about money.
He wasn’t looking at his phone. He wasn’t touching the wine in front of him.
He was simply sitting, spine straight, jaw tight, staring at nothing the way people stared when the nothing was actually something enormous.
Elara almost kept walking. She told herself later that she really had almost kept walking.
That some sane, self-preserving part of her brain had genuinely tried. Then she noticed the second place setting.
A full plate, untouched. Silverware, polished and waiting. A second wine glass, empty, positioned across from him like the ghost of someone who was never going to arrive.
Something about it tugged at a rib low in her chest, somewhere near the place where grief lived when it had nowhere better to go.
She didn’t decide to walk inside so much as her feet simply started moving, and by the time her brain caught up with her body, she was already pushing through the heavy brass door into warmth and candlelight, and the low murmur of a room that had no idea what she was about to do.
She crossed the floor before she could talk herself out of it. “Are you waiting for someone?”
She asked. The man looked up slowly, like he’d forgotten other people could speak to him, and Eloin had one full second to register a face carved out of hard, symmetrical lines.
Dark eyes, a jaw that could cut glass. The kind of stillness that belonged to men who had learned a long time ago that stillness kept you alive.
“No,” he said. His voice was low, controlled. The kind of voice that didn’t often get interrupted.
Eloin glanced at the second plate, the second glass, the empty chair. “Then why did you order dinner for two?”
For a long moment, he said nothing at all. And something in his expression shifted.
Some crack running fast and quiet through granite. He didn’t have an answer, so Eloin pulled out the empty chair and sat down in it like she’d been invited.
Which, in fairness, she had not been. “If you’re going to sit alone anyway,” she said, shrugging out of her coat, “you might as well have some company.
I’m off the clock. I have nowhere to be, and honestly, watching you stare at that untouched wine was starting to stress me out.”
Two men near the entrance in dark suits went rigid, hands twitching toward their jackets, eyes locking onto their boss for a signal that would tell them whether the Kirby stranger who had just sat down at his table was a threat and nuisance or something else entirely.
Roman Calder lifted one hand, barely two fingers off the tablecloth, and both men stood down.
He looked at Eloise for a long moment. Then, for the first time in longer than he could remember, something in his chest loosened.
He had no idea that the woman sitting across from him had just walked, completely unknowingly, straight into the most dangerous 6 hours of her life, and that the countdown, though she couldn’t hear it yet, had already begun.
What Eloise didn’t know, what she had absolutely no way of knowing, sitting there in her worn green coat with soup container plans abandoned in her apartment, was that the man across from her controlled roughly a third of the criminal economy west of the Mississippi.
Roman Calder ran an empire built on shipping routes and shell companies, on men who owed him favors and men who owed him fear, on a network so quiet and so thorough that most of the city’s most powerful businessmen lowered their voices when they said his name, if they said it at all.
He had capos in three states. He had two dirty detectives on retainer and a judge who golfed with him twice a year and never once ruled against his interests.
He had, by any reasonable measure, more money than several small countries and considerably more enemies.
He had also, 6 years earlier, lost his younger brother on Christmas Eve. Eloise would learn the full shape of that story later, in pieces, the way you learn the true shape of anyone you love.
For now, all she knew was that the man across from her ordered dinner for two every single Christmas Eve and never touched the second plate.
And that when she asked him, gently, carefully, the way you ask a question you already suspect will hurt, who the second place setting was for, he only said, “Someone I couldn’t save.”
And changed the subject so fast she didn’t push. She had no idea that the two men in dark suits by the door were his personal security.
She had no idea that the black SUV idling outside had reinforced doors thick enough to stop rifle rounds.
She had no idea that somewhere in a mahogany-paneled office, 12 floors above the city, a man named Victor Sorin, Roman’s own underboss, a man Roman had trusted since they were 19 years old running numbers together on the West Side, was at that exact moment sending a text message that would put a 6-hour deadline on both their lives.
Victor’s message went to a burner phone belonging to Damian Drossi, head of the only organization in the region that had ever come close to rivaling Roman’s, a man who had spent the better part of a decade waiting for exactly the kind of opening that a lonely boss with his guard down on Christmas Eve represented.
The message was short. He’s alone at the Cliff Rose. Minimal security. Window closes at midnight.
Move now or lose the chance for another year. Damian read it twice, smiled the way a man smiles when a very old debt is finally about to come due, and picked up his own phone to give an order that would put 6 hours on a clock nobody at that candlelit table could hear ticking.
Eloin, meanwhile, was telling Roman Calder about a customer who had once tried to return a library book to a private bookstore, genuinely confused about the difference, and Roman was laughing.
Actually laughing. A low, rough sound, like it hadn’t been used in a long while and had forgotten how to be smooth.
“You’re serious,” he said. “Dead serious. Wanted a refund on a library book. What did you tell her?
I told her the library was two blocks that way and wished her a merry Christmas.
Elowen took a sip of the wine he’d poured for her without asking, then made a face.
This is really good, by the way. Expensive good. “It’s fine.” Roman said, which was in Roman Calder’s particular vocabulary, the equivalent of another man weeping with gratitude over a bottle that cost more than Elowen’s monthly rent.
She didn’t recognize his name when the waiter murmured deferentially while refilling their water glasses.
She didn’t flinch at the two men by the door, didn’t clock the earpiece tucked behind the taller one’s collar, didn’t notice the way every staff member in the restaurant moved around their table like they were navigating around something that could go off.
She simply talked to him like he was an ordinary, lonely man on a night when loneliness was easy to spot and easier to fix.
And somewhere above them, 12 floors up, a countdown had already started that neither of them could hear.
At 9:15, Roman’s phone buzzed once against the white tablecloth. And something in the temperature of the evening changed.
He didn’t look at it right away. He’d learned a long time ago that reacting too fast to anything was a tell, and men in his position couldn’t afford tells, not even in front of a woman with flower-colored freckles across her nose who made him forget for whole stretches of minutes at a time that he had spent the last 6 years turning himself into stone.
But when he finally glanced down and read the message, three words from his head of security, terse and cold, his jaw tightened in a way Elowen had already, in the space of one dinner, learned to recognize.
“Soren’s gone dark.” Roman set his phone face down on the table with the careful precision of a man setting down a weapon he didn’t want to accidentally discharge.
“Everything okay?” Elowen asked. “Fine.” He said. And it was the first thing he’d told her all night that was a lie.
Across the room near the maitre d’s station, the taller bodyguard, a broad-shouldered man named Anton, who had been with Roman since the beginning, caught his boss’s eye and gave a small, sharp shake of his head.
Not now. The gesture said. Not here. Roman had built an entire life on reading small gestures.
He excused himself for a moment, told Elouan he needed to make a call, and crossed the restaurant with the unhurried, dangerous grace of a man who never once looked like he was in a rush.
Even when everything in him was screaming to move faster. In the alcove by the coat check, Anton kept his voice low.
Sorin missed his check-in. Twice. His phone’s been off for 40 minutes. He’s probably drunk somewhere feeling sorry for himself.
Roman said. Though even as the words left his mouth, something cold was settling behind his ribs.
Boss. Anton’s voice dropped even lower. We picked up chatter on the Drossi channel an hour ago.
Nothing confirmed. But somebody fed them your location tonight. Somebody who knew you’d be here and knew you’d have next to no security with you.
Roman went very still. There were exactly four people who had known with certainty that he would be dining alone and likely guarded at the Cliff Rose on Christmas Eve.
His driver, his housekeeper, who had worked for his family for 20 years and would sooner die than betray him.
Anton himself, and Victor Sorin. The boy he’d grown up next to on the west side, the man he’d made underboss with his own hands, the closest thing to a brother Roman had left in the world since the Christmas Eve six years earlier when the real one had died.
Get everyone to full alert. Roman said quietly. “Quietly. I don’t want her seeing this, boss.
If Drossi’s really moving tonight.” “I said quietly, Anton.” He looked back across the restaurant floor at the woman still sitting at his table laughing softly to herself at something on the dessert menu, completely unaware that somewhere in the city a clock had started running on both their lives and that the number on it, if anyone had bothered to say it out loud, would have been six hours.
He walked back to the table wearing his calmest face, the one that had fooled senators.
It did not fool Elowen at all. “You’re doing that thing,” she said the moment he sat back down.
“What thing?” “That thing where you smile with your mouth but not your eyes. My dad used to do it right after the diagnosis when he was trying to convince me he was fine.”
She studied him for a second, head tilted. “Something’s wrong.” Roman looked at her for a long moment, weighing, calculating, doing the math he always did before he let anyone see anything real.
Len, for reasons he couldn’t fully explain even to himself, he decided not to lie to her again.
“Something might be wrong.” He admitted. “I’m going to need you to trust me for the next few hours, even if some of what happens doesn’t make sense right away.”
Elowen’s stomach dropped quietly the way stomachs drop right before the drop actually arrives. “How many hours?”
She asked. Roman’s jaw flexed. “Call it six,” he said. “If I’m wrong about what’s coming, it’ll be nothing.
If I’m right, I need you to do exactly what I say.” Outside the tall windows of the winter room, snow kept falling soft and silent, completely indifferent to the fact that somewhere above the restaurant in a mahogany office belonging to a man Roman had once called brother.
A second message was already on its way out into the freezing dark. The message went to six men positioned in a delivery van two blocks from the Cliff Rose Hotel, and it contained exactly one word.
“Go.” Roman didn’t know that yet, not with certainty, but every instinct sharpened by 20 years of staying alive in a business that killed most men within a decade told him something ugly was already in motion.
He signaled Anton with two fingers against his own collarbone, a gesture that meant clear the room quietly now, and reached across the table to close his hand gently over Eloise’s.
“I need you to listen to me carefully,” he said. “Okay,” she said, and her voice only shook a little, which he would later think was one of the bravest things he’d ever witnessed.
“There’s a service exit behind the kitchen. My car is going to pull around to it in the next 2 minutes.
When Anton comes to get you, you go with him. No questions, no hesitating, no trying to help me carry anything.
You go.” “What about you?” “I’m right behind you.” She looked at him with those wide, warm eyes that had walked straight through the middle of his careful, guarded life 2 hours earlier, and pulled out a chair like she had every right to it.
And something in Roman’s chest twisted painfully at the thought of what he might be about to drag her into.
“You’re lying,” she said quietly. “You’re not right behind me. You’re staying to fight whatever this is.”
“Eloise, don’t Eloise me. I might not know who you actually are, Roman Calder, but I’ve spent one evening watching how every single person in this restaurant moves around you like you’re the only thing keeping the lights on.
Fair enough.” For a moment, the ambient noise of the restaurant, silverware, distant laughter, a string quartet playing something soft and seasonal near the bar, seemed to fall away entirely, and it was just the two of them, and the clock nobody could hear ticking down toward whatever was coming through the freezing dark toward the Cliffrose Hotel.
Then the front windows of the winter room shattered inward in a single deafening roar, and the evening Elouise had walked into out of nothing but stubborn kindness became something else completely.
She went down hard behind an overturned table, ears ringing, glass raining across the marble in a bright, terrible shower, and somewhere close by she heard Roman’s voice, not panicked, never panicked, but sharp and absolute, shouting orders into the chaos.
“Get her out now! Move!” Six hours had just become considerably less than six hours, and neither of them yet knew exactly how much time was left.
Gunfire cracked through the winter room in short, ugly bursts, and the elegant Christmas Eve dinner Elouise had walked into dissolved into a war zone of overturned tables and screaming diners scrambling for the exits.
Roman moved like something out of a different genre of story entirely, low, fast, purposeful, pulling a compact pistol from a holster hidden beneath his tailored jacket and putting himself bodily between Elouise and the shattered front windows, where two men in dark tactical gear were advancing through the broken glass.
“Stay behind me.” He ordered. Elouise, to her own enormous surprise, did not freeze. She had grown up in a house with a father who insisted every child learn to think clearly under pressure, who had taken her and Marisol to a shooting range exactly twice before deciding they hated it, who had more usefully spent years teaching her the layout of every building she ever set foot in out of some anxious, protective habit she’d never fully understood until this exact moment.
She had clocked the kitchen doors the second she walked in. She had clocked the wine cellar entrance behind the bar, half hidden by a velvet curtain, because old habits from her father’s overprotective safety lectures apparently didn’t switch off just because the world had gone insane.
There’s a service corridor behind the bar, she said, voice low and fast. I saw it when we walked in.
It connects to the kitchen exit. Roman’s eyes cut to her, sharp with something that wasn’t quite surprise and wasn’t quite pride, but lived close to both.
How do you know that? My dad had opinions about fire exits. Long story. Move, Roman.
For half a second, something almost like a laugh cracked through the tension on his face.
Disbelief, admiration, the particular dizzy feeling of watching someone rewrite your assumptions about them in real time, and then a bullet punched through the table they were crouched behind, and there was no more time for anything except survival.
Anton went down near the entrance, clipping one attacker with three fast shots before diving for cover, blood blooming dark across his shoulder.
Roman’s other man, a wiry young enforcer named Dax, laid down covering fire toward the shattered windows while screaming diners poured through the kitchen doors behind the bar.
Elowen grabbed Roman’s sleeve and hauled him toward the velvet curtain she’d spotted, and together they half crawled, half ran through the narrow service corridor beyond it.
Glass and grit biting into her palms, her heart a hammer against her ribs. Behind them, a third attacker rounded the corner of the bar too fast, gun already rising toward Roman’s exposed back.
Elowen didn’t think. She grabbed a heavy iron wine rack bolted loosely to the wall and swung it with everything she had, catching the man across the jaw and sending him sprawling into a rack of champagne bottles that exploded in a burst of foam and glass.
Roman spun, finished what she’d started with brutal efficiency, and then simply stared at her for one full second in the middle of a firefight, chest heaving, something raw and stunned moving across his face.
“Where did you learn to do that?” “I stock heavy boxes for a living, Roman.
Move.” They burst through the kitchen’s rear exit into the freezing alley behind the hotel, snow swirling under the security lights, and Roman’s driver was already there, the black SUVs engine running, back door thrown open.
“Get in.” Roman ordered. Elowen didn’t argue this time. She dove into the back seat, and Roman followed a half second behind her, slamming the door just as two more shots cracked against the reinforced glass and spider-webbed harmlessly across the surface.
The SUV tore out of the alley, tires screaming against packed snow. And for a moment, all either of them could do was breathe.
Then Roman’s phone buzzed again, and the message on the screen made something in his expression go dangerously, terribly calm.
“4 hours left, boss. Soren’s phone just came back online. He’s at the safe house on Redwood, waiting for you.”
The trap wasn’t finished. It had only just started. The safe house on Redwood Road sat behind a chain-link fence and a row of dead cottonwoods, an unremarkable single-story house that looked, from the outside, exactly like every other tired rental on the block.
Roman had bought it 8 years earlier under a shell company name that led nowhere.
And until that night, exactly four people had known it existed. Now Elowen was the fifth.
“You brought her here.” Anton said, wincing as the SUV’s other passenger, a grim young medic named Prior, pressed gauze hard against the bullet graze on his shoulder.
“Boss, with respect, that’s a problem.” She’s safer with us than anywhere else right now.”
Roman said. Drossi’s men were watching the Kifros. “If they saw her leave with me, they already have her face.”
Allowyn sat on the edge of a worn couch wrapped in a blanket someone had shoved into her hands.
Hands still trembling slightly with the particular shakiness that comes after your body realizes danger has passed and finally allows itself to feel it.
She watched Roman move through the small dim house with the same controlled precision he’d shown in the restaurant, giving orders, checking a bank of monitors tucked into a closet that clearly wasn’t meant for coats.
“Who’s Victor Sorin?” She asked once the room had quieted enough for her voice to carry.
Roman went still. “Someone I trusted,” he said finally. “My underboss. We grew up together.
I made him a made man with my own hands 12 years ago. His voice was flat in a way that told Allowyn exactly how much effort it took to keep it flat.
Tonight, for reasons I don’t understand yet, he sold my location to the only man in this city who spent a decade wanting me dead.
You think it was him?” “For sure. I know it was him.” Roman set his phone down on the scarred kitchen table hard enough to rattle the surface.
“He’s the only person outside this room who knew I’d be alone tonight. He’s been distant for months and now he’s sitting at a safe house only he and I know about, waiting for me.
4 hours before some deadline Drossi apparently gave him.” He looked up and for the first time all night, Allowyn saw something in his face that wasn’t controlled at all.
It was grief. Old, familiar grief, the kind that had a shape it fit into automatically.
“This is exactly how my brother died. Somebody we trusted opened a door that should have stayed locked.
Eloin was quiet for a moment. You don’t have to go there alone, she said.
I have to go there, Roman said. Alone is the part I haven’t decided yet.
Take me. Absolutely not. Roman. She stood, blanket still around her shoulders, and crossed the small room to stand in front of him.
Close enough that he had to look down to meet her eyes. I hit a man in the face with a wine rack an hour ago.
I found the exit route through a restaurant I’d never set foot in before tonight.
I’m not asking you to let me hold a gun. I’m asking you not to walk into whatever this is completely alone.
Because I don’t think that’s actually the smart move, and I think some part of you knows that.
For a long moment, neither of them said anything. Outside, the wind picked up, rattling the bare branches of the dead cottonwoods against the fence, and somewhere across the city, a clock that neither of them could hear kept counting down.
4 hours, Roman said finally, almost to himself. Whatever’s coming, it’s coming before dawn. He looked at Eloin for a long moment, weighing something enormous, and then, very quietly, he said the thing he hadn’t let himself say to anyone in 6 years.
I don’t want to lose someone else on this night. Eloin’s chest ached with a tenderness she hadn’t expected to feel toward a man she’d known for less than a single evening.
Then don’t, she said softly. Let me help you not lose anyone this time. Behind them, unnoticed, Anton’s phone buzzed with a new message from a contact inside Drossi’s organization, and his face went pale as he read it.
Boss, he said, you need to see this. The message was a photograph, grainy, taken from a distance, but unmistakable.
It was Eloise walking home from the bookstore 3 weeks before Christmas Eve, completely unaware she was being watched.
Drossi’s men had been tracking Roman’s movements for far longer than anyone in that room had realized, and somehow impossibly they already knew exactly who she was.
“Explain.” Roman said. And the single word came out low enough to shake the walls.
Anton turned the phone screen toward him with visibly unsteady hands. “It came in 20 minutes ago, encrypted drop, no return address, but the metadata traces back through the same server Soren’s been using to talk to Drossi’s people for the last 2 months.”
He swallowed hard. “Boss, they’ve had eyes on her since before tonight, since before the restaurant.
This wasn’t a lucky guess that she’d be alone with a woman at the Kifaru’s.
They already knew who she was going to be.” The room went very quiet. Eloise felt the blood drain slowly out of her face.
“That’s not possible.” She said. “I’ve never met Roman before tonight.” “I walked into that restaurant on a whim because I felt bad for him.”
“They didn’t need you to have met him.” Roman said grimly. And something in his voice had gone somewhere cold and far away.
They needed a weakness they could aim at me on the one night a year I don’t surround myself with a wall of guards.
If it hadn’t been you, it would have been anyone I let sit at that table.
Soren didn’t just sell my location tonight. He set the phone down slowly, deliberately, the way a man sets down something he wants to throw across a room but won’t allow himself to.
“He’s been building this for months, long enough to have someone watching a bookstore 3 weeks before Christmas, waiting to see if I’d finally let my guard down enough to matter.”
Elowen sat down hard on the arm of the couch, the blanket slipping off one shoulder, her mind racing back through every ordinary night at Winter and Pine, every walk home through downtown, every moment she’d assumed, with the easy confidence of someone who had never had reason to think otherwise, that nobody in the world had any particular interest in her at all.
So, this was never really about me stumbling onto your table. She said slowly. This was what?
A setup? A trap Soren built and I just happened to walk into? No. Roman crouched in front of her, taking both her hands in his, his voice low and urgent in a way she hadn’t heard from him yet.
You didn’t walk into a trap. You walked into a restaurant because you have a heart that can’t stand to watch someone eat alone on Christmas Eve.
And that is the single truest thing that’s happened to me in 6 years. Soren built a trap.
You just happened to be the person kind enough to sit down before he could spring it the way he planned.
That doesn’t make me feel better, Roman. I know, he said quietly. It shouldn’t, because it means you’re a target now, whether you asked for it or not, and I need you to understand that before we go any further tonight.
He held her gaze, unflinching. You can still walk away. Anton can get you somewhere safe, somewhere far from all of this, and I will make sure Drossi and Soren both understand that if either of them so much as looks at you again, it will be the last mistake either of them ever makes.
You didn’t sign up for this life. Elowen looked at him for a long, quiet moment.
Then she pulled her hands free of his, not to withdraw, but to reach up and cup his jaw, forcing him to hold her gaze the way he’d been holding hers.
You don’t get to decide that loving someone means locking them away, Roman Calder. She said, and her voice, though it shook slightly, did not waver in what it meant.
I walked into that restaurant because you looked like a man who’d forgotten what it felt like to have somebody in his corner.
I’m not going to disappear the second things get complicated. That’s not who I am.
Something in Roman’s chest cracked open in a way that had nothing to do with fear and everything to do with the terrifying, unfamiliar sensation of being truly seen by someone who had every reason to run and chose instead to stay.
“3 hours,” Anton said quietly from across the room, watching the clock on the wall with a grim expression.
“Whatever Sorin and Drossi are planning, it’s coming before 3:00 in the morning. We need a decision.”
Roman stood, and when he turned back to Elowen, the softness in his eyes had hardened into something focused, something dangerous, something that made the two guards flanking the door straighten un “Then let’s go find out exactly what my old friend thinks he’s earned tonight.”
He said. The drive to the second safe house took 11 minutes, though it felt to Elowen like considerably longer.
Each mile marker sliding past the frosted windows like something out of a dream she couldn’t wake from.
Roman sat beside her in the back of the armored SUV, one hand resting loosely on the pistol at his hip, the other, without seeming to notice he was doing it, wrapped protectively around Elowen’s fingers.
“Tell me about him.” She said quietly. “Victor, before all this.” “Who was he to you?”
Roman was silent for a long moment, watching the city slide by outside the window.
Strings of Christmas lights on quiet residential streets, a lit-up nativity scene on somebody’s frozen front lawn.
All of it so ordinary and warm and completely disconnected from the cold calculus of what they were driving toward.
“We grew up two houses apart on the west side,” he said finally. “His mother used to feed me dinner three nights a week because mine worked doubles at the hospital and never made it home in time.
When my brother died,” his jaw tightened, and Eloise felt the small involuntary squeeze of his hand around hers.
“Victor was the one who sat with me for a week straight. Didn’t say much.
Just sat there. Made sure I ate. Made sure I didn’t do anything stupid with the grief.”
“That sounds like someone who loved you.” “It was.” Roman’s voice had gone rough. “That’s what makes tonight feel less like betrayal and more like losing him twice.”
Eloise thought of her own father. At the particular ache of losing someone you loved.
And then, in some smaller, quieter way, continuing to lose the memory of them a little more each year.
“As time wore the edges smooth, maybe there’s a reason.” She offered gently. “Maybe he didn’t just wake up one day and decide to sell you out.”
“There’s always a reason,” Roman said. And something bitter had crept into his voice. “Money.
Fear. Ambition. Doesn’t change what he did.” “No.” Eloise agreed softly. “But it might change what happens next.”
The SUV slowed as it turned down a narrow service road behind an industrial storage facility on the west edge of the city.
Headlights sweeping across stacked shipping containers and a single warehouse with light bleeding out from beneath a rolled-up loading door.
“Two hours,” Anton said grimly from the front seat, reading a message on his phone.
“Confirmed. Drossi’s crew is staging six blocks from here. Whatever Soren’s waiting to tell you, boss, he’s not waiting much longer to tell it.
Roman turned to Elara one final time before the vehicle came to a stop. Whatever happens in there, he said quietly, stay close to Anton.
Don’t engage unless I tell you to. And Elara, his thumb brushed briefly across her knuckles, a small tender gesture that seemed entirely out of place given everything unfolding around them, and entirely necessary anyway.
Thank you for not running when you had every reason to. I don’t run from people who look like they need someone in their corner, she said, echoing her own words back at him with a small brave smile.
Even when it turns out their corner comes with an alarming amount of gunfire. Something in Roman’s chest loosened just slightly in the middle of everything.
The SUV rolled to a stop outside the warehouse, and the door swung open into the cold.
And whatever waited inside was about to answer every question either of them had left.
The warehouse smelled like motor oil and cold concrete lit by a single bank of fluorescent lights hanging low over an open floor scattered with stacked pallets and the long dark shape of a delivery truck parked near the back wall.
Victor Soren stood alone near the center of the space, hands visible, no weapon drawn, wearing the kind of expression Elara had seen exactly once before in her life on her father’s face, the day he finally told her the treatments weren’t working anymore.
It was the face of a man who had already decided something and was only waiting to be allowed to say it out loud.
Roman, Victor said, and his voice cracked slightly around the name. 20 years of history compressed into a single syllable.
Don’t, Roman said, and his gun was already leveled, steady as stone. Though his eyes betrayed something far less steady underneath.
Don’t say my name like we’re still the two kids who used to split a sandwich behind your mother’s house, tell me why?
Victor’s jaw worked silently for a moment. “They have my sister,” he said finally. “Drossi’s people took Nadia 3 months ago.
Told me if I didn’t get them your location, your patterns, a window where you’d be exposed.”
His voice broke completely. “They’d send her back to me one piece at a time.
I didn’t sell you out for money, Roman. I sold you out because I couldn’t watch her die the way He stopped himself, but the unfinished sentence hung in the cold air between them anyway.
“The way your brother died.” Roman’s gun did not lower, but something behind his eyes shifted.
Some old, familiar grief rising up to meet a new one. “You could have come to me,” he said, low and furious and heartbroken all at once.
“20 years, Victor. You could have walked into my office and told me the truth, and I would have burned that entire organization to the ground to get her back.
I know that now,” Victor said, tears cutting tracks down a face that had gone gray with exhaustion and fear.
“I didn’t believe it 3 months ago. I thought I was protecting the only family I had left.”
He looked past Roman to Aloan standing near Anton’s shoulder, and something like shame crossed his face.
“I never meant for anyone else to get pulled into this. I told Drossi’s people that the restaurant plan was too dangerous, that there could be civilians.
They didn’t listen. They never intended to just take Roman quietly. They intended to make an example tonight in front of witnesses, so nobody in this city ever forgets what happens to men who think they’re untouchable.”
“Where’s your sister now?” Roman demanded. “I don’t know,” Victor admitted, voice breaking. “That’s why I came here instead of running.
I was hoping, God help me, I was hoping you’d be angry enough to want Drossi dead badly enough to get her back for me anyway.”
For a long, terrible moment, nobody in the warehouse moved. Then Eloise stepped forward, past Anton’s restraining hand, closer to the center of the cold concrete floor.
“How much time do we actually have?” She asked quietly, “before Drossi’s people move on this location, too?”
Anton checked his phone, and his face went grim. “40 minutes,” he said, “maybe less.”
Roman looked at Victor. At the man who had betrayed him and loved him in the same breath, who had sold his location to save his sister, and then walked back into the fire anyway to try to make it right.
And made a decision that surprised absolutely everyone in the room, including perhaps himself. “Then we don’t have time to hate each other properly,” he said.
“We get your sister back. We end Drossi tonight. And then, Victor, [clears throat] you and I are going to have a very long conversation about what trust is supposed to mean between us.”
Relief and grief and disbelief moved across Victor’s face all at once. “40 minutes,” Anton repeated urgently.
“Boss, if we’re doing this, we need a plan right now.” Roman turned to Eloise, and something in his expression, respect, gratitude, the beginning of a plan forming behind his eyes, settled into place.
“You said you know this neighborhood,” he said. “The bookstore’s four blocks from here. You walk this area every night.”
“Every single night,” Eloise confirmed. “Then you’re about to become considerably more useful than any of the men in this room.”
The plan came together fast, sketched out on the hood of the SUV with Eloise’s finger tracing the streets she’d walked home along for 4 years, streets she knew the way other people knew the backs of their own hands.
There’s a loading alley behind the print shop next to my store, she said, pointing.
Delivery trucks use it during the day, but it’s dead quiet at night. It connects directly to the service entrance of the old Merriman warehouse.
The one Dross’s people are staging out of. Based on what your guy said, if you come at them from the alley instead of the main road, you lose the element of surprise on their side completely.
Roman studied the makeshift map, something sharpening in his expression. You’re certain about the layout?
I’ve walked past that alley probably a thousand times. There’s a busted security gate about halfway down.
Nobody ever bothered fixing it because nobody thought there was anything back there worth stealing.
She glanced up at him. Turns out there’s apparently a rival crime family worth avoiding instead.
Small world. Anton, despite the tension crackling through the group, let out a short surprised laugh.
She’s not wrong, boss. That checks with the surveillance we pulled an hour ago. Roman looked at Eloise for a long moment, something unguarded moving across his face.
You keep doing this. He said quietly. Doing what? Being exactly what the situation needs when nobody has any right to expect that from you.
I contain multitudes, Eloise said. Deadpan. Though her hands were shaking slightly at her sides.
Also, my dad made me memorize every back alley in a six-block radius of the store when I first started working nights.
Something about a woman alone needing to know her exits. I never thought I’d be using it to help stage an assault on organized crime.
But here we are. 30 minutes, Anton said grimly, checking his phone again. Victor stepped forward, still visibly shaken but steadier now, purpose settling over him like armor he’d forgotten he owned.
“I know where they’re holding Nadia. There’s a service room in the back of the Merriman building.
Cold storage, mostly unused. If Drossi’s smart, and he is, he’ll have her close to wherever he’s coordinating the strike from as leverage in case anything goes wrong.
Then that’s where we’re going.” Roman said. “Anton, you and Dax take the front with two teams.
Create noise. Draw their attention outward. Victor and I go through Eloise’s alley route and hit them from the side they won’t be watching.
And me?” Eloise said. Roman turned to her, jaw tight. “You stay in the car with Priya.
With the doors locked and you do not move until I come get you myself.”
“Roman.” “I mean it, Eloise.” His voice softened just slightly underneath the command. “I’ve already put you in more danger tonight than I will ever forgive myself for.
I need you somewhere safe while we finish this. Please.” Something about the please, rare, clearly costly, offered instead of ordered, made Eloise’s chest ache.
“Okay.” She said quietly. “But Roman.” “Yeah?” “Come back.” “All of you. I did not hit a man with a wine rack tonight just to spend Christmas morning identifying a body.”
A ghost of a smile flickered across his face. Brief and real. “Copy that.” He said, and then he was moving, gathering his people, and the countdown that had started with a six-word text 3 hours earlier narrowed down to its final, dangerous stretch.
The alley behind the print shop was exactly as narrow and forgotten as Eloise had described.
Snow drifted against a dumpster, the busted security gate hanging loose on one hinge, just like she’d promised.
Roman moved through it with Victor at his side. Both men silent, breath fogging in the freezing air, weapons drawn low.
Behind them, muffled by distance and brick, they could hear the first crack of gunfire as Anton’s team engaged Rossi’s people at the front of the Merriman building, exactly as planned.
Exactly loud enough to pull every available gun toward the wrong entrance. “Cold storage room.”
Victor whispered, pointing toward a rusted service door 20 ft ahead. “If Nadia’s here, that’s where she’ll be.”
They moved fast, low, and Roman felt something settle over him that he hadn’t felt in years.
Not the cold calculation of running an empire, but the simpler, older instinct of a man protecting the last piece of family he had left standing beside him.
The service door was unlocked, careless in the chaos of the frontal assault drawing every guard’s attention elsewhere.
Inside, the cold storage room was dim and bare except for a single chair in the center, and in it, bound but alive, a young woman with Victor’s same dark eyes stared up at them with an expression caught somewhere between terror and disbelief.
“Nadia.” Victor was across the room in three strides, cutting the ropes at her wrists with shaking hands.
“I’m here. I’m so sorry. I’m here.” Roman kept his gun trained on the door, watching, listening, and it was in that exact moment Victor’s sister, sobbing with relief into her brother’s shoulder, gunfire still cracking distantly at the front of the building, that Damien Rossi himself stepped into the doorway behind them, flanked by two men with rifles already raised.
“Well,” Rossi said, an unpleasant smile spreading across a face Roman had hated for a decade.
“Isn’t this touching? The traitor rescues his sister, and the great Roman Calder walks straight into the one trap he didn’t see building right under his own boots.
Roman didn’t lower his weapon. Damian, you should have died in that restaurant an hour ago, Drossi said conversationally, stepping further into the room, rifles trained on Roman and Victor both.
Would have saved us both a great deal of trouble tonight. Funny, Roman said, voice low and dangerously even.
I was about to say the same thing about you. And then, from the doorway behind Drossi, a familiar voice cut through the tension like a blade.
Actually, Eloise said, stepping into view with Anton half a pace behind her, both of them having circled around from the front assault the moment Anton’s team broke through.
I think the trouble’s about to be entirely one-sided. Drossi spun, momentarily distracted, and that half second of distraction was all Roman needed.
Everything happened fast after that, the particular blurred fast of moments people spend the rest of their lives reconstructing.
Roman moved on the distraction, closing the distance to Drossi’s nearest guard before the man could fully register the shift in the room, disarming him with a brutal economy of motion that spoke to 20 years of practice.
Victor, sister safely behind him, put himself between Nadia and the remaining rifle and Anton moving through the doorway.
Eloise had somehow talked her way past. Roman would ask her exactly how later, and the answer would involve the words, “I told him I was the housekeeper,” and would make him laugh for the first time in what felt like years.
Took down the second guard with two clean shots. Drossi himself lunged for the fallen rifle, and it was Eloise of all people who moved first, sweeping a metal folding chair off a stack near the wall, and slamming it into his outstretched arm hard enough to send the weapon skittering across the concrete floor.
“You,” Drossi snarled, cradling his arm, “are supposed to be a civilian.” “I contain multitudes.
Allowyn said again, breathless, adrenaline burning through her veins like fire. Also, I’ve had a really long night.
And I would genuinely like to go home. Roman had Drossi on the ground within seconds, gun pressed hard against the man’s temple, chest heaving.
Six years of grief and one impossible night colliding behind his eyes. “Boss,” Anton said carefully, “witnesses are coming.
Front teams got two of his lieutenants detained. If we’re doing this, we do it clean in front of everyone who matters, so nobody in this city has to wonder who won tonight.”
Roman looked down at the man who had spent a decade waiting for exactly this opportunity, who had turned Roman’s own underboss into a weapon aimed at his heart, who had ultimately given Roman something he hadn’t expected, the chance to prove in front of everyone whose loyalty mattered exactly what happened to men who mistook his restraint for weakness.
“Get him up,” Roman said, straightening, lowering the gun with visible effort. “We’re not doing this in a basement where nobody sees it.
We’re doing this where every single person who might ever consider crossing me again gets to watch exactly how tonight ends.”
They brought Drossi out into the main floor of the Merriman warehouse, where Anton’s team had already secured the remnants of his crew.
Six men on their knees, hands zip tied, faces caught somewhere between fury and fear under the harsh overhead lights.
Roman stood at the center of it all, Allowyn a careful half step behind him.
Victor, with his arm wrapped protectively around Nadia’s shoulders near the edge of the room.
“Three months ago,” Roman said, and his voice carried easily across the cold concrete space, steady and absolute the voice of a man who had spent two decades learning exactly how much weight his words could hold.
This man kidnapped an innocent woman to force one of my own people into betraying me.
Tonight, he tried to finish what he started in front of a restaurant full of civilians on Christmas Eve.
He let that settle over the room. Everyone here is going to remember this moment.
Not because of what happens to Damian Drossi in the next 5 minutes, because of what didn’t happen tonight.
Nobody in that restaurant died. Nadia is standing right there, safe, because a brother chose, in the end, to trust the man he’d betrayed instead of running from him.
He crouched down in front of Drossi, voice dropping low enough that only the closest men could hear it clearly.
You wanted an example made tonight. Fine. Let’s make one. He stood, addressing the room again.
Anyone in this organization who wants to walk away clean right now gets to walk.
Nobody’s chasing you down for a debt you didn’t choose. But anyone who stays loyal to a man who just tried to burn down a restaurant full of families on Christmas Eve, his gaze swept the kneeling men slowly, deliberately.
You’re not my problem tonight. You’re my problem tomorrow and every day after until there’s nothing left of what he built.
The silence that followed was absolute. One by one, three of the kneeling men shifted, some visible calculation crossing their faces.
The math of self-preservation that ran through every man in that business eventually. Roman turned to Victor.
You lied to me. He said quietly. And the room’s tension shifted again, sharper now, more personal.
For 3 months, you let me believe you’d simply lost interest in the work. You let me start to doubt myself, to wonder what I’d done to push you away.
He shook his head slowly. That’s the part I need you to understand Hurt worse than the bullets tonight.
Not the betrayal, the silence. I know. Victor said, voice breaking again. I’m not asking you to forgive it tonight.
I’m asking for the chance to earn it back. Roman studied him for a long moment, weighing 20 years of history against 3 months of fear-driven silence.
And something in his expression finally carefully softened. You’ll earn it, he said, starting with getting your sister somewhere safe and warm, and starting tomorrow telling me the truth about everything, even the parts that scare you.
He extended a hand. That’s the only version of this where we walk away from tonight as anything other than strangers.
Victor took the offered hand and something between them, battered, imperfect, but real, began slowly to mend.
Eloen watched the whole exchange with her heart in her throat. And when Roman finally turned back to her gun-holstered shoulders loosening for the first time in hours, she crossed the cold concrete floor and simply put her arms around him, not caring who was watching, not caring what it looked like to the men still kneeling nearby.
You’re bleeding. She said against his shoulder, noticing for the first time a thin line of red along his temple.
It’s nothing. It’s absolutely something, and we’re getting it looked at. And then you are taking me somewhere warm because I would genuinely like to finish the dinner we never got to eat.
Roman laughed. A real full laugh, the kind that seemed to surprise even him. And pressed a kiss to the top of her head, right there in the middle of a warehouse full of zip-tied criminals and broken loyalties and the wreckage of a night that had somehow impossibly ended better than it began.
Copy that, he said softly. Dawn was still hours away when they finally made it back to Roman’s penthouse, a wide, warm space with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking a city still glittering under fresh snow, entirely unaware of what had unfolded in its quiet corners that night.
A doctor had come and gone stitching the shallow cut along Roman’s temple and checking Elouise over despite her insistence that she was fine, genuinely, completely fine, just tired and a little bit in shock and possibly never going to be able to look at a wine rack the same way again.
They sat together on a wide leather sofa, a fire crackling in the hearth and for a long time neither of them said anything at all, letting the adrenaline finally drain out of the room and leave something quieter in its place.
“I have to ask.” Elouise said eventually, curled against his side with a blanket pulled over both their laps.
“Is this a regular Tuesday for you? Because if so, I might need a different job.”
Roman huffed a soft laugh into her hair. “Tonight was not typical. I want to be very clear about that.
Tonight was by any reasonable measure one of the worst and most dangerous nights I’ve had in 6 years.
And the best?” He was quiet for a moment. “Also somehow one of the best.”
He admitted. “I sat alone at that table because it was easier than admitting how much I dreaded another Christmas Eve by myself and then you walked in and asked me why I’d ordered dinner for two.
And I didn’t have an answer because I honestly didn’t know anymore. I just knew I couldn’t stop setting that second place year after year even though it never once occurred to me that someone might actually sit in it.”
Elouise looked up at him, firelight catching the exhaustion and tenderness both written plainly across his face.
“Who was it for?” She asked softly. “The second plate.” “You said someone you couldn’t save.
I didn’t want to push.” “But” Roman’s throat worked for a moment. “My brother, Ezra,” he said finally, “6 years ago tonight.
He was 22. He got pulled into a piece of the business I tried to keep him out of, and I was too slow, too arrogant, too certain I had more time to fix it before it fixed itself.
Someone I trusted set him up the same way Soren set me up tonight, and by the time I got to him it was already too late.”
He swallowed hard. “I started ordering dinner for two the following Christmas Eve. I told myself it was a way of honoring him.
Really, I think it was a way of refusing to admit he was gone. Like if the table was set right, he might still walk through the door.”
Eloise’s eyes stung, and she didn’t bother blinking the feeling away. “I’m so sorry,” she whispered.
“Don’t be sorry,” Roman said, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear with surprising gentleness for a man whose hands had, hours earlier, been wrapped around a gun.
“Be the reason that table finally has someone real sitting across from it. Every year for 6 years, I’ve spent that night grieving.
Tonight, for the first time, I spent it living. That’s because of you.” “I just wanted you to not eat alone,” Eloise said, voice thick.
“I didn’t sign up to fall in love with a mafia boss in one evening.”
The word hung in the air between them, unplanned, unguarded, entirely true. Roman went very still.
“Say that again,” he said quietly. Eloise’s cheeks went warm despite the exhaustion pressing down on every part of her.
“I said I didn’t sign up for this,” she repeated, deliberately softer this time, deliberately closer to what she’d actually meant.
But I think I might be falling in love with you anyway,” Roman called her, “against every reasonable instinct I have, which is either the best decision of my life or the worst one, And I genuinely can’t tell which yet.
Roman cupped her face in both hands, thumbs brushing gently along her cheekbones. And for the first time since the moment she’d walked toward his table 3 weeks earlier, he let himself smile, fully, unguardedly, the way a man smiles when he’s finally stopped bracing for the next loss.
“For what it’s worth,” he murmured, “I think it’s the best one.” Then he kissed her slow and careful, like something precious he intended to handle gently for as long as he was lucky enough to have it.
And outside the tall windows of the penthouse, the last of the snow drifted down over a city that had no idea how close it had come to losing something it didn’t even know existed.
1 year passed the way years do, in ordinary Tuesdays and quiet mornings and arguments over throw pillows and long phone calls after hard days in the slow, patient work of two people learning how to build a life together out of the wreckage of everything that had almost gone wrong.
Elouise kept her job at Winter and Pine Books, though she’d long since stopped pretending Roman’s frequent visits during her night shifts were purely coincidental.
He’d shown up so often, always with some flimsy excuse, needing a book for a business associate, wanting her opinion on a gift for Victor’s newborn niece once memorably, claiming he’d simply been walking past.
That the store’s owner had started leaving him free coffee out of sheer amusement. Victor had earned back a measure of trust that Roman dolled out carefully, deliberately, the way a man rebuilds something that had once nearly shattered entirely.
Nadia had moved to Denver for a fresh start. And Victor visited her every month, a habit Roman never once questioned or begrudged.
Damien Dross’s organization had quietly dissolved in the months that followed, most of his remaining men scattering to other cities, the empire he’d spent a decade building collapsing under the weight of a single failed night.
Roman never spoke much about what exactly had happened to Drossi himself. And Eloin, wisely, had learned not to ask.
And now on Christmas Eve, exactly 1 year after a curvy young woman had walked uninvited toward a lowly man’s table, Roman called her sat once again at the same corner booth in the winter room at the Cliff Rose Hotel.
Beneath the same soft amber lights, a full dinner for two set carefully in front of him.
But this time he wasn’t staring at nothing. He was watching the door. Eloin walked in a few minutes past eight wearing a simple red dress and a coat dusted with fresh snow, a small wrapped gift tucked under one arm.
And something about the sight of her crossing the same floor she’d crossed exactly a year earlier made Roman’s chest ache in the best possible way.
“You came back.” He said softly when she reached the table, standing to pull out the same chair he hadn’t let anyone else sit in all year.
“You saved me a seat last year.” Eloin said, settling into it, placing the small wrapped gift beside his plate with careful hands.
“Seemed rude not to return the favor.” Roman looked around the restaurant. The same candlelight, the same soft murmur of families celebrating, the same untouched wine glass he’d stopped pretending was for anyone else the moment she’d walked through the door a year ago.
And then back at the woman who had unknowingly walked into the loneliest night of his life and rewritten the entire shape of it.
“I wasn’t saving a seat.” He said quietly, reaching across the table to take her hand.
“I was waiting for you, I think. If I’m honest, some part of me has been waiting for you since the night Ezra died without knowing what I was waiting for.
And then you walked in and asked me why ordered dinner for two, and I finally had an answer, even if it took me a whole year to figure out exactly what it was.
Elowen’s eyes were bright with unshed tears, warm and unguarded in a way that still, after everything, made Roman feel like the luckiest man in the state of Utah.
“What’s the answer?” She asked softly. Roman reached into his jacket pocket and set a small velvet box on the table between them, beside the untouched second plate that for the first time in 7 years was finally about to be touched by exactly the person it had always been meant for.
“The answer,” he said, “is that I ordered dinner for two because some part of me refused to stop believing that someday somebody would walk through that door and make the empty chair make sense.
It just took a little longer than I expected to find you.” He opened the box, and candlelight caught the ring inside, simple and warm and entirely hers.
“Elowen Price, will you make sure I never have to set that second plate for grief again?”
Elowen laughed, a bright, startled, joyful sound that turned heads at nearby tables, tears spilling freely down her cheeks now.
“Yes,” she said, “obviously yes, though I want it on record that this is significantly less dangerous than our first date, and I’m choosing to see that as a promising sign.”
Roman laughed, too low and warm and entirely unguarded, and slid the ring onto a finger with hands that had 1 year earlier held a gun steady through a warehouse full of danger, and now trembled slightly over something infinitely more important.
Outside the tall windows of the winter room snow kept falling over Salt Lake City, soft and silent and utterly indifferent to the fact that somewhere inside a warm glowing restaurant, a man who had spent 6 long years believing Christmas Eve was the night he remembered everything he’d lost, had finally, at long last, found someone to come home to.
So, here’s the question I’ll leave you with tonight. Because I think you already know how you would have answered it.
The second Eleon saw that lonely man staring at an untouched second plate with absolutely no idea who he was or what walking toward that table might cost her.
She had exactly one choice to make in about 3 seconds flat. Run and keep walking home to her soup and her quiet apartment and her safe, ordinary Christmas Eve.
Or stay. Pull out that chair and risk everything on nothing more than the feeling that somebody needed her more than she needed to be safe.
Comment run or stay. Tell me honestly, what would you have done standing outside that window in the freezing cold at minute one before you knew a single thing about who Roman Coldera really was.
I’ll be reading every single answer. Merry Christmas and I’ll see you in the next one.
