The warmth hit first, a dense, dry wash over her rain-chilled skin. The hallway's chill vanished under recessed lights and expensive air: citrus and faint smoke, like a fire that never burned long enough to stain anything. Water dripped from her hair into the collar of her shirt, cold trickles sliding down her spine. Behind her, the soft click of the door sealed the night out.
She cataloged the room on instinct: open space, floor-to-ceiling glass, the dark blur of the city beyond, a hallway to her left, a short corridor to what had to be a kitchen.
Julian moved past her, not touching, close enough that the heat of his body skimmed her arm. The living room unfolded in clean lines and deep colors, low couches, glass and steel that did not show fingerprints. Now that they were inside, she saw the details Liam never described. No clutter. No photographs. Nothing left lying around that could be used as a weapon.
Her gaze tracked the balcony doors, the elevator wall they had come from, the far exit that might lead to a service stair. When Julian reached for her coat, his hand cut through the air quicker than her nerves could manage.
Her muscles snapped tight. The flinch ripped through her before she could stop it, a jolt from wrist to jaw. She stepped back, heel catching on the thick rug, wet fabric sucking at her skin. The sound of her breath came harsh in her ears, loud against the low hum of the building.
Julian halted. His fingers hovered inches from her shoulder, then retreated as if he had touched an invisible fence. He did not apologize. He only studied her, head tilted the slightest degree, then deliberately slowed, movements stretched, each shift of his body telegraphed, unhurried, unthreatening.
"I will not touch you unless you tell me to," he said. His voice had texture, a roughness under the smooth.
He stepped to the side, creating space that still managed to feel like a boundary. "You are soaked. Sit, or you will get sick."
The command in sit brushed over her skin, soft and steel at once. She swallowed against the taste of rain in her throat and nodded. When she finally shrugged free of the heavy coat, the sleeve dragged up, wet fabric scraping over her wrist, baring skin she had been careful to hide.
His gaze caught there. Heat crawled along the path of it, stinging where the bruise lived. The mark was obscene against her pale skin, a band of angry purple and red, edges smudged where Liam's fingers had shifted. Exactly two inches wide. She knew that because she had measured it in the bathroom mirror with the edge of her comb, teeth pressed in, counting quietly, as if numbers could turn it into data instead of proof. Under Julian's attention, the bruise seemed to swell, her pulse beating against the swelling, a hot, synchronized throb that made her feel exposed all the way to bone.
Julian did not move closer. His eyes lifted from her wrist to her face. The silence stretched.
"Did he hurt you?"
The words were stripped down to bone, nothing added, nothing softened. They landed in her chest with a dull shock. Air burned in her lungs. His cologne, her damp wool, everything wrapped around the memory of Liam's hand slamming into place. Her throat tried to close. Sound refused to come, stuck behind the old training: smile for the cameras, call it an accident, never use his name.
She made herself look at Julian. Concrete gray eyes, unreadable. The bruise throbbed again. Her body answered before her mouth could betray anyone.
She nodded. Once, small, like a guilty admission.
Something flickered across Julian's face, fast and raw, a flash of teeth without an actual smile, the animal in a man who had done careful work to keep it leashed. It vanished almost as soon as it formed, his features smoothing into something that might have been calm if she had not seen the fracture first. The air shifted. The room felt charged, as if the storm outside had slipped in under the door.
Julian reached into his pocket. The move was unhurried, but she still felt every inch of it. Her skin prickled. For one dizzy second, she pictured metal catching light in his palm, the clean, mechanical sound of a slide being racked. Instead there was only the quiet scrape of his phone against fabric. He glanced at the screen, jaw working once.
She tasted acid at the back of her mouth.
"Julian," she started, voice rough from disuse, the syllables scraping her tongue. "Please, do not, he will find me, he always finds me."
The confession slipped out, ragged and too loud in the hushed room. He looked at her as the phone rang. It was not a comforting look. It pinned. It said stay without words. The faint click as the call connected, the distant rush of someone breathing on the other end. Her pulse hammered in her bruised wrist, in her throat, and in the soles of her feet pressing into the plush rug.
Julian spoke, three words. "She's with me now."
No explanation. No name. He ended the call immediately, thumb tapping the screen, the finality of it louder than any slammed door.
The silence that followed felt different. Not emptier. Denser. Her ears picked up the muted hiss of the HVAC, the distant wail of a siren from streets far below, the soft drip of water from her clothes onto his pristine floor. She could not seem to get a clean breath. He had not said Liam's name, but the message had gone somewhere, to someone who would carry it to him like a lit match. She would appear on Liam's radar as missing, then claimed. Not lost. Taken.
The knowledge slid into place with cold precision. Something inside her unclenched. Terror. Relief. Both at once. She had not been offered safety. She had been claimed as territory.
She wanted to rewind, to find a version of the night where she stayed on the train, where she called anyone else. Each image broke apart under the reality standing in front of her: the man who had just drawn a line across a battlefield she did not understand. Julian put his phone away as if nothing monumental had occurred. There was no going back to hiding at Liam's side, smoothing makeup over bruises, telling herself survival meant silence.
She was no longer just running. She had stepped between brothers, and in doing it, she had become a weapon.