His eyes lifted to yours.
The air changed.
“Then you stay because you choose to,” he said. “Not because I bought your gratitude. Not because my mother loves you. Not because your brother needs doctors. Because you want to.”
Your heart began to beat too fast.
“And what do you want?”
Roman went very still.
For a man who commanded rooms, cities, and monsters, he looked almost unprepared for the question.
“I want things I have no right to want,” he said.
You should have stepped back.
You stepped closer.
“Say it anyway.”
His gaze dropped to your mouth, then returned to your eyes with brutal discipline.
“I want to know what your laugh sounds like when it isn’t hiding pain. I want to see you sleep without fear. I want every door that was closed to you opened before you touch the handle.” His voice roughened. “And God help me, Iris, I want you in my home for reasons that have nothing to do with debt.”
Your breath caught.
The stairwell felt too small.
You whispered, “Roman.”
He closed his eyes for half a second, as if your voice hurt him.
“I will not touch you while you are vulnerable,” he said. “I will not make myself another thing you survive.”
That was when you realized the most dangerous thing about Roman Cross was not his power.
It was his restraint.
Weeks passed.
Liam improved.
Slowly at first, then enough that color returned to his face and sarcasm returned to his mouth. He teased the nurses. He complained about hospital food. He asked Elena if she was secretly the boss of the family, and Elena smiled over her tea and said, “Only when my son forgets himself.”
You found yourself laughing more.
Not loudly. Not freely. Not yet.
But enough that Roman noticed every time.
You started working with Elena during the day, not as a caretaker exactly, though that was what Roman had first suggested. Elena refused to be treated like a fragile antique. Instead, she had you help organize her charity foundation, which funded clinics in neighborhoods where people were used to being ignored.
“You understand what people need before they ask,” Elena told you one afternoon. “That is rarer than money.”
“I don’t know anything about running a foundation.”
“Good,” she said. “You have not learned how to make compassion inefficient.”
So you learned.
You reviewed applications. You called clinics. You helped families fill out forms that looked designed to humiliate them. For the first time, your pain became useful in a way that did not require bleeding.
