The cut is three inches long and not as serious as it looked in the alley.
I know this because I've been staring at it for the last four minutes while I work through Sloan's first aid kit. The one she keeps under the bathroom sink between a broken diffuser and a bottle of dry shampoo from 2019.
Beckett is sitting on a kitchen stool with his forearm extended across the counter and his shirt gone. The sleeve was ruined and I needed better access, even though neither of those reasons fully explains why I haven't looked above his collarbone since we walked through the door.
He is, objectively, a problem. The kind of problem that arrives without warning and sits in your kitchen at midnight looking like that, and the decent thing would be to simply not notice.
I notice.
The wound is shallow. A clean pull from the blade's edge, already clotting at both ends, the skin around it red and angry but holding. I press a dampened cloth to the center and he doesn't flinch.
"You can tell me if it hurts," I say.
"It doesn't." He watches my hands. "Have you done this before?"
"My grandmother is the clumsiest person alive."
I blot the blood with more gauze and try, with genuine effort and zero success, not to notice the way his forearm is warm under my fingers, the muscle underneath shifting when I press. The skin there is smooth and I am absolutely not thinking about what the rest of him feels like.
"So I got good at this early," I add.
Don't look up. Don't look up. Don't look up.
My hands stay on his forearm and I keep my eyes on the wound, reminding myself that the adrenaline still humming through my bloodstream is not the same thing as permission.
It's just biology. It's just the fact that he smells like cedar and warm skin and I have been standing close enough to know that for four minutes now and my brain has started doing things I did not authorize.
In the alley, his body was in front of mine before I'd finished flinching.
I replay it like you replay things your nervous system refuses to file away. The figure coming fast from between the buildings. The flash of metal. The split-second calculation Beckett made that put him between me and a blade before I'd registered the threat as real.
My first coherent thought was not relief. It was a cold, clarifying certainty.
Gary would have stepped behind me.
His instinct has always been to preserve Gary first, and everything else is logistics. Beckett bled for me. For a woman who slapped him forty minutes before.
I tape the gauze down, pressing the edges flat, and I try to decide what to do with the fact that the most protected I have felt in years happened in a dark street at midnight next to a man I don't fully trust.
"The marriage is arranged." He says it without a preamble.
Just the sentence, dropped into the quiet kitchen like he's been holding it in his mouth since the alley and the blood finally gave him a reason to put it down.
I don't move my hands from his arm. "Okay."
"My father set it up. He told me that if I refused the engagement, he'd pull his board seats. This would block the Pryce acquisition indefinitely." He pauses, and I watch his jaw move before the next words come. "I left before dessert."
I look up at that. He is watching the far wall, not me, his profile sharp in the overhead light. This close, I can see the faint tension along his jaw, the way his throat moves when he swallows.
I look back at the bandage. "He can actually do that? Block the acquisition?"
"He holds enough board seats." A muscle ticks in his jaw. "So yes."
"And you walked out anyway."
"I sat through the appetizers and the entree and a conversation about coastal expansion strategy with a woman who agreed with everything I said, and then I decided I'd rather lose the acquisition than spend another forty minutes performing." He finally looks at me. "So yes. I walked out anyway."
The woman who agreed with everything he said.
I tuck the thought away and strip off the latex gloves. "What does your mother think about the arrangement?"
The question lands differently than I intend it to. I watch the shift happen behind his eyes — the careful composure he maintains like structural load-bearing, something essential redistributing when the right word hits the right point.
"My mother," he says, "has been with my father for thirty years."
"And?"
"They perform the marriage." He looks back at the far wall. His hand turns palm-up on the counter. "Public events, family dinners, the right photographs at the right charity functions. At home they keep different floors, different schedules."
The kitchen hums around us. The refrigerator, the drip of the faucet I haven't tightened since I arrived. The space between his shoulder and mine is approximately four inches and I am aware of every millimeter of it.
"She stayed," I say.
"She stayed." His thumb moves against the counter, a slow back-and-forth. "I spent a long time being furious with her for it. Then I grew up and understood that leaving a man like my father takes resources and nerve." He stops the movement of his thumb. "I decided that I would never offer a woman a life that required her to hollow out to fit inside it."
And so he never offered anyone a life at all.
His rotation of women is not selfishness. He does this to keep everyone at the exact distance that ensures no one stays long enough to need anything from him.
We built the same wall from opposite sides and ended up sealed inside the same room, and I don't know whether to find that funny or terrifying.
He looks at me then, and the distance between us across the counter is not very far. His eyes drop to my mouth for exactly one second before they come back up, and that one second does more damage than everything else combined.
I think about the kitchen at his estate, the candlelight, his mouth slow and careful against mine and the warmth of his palm against my face. I think about pulling back, and the look on his face after — just waiting.
I think about what it would feel like not to pull back. I think about it with a specificity that would embarrass me if he could see inside my head, which, given the way he's looking at me right now, I'm not entirely sure he can't.
"You should go," I say. "It's late, and the cut is fine. Sloan will be back soon."
"Will she?"
It isn't a question. His eyes hold mine with the steady, unhurried attention that has been quietly dismantling my defenses since the night in the parking garage.
He hasn't moved. He just sits there being exactly as warm and solid and present as he has been all night, and my self-control is doing its level best and losing.
"Beckett…"
"You don't want me to leave." His voice is even. Low enough that I feel it somewhere below my sternum. "You've been standing twelve inches from me for the last minute when you could have stepped back after the bandage was done. And you haven't."
He's right. I haven't.
The adrenaline from the alley is still in my blood. And the image of his back — broad and warm and between me and a knife — refuses to move from the front of my mind no matter what I put in front of it.
I close the distance between us and finally kiss him.
His hands come up the moment I move — both of them, finding my face with the same gentleness as the first time — and when he kisses me back, I don't wait for permission and I don't leave room to reconsider.
He tastes like whiskey and something I've been trying not to want for weeks. The moment his mouth opens against mine I stop being careful about any of it.
The sound that moves through his chest when I press forward is the most honest thing I have heard in years. His bandaged arm wraps carefully around my back, and his other hand slides into my hair.