Chapter 15 - THE LOCKS HE NEVER CHANGED AGAIN
A year after I walked out of Nico’s penthouse, I stood in front of a different door.
Red brick townhouse.
Small front garden.
No guards in the lobby.
No private elevator.
No cameras tracking every breath I took.
Nico opened the door.
“Hi.”
I lifted the grocery bag in my arms.
“You said you were cooking.”
“I am.”
“That’s why I brought emergency food.”
He looked offended.
I laughed.
We had been seeing each other again for four months.
Slowly.
Painfully sometimes.
There were rules.
No secret decisions involving me.
No gifts worth more than I could comfortably buy myself.
No security changes without telling me.
No disappearing for three days and returning with blood on his shirt.
That last rule had become surprisingly easy once Nico no longer lived the life that made blood on shirts normal.
Vincent’s prosecution and the financial investigations had permanently broken the old organization.
Nico could have fought to rebuild it.
He didn’t.
He kept the legitimate real estate holdings that survived review and built the security company with Arthur.
For the first time in his adult life, his phone could ring after midnight without someone potentially dying.
Arthur called it boring.
Nico called it expensive therapy.
I called it progress.
That night he made pasta.
Badly.
I ate it anyway.
After dinner, he disappeared upstairs and returned carrying something small.
My chest tightened.
“If that’s jewelry—”
“It isn’t.”
He placed an old black titanium card on the table.
The same one I had left inside his safe.
I stared at it.
“I canceled it.”
“Good.”
“I kept it because I wanted to remember what an idiot I was.”
“Also good.”
He turned it over.
A date had been engraved on the back.
The night I left.
12:45 A.M.
Underneath were five words:
THE NIGHT I FINALLY LISTENED.
My eyes burned.
“Nico…”
“I’m not giving it back.”
“Excellent.”
“I’m giving you something else.”
He placed a brass key beside it.
I immediately laughed.
“You really haven’t learned anything.”
His face fell.
Then I saw the label.
MARA’S APARTMENT — SPARE.
I stopped.
“That’s my key.”
“Yes.”
“How did you—”
“You gave it to me three weeks ago when you asked me to water your plants.”
I had forgotten.
He pushed it back toward me.
“I don’t need to keep it.”
I stared at him.
“What?”
“You gave me access because you trusted me in that moment. That doesn’t mean I automatically own access forever.”
Something inside me broke open gently.
No grand speech could have meant more.
I picked up the key.
Then placed it back in his hand.
“Keep it.”
His eyes lifted.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
He closed his fingers around it.
Not possessively.
Carefully.
Later, we sat on the front steps with coffee while Manhattan hummed several miles away.
I rested my head against his shoulder.
Nico kissed my hair.
“I need to tell you something.”
“That sentence used to terrify me.”
“I know.”
“What?”
He looked straight ahead.
“I never changed the locks.”
My throat tightened.
“After I left?”
“No.”
“Why?”
“I kept thinking you might come home.”
I was quiet for a moment.
Then I corrected him.
“That penthouse was never my home.”
He nodded.
“I know that now.”
I looked through the open doorway behind us.
At the modest living room.
At my shoes beside his.
At two mugs on the table.
At a life neither of us had purchased for the other.
“This could be,” I said.
Nico turned toward me.
For once, the most feared man I had ever known didn’t answer with certainty.
He asked.
“Do you want it to be?”
I smiled.
“Yes.”
He kissed me.
No audience.
No diamonds.
No black card.
Just Nico.
And for the first time, that was enough.
A year earlier, he had said he could forget my name in four days.
Instead, losing me forced him to learn something far more difficult.
My name was never the part he needed to remember.
It was the woman attached to it.
May you like
And this time...
He finally saw me.
