Chapter 6 - The Balance Sheet of UsThe sun rose over Boston like a bruised peach, staining the gray harbor water in shades of violet and cold gold.
Back in the forty-second-floor office, the rain had finally stopped, leaving streaks of water running down the floor-to-ceiling glass like tears.
Simon was gone—safely on a morning train to Burlington, Vermont, equipped with a new identity, a padded bank account courtesy of Mercer Holdings, and a very firm understanding that he had hallucinated every single detail of the previous night’s events.
The black ledger sat open on Dominic’s desk.
The office smelled of stale coffee, burnt gunpowder residue from Thomas’s coat, and the faint, familiar scent of an unbranded cigarette.
I stood by the window, wearing my trench coat, holding a paper cup of black coffee I hadn't touched.
Dominic sat behind his desk, staring down at the columns of numbers I had spent four years perfecting.
“You didn't have to keep funding my father’s debts,” I said quietly, breaking the silence that had stretched between us for an hour.
“Your father was a gambler who owed money to men far worse than me,” Dominic replied without looking up. “If I hadn't bought his debt, you would have ended up in a foster home by the time you were thirteen. The math was simple.”
“Everything is math to you, isn't it?” I turned around to face him. “People aren't assets, Dominic. Feelings aren't liabilities.”
Dominic finally closed the ledger.
The sound was softer this time—not a threat, but a conclusion.
He stood up, walking slowly around the desk until he stopped just a few feet away from me. Up close, I could see the fine lines of exhaustion around his eyes, the small scar near his mouth, and the raw, heavy gravity of a man who carried an entire city on his shoulders.
“If feelings weren't liabilities,” Dominic said softly, his voice dropping into that low, ragged register that made my heart skip a beat, “I wouldn't have spent four years watching you walk across this room every morning, terrified that one day you’d look at me and realize you were caged.”
“I was caged,” I whispered, tears finally blurring my vision. “You built a fortress around my entire life.”
“Yes,” Dominic agreed, taking one step closer until I could feel the heat radiating off his chest. “Because the world outside my fortress is full of men like Kenny. And I refused to let anything touch you.”
He reached out.
His warm, calloused fingers brushed gently against my cheek, wiping away a tear I hadn't felt fall.
His touch wasn't cold. It wasn't calculating. It was shaking—just a fraction—revealing the only crack in the armor he had worn his entire life.
“You can leave today, Norah,” Dominic murmured, his thumb tracing the line of my jawline. “The trust fund is legally yours. The Boston accounts are clean. You can take the train to Vermont, find Simon, and live that ordinary life in a quiet little town where no one knows my name.”
I looked up into his dark, searching eyes.
I thought of the Somerville teacher, the crisp autumn leaves, the safe, predictable history books, and the quiet suburban streets where nothing ever happened.
Then I looked at Dominic.
At the man who had watched over me in the dark for fifteen years. At the man who had stood in a freezing warehouse and dared a killer to pull the trigger just to prove a point about math and possession.
I reached up, my hand resting gently against the lapel of his charcoal suit coat, feeling the solid, heavy rhythm of his heart beneath my palm.
“Ordinary looks very boring, Dominic,” I whispered.
A slow, rare, devastatingly handsome smile broke across his face—the first real smile I had ever seen him wear.
“It is,” he said, pulling me against him until there was no space left between our worlds. “Fortunately, you never were very good at math anyway.”
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And as his lips met mine in the gray morning light above the Boston harbor, I realized I didn't want to balance the ledger anymore.
Some debts were worth spending the rest of your life paying off.
