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“It’s not your choice to make,” she said. “I want to be here. I want to help.”

“What if that’s not what I want?” The question hadn’t come out the way he’d intended and he rushed to stop her as she yanked her hand from his and hurried ahead. “Elise… that’s not what I meant.”

She turned to face him, her eyes flashing. “That you don’t want me here you mean?”

“Of course I want you here. I always want you with me.”

They were standing in the middle of the sidewalk, forcing pedestrians to shoulder past them. Finn took her hand and led her out of the throng toward a tiny patch of grass visible through a small fence half a block away.

It turned out to be a small green space, one of many hidden parks tucked throughout the city.

He pulled her gently onto one of the iron benches lining the path that wound through the space. “Will you look at me, El?”

She turned to look at him and he almost flinched from the fire in her eyes.

“How can you doubt that I want you with me? I love you. You’re everything to me,” he said.

The set of her shoulders softened. “Then why did you fight me on this? You know it’s not going to be dangerous.”

“First of all, no I don’t. We’ve been hit with a million surprises since this whole thing started.” He hesitated, wanting to choose his words carefully. “Can’t you understand why I wouldn’t want to drag you into this? It’s my problem, my mess.”

She shook her head, her eyes sparking with fresh anger. “Unbelievable.”

“What am I missing here? Why are you so mad? I want to understand,” he said.

“You want everything from me and you give nothing.”

“Wait… I give nothing?” That hurt. He’d given his heart to Elise, his love, far more than he’d ever given any woman.

“That’s not what I meant to say.” She shook her head and stood, pacing away from him across the empty path, shaded by the trees overhead.

“Then what did you mean?” he asked, his frustration threatening to break free.

She turned to face him. “What happened in Ukraine, to Petro and his parents, to you, Finn.”

“Nothing happened to me.” He was getting confused. Confused about the issue at hand.

“It did, Finn. You heard your friends being murdered only a few feet away from where you stood. You had to hide Petro, to keep him safe. But you don’t want to acknowledge that trauma, and you definitely don’t want to let me into it,” she said. “In the meantime, you want to know what happened to me. You want me to tell you things and to let you into the deepest parts of myself.”

He knew she wasn’t just talking about the details of her kidnapping, but what had happened between them in bed the night he’d come home wrecked from the mountain house.

“I never forced you to do anything you didn’t want to do, never forced you to tell me anything,” he said.

She sighed. “No. But you wanted to know, didn’t you?”

“So I could be close to you,” he said. “I thought that’s what it meant to love someone.”

“Exactly, Finn. Exactly.”

He had the sense that he’d walked into a trap. Except it wasn’t a trap.

Elise was just right, plain and simple.

“I used to think you wanted to protect me from everything that had happened in Ukraine, everything you were doing about it since coming home,” she said. “But now I know it was never just about that. It was about protecting yourself too. About keeping me out of the parts that hurt you the most.”

The words were like arrows aimed at his heart. They hurt because they were true.

He’d broken down the night he’d returned from the mountain house, but that hadn’t been a choice. His emotions, bottled up since the moment he realized he’d killed Eudorus, had spilled out of him against his will.

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