The first time I saw Raphael Luminari, he was a shadow on frosted glass, pounding on my locked clinic door like the night itself was chasing him across Highway 26.

It was 10:45 p.m. in the middle of nowhere, Oregon, United States of America. My veterinary clinic sat alone under a strip of pine trees and stars, twenty miles from the nearest hospital and at least an hour from the kind of trouble that usually made the evening news. Or so I’d thought.

The pounding shook the door again, harder this time, rattling the “OPEN” sign I’d already flipped to “CLOSED.”

“Clinic’s closed!” I shouted, my hand frozen on the deadbolt. “Emergency hospital’s fifteen miles north, off the freeway!”

For a beat, there was nothing. Then a sound reached me through the glass, low and raw and too broken to be anything but real.

“Please.”

The single word was hoarse, threaded with pain, the kind of sound that crawls under your skin and sits right against your conscience. Every safety lecture, every true crime podcast I’d ever half-listened to while doing late-night paperwork started screaming in my head: Do not open the door. Call the sheriff. Lock up.

Instead, I stepped closer.

Through the frosted pane, I made out a tall, swaying silhouette. Broad shoulders. The shape of a hand braced against the doorframe. The next moment, the glass smeared dark where he slid down to one knee.

My medical brain kicked in and steamrolled my common sense.

“Are you hurt?” I called.

A humorless huff of breath. “Thinking of writing a complaint to the Oregon tourism board, but yes. Hurt.”

Sarcasm. That was something.

I unlocked the door.

He almost fell through it.

I’m five foot five on a good day, one hundred and thirty pounds if you count my boots. The man collapsing into my arms was at least six three, all muscle and dead weight, and very little of this situation was compatible with OSHA guidelines. I stumbled, caught his wrist, and somehow managed to steer him toward the nearest exam table.

That’s when I saw the blood.

His white dress shirt—what was left of it—was soaked a deep, ugly red from the left shoulder down. Not a scrape. Not a cut. A spreading, pulsing stain. His other hand pressed over the injury, fingers slick.

“Bullet,” he gritted out, breathing hard. “Left shoulder. Through and through. I think.”

“You think?” My voice came out thinner than I liked. “You’re not sure?”

“Hard to double-check when people are shooting at you on the highway.”

That word—shooting—hit like a cold slap. This wasn’t a bar fight. This wasn’t some drunk hunter nicking himself in the woods. This was a different category of problem entirely.

Up close, the details came into focus with sharp, almost ridiculous clarity. The shirt wasn’t just expensive; it was custom. The trousers were tailored and ruined, flecked with dried mud and darker stains. His shoes were Italian leather and currently tracking a trail of blood across my clean floor.

His face, though—his face was what stuck with me. Olive-toned skin gone too pale, a faint shadow of stubble, a cut along his brow already crusted. At odds with all that careful tailoring were fresh bruises along his ribs, scraped knuckles, and eyes like polished ice—sharp, unnervingly clear, and fixed on me.

“You’re a doctor?” he asked, teeth gritted.

“Veterinarian,” I said, moving into motion. “Which means technically you’re my first human patient, so congratulations. If you’ve got a preference on anesthesia… now is an excellent time.”

Something that tried to be a laugh escaped him and ended up halfway to a groan. “You’re joking.”

“Humor stops me from panicking.” I snapped on gloves, cut away the shredded shirt, and swallowed hard at the sight beneath. Bullet entry front, exit back. High in the shoulder muscle, missing bone and major vessels by what had to be millimeters. “You’re incredibly lucky.”

“Been told that,” he muttered. “Usually right before something explodes.”

“This is going to hurt,” I warned, irrigating the wound with saline. He hissed, but didn’t move.

“What’s your name?”

He watched my hands like he was used to judging people by what they did under pressure, not what they said. “Raphael.”

“Last name?”

A beat. “Does it matter?”

“You’re bleeding on my table in rural Oregon, I’m about to fish around inside your shoulder with equipment meant for Labrador retrievers, and you might have brought whoever shot you straight to my front door,” I said crisply. “Yeah. It matters.”

The corner of his mouth twitched. “Luminari.”

The name landed with a faint echo of familiarity, like something I’d seen once in a headline I hadn’t fully read. West Coast. Family-owned import businesses. Political donations. That kind of thing. Rich people noise, far away from my world of barn cats and border collies.

He held my gaze. “Just Raphael is fine.”

“Valentina,” I said automatically. “Dr. Valentina Cruz. You can skip the ‘doctor’ since I’m… very much pushing the limits of my license right now.”

I numbed the area as best I could with local anesthetic, then started stitching. My hands steadied the way they always did under a bright light with a life on the line. It didn’t matter that he was human instead of a golden retriever. It didn’t matter that someone out there had put a bullet in his shoulder on a US highway like this was an action movie. Right now he was a patient. That was simple.

“Tell me about the people looking for you,” I said, eyes on the wound.

“The less you know, the safer you are.”

“The man bleeding all over my exam table doesn’t get to make that call,” I snapped. “If they come here, I need to know what I’m dealing with.”

A long pause. Then, grimly, “Business associates. Disagreement got… heated.”

“Business associates don’t usually settle disagreements with bullets,” I said.

“Mine do.”

That honesty—flat, unapologetic—sent a chill down my spine that had nothing to do with the air conditioning kicking on. I didn’t stop stitching.

Halfway through the second suture, my dog exploded into the room.

Thor, eighty pounds of German Shepherd and unresolved trauma from the illegal fighting ring I’d dragged him out of two years ago, skidded into the doorway. Hackles up. Teeth bared. A low growl rumbled out of him like distant thunder.

Raphael’s reaction was instant. His good hand jerked toward his waistband, toward something he clearly wasn’t supposed to have in my clinic. His body twisted, tearing my stitches, fresh blood welling.

“Stop,” I snapped. “Thor, sit!”

Thor obeyed, but his gaze stayed locked on Raphael, ears forward, every muscle coiled.

My patient went completely still. His hand drifted away from whatever weapon he’d been reaching for. His jaw flexed once.

“Your guard dog?” he asked quietly.

“My friend,” I corrected. I pressed fresh gauze to his shoulder and felt him grit his teeth under my palm. “Breathe through it. I need to redo those stitches, and it will hurt worse the second time.”

Thor studied us for another long, tense moment.

Then, astonishingly, he padded forward, sniffed Raphael’s knee, and lay down beside the exam table. Right at his feet. Like he’d made a decision.

My throat went tight. “He doesn’t trust people,” I said, more to myself than to Raphael. “It took him three months to let me touch him after I pulled him out of that ring.”

Raphael’s fingers slid cautiously into Thor’s fur. The dog let him.

“Smart dog,” Raphael murmured. “Terrible judge of character, apparently.”

Almost a smile. Almost.

Twenty-three stitches later, the bullet wound was closed. Not my prettiest work, but it would hold. I changed the bandage, counted his breaths, and noticed the too-warm heat of his skin. Fever flirting at the edges. Shock not far behind.

“You need antibiotics, rest, and a very real hospital,” I said. “I’m guessing we’re one for three.”

“Can’t go to a hospital.” He tried to stand, swayed, and nearly pitched off the table. I grabbed his good arm and we ended up too close, his breath warm against my cheek, the faint scent of cedar and expensive cologne under the copper of blood.

“You can’t go anywhere,” I said firmly, stepping back before I did something stupid. “It’s almost eleven. Where exactly are you planning to run while the people who shot you cruise around rural Oregon looking for a man bleeding from the shoulder?”

He glanced toward the dark windows. No streetlights out here. Just the glow of my signage and the endless shadow of trees.

“Anywhere but here,” he said. “I don’t want them finding you because of me.”

“Too late,” I muttered.

I thought fast. “If you stay, I can say you’re my cousin visiting from out of state who had a hiking accident. You slipped on a trail, smashed into a rock. Something boring and American.”

“You’d lie for me?” he asked.

“I’d lie to keep more armed men from shooting up my clinic,” I said. “Apartment’s through that door. There’s a couch. You’ve got seven hours until my assistant shows up at six. You’re gone before then, or we’re having a very different kind of conversation.”

He studied me with those cool blue eyes that had seen far too much. Then he nodded once.

“Understood.”

He swallowed the antibiotics and pain pills dry, like he was used to forcing his body to cooperate by sheer willpower. As I watched him limp through the door into my tiny attached apartment—with Thor trotting after him like they’d made some silent pact—I had the sudden, sinking sense that I’d just stepped off a cliff I hadn’t seen the edge of.

I was proven right when I heard his voice through the wall.

Low. Controlled. Speaking into a phone I hadn’t seen him pull.

“They found me on Highway 26,” he said. “Had to bail near Forest Grove. I’m secure for now, but I need a cleanup crew and protective detail. There’s a civilian involved. A veterinarian. She helped me.”

A pause. My heart hammered.

“No,” Raphael added. “She doesn’t know anything. Didn’t ask the right questions. But they might have seen me come here.”

Another pause. Then, steel in his tone: “Do whatever you need to do to keep her safe. She’s not part of this.”

I moved to the window, lifting the blinds just enough to see.

The road outside was empty, dark, quiet.

Until it wasn’t.

A black SUV glided past my driveway, lights off. It paused exactly at the turn-in to my clinic, engine idling, windows tinted so dark they looked like holes in the world. It sat there, watching, for a full five seconds before rolling on.

I let the blinds fall.

Sleep didn’t really happen after that.

By five-thirty, Raphael was in my kitchen making coffee like he lived there.

“You should be unconscious,” I said, standing in yesterday’s jeans with my hair in a battle ponytail.

“Couldn’t sleep,” he said, pouring coffee into two chipped mugs. “Guilt. Pain. Take your pick.”

The domesticity of it would’ve been funny if it weren’t so surreal—this dangerous stranger, still fever-warm, wearing a clean T-shirt from my donation bin and moving around my kitchen like he’d done it a hundred times.

“You need more antibiotics,” I said.

“Already took them at three.” He leaned against the counter, eyes flicking to the front door every time a car passed on the road outside. “Skipped the pain meds. Need to stay sharp.”

“You didn’t answer my question last night,” I said, accepting the mug and ignoring how our fingers brushed. “Who’s actually after you?”

Before he could reply, keys clinked in the front lock.

I’d forgotten to reset it.

My assistant, Camila, breezed into the clinic, chattering about Portland traffic and Pacific Northwest rain, stopped dead when she saw a six-three stranger in my kitchenette, and went wide-eyed.

“Val,” she whispered, not nearly quietly enough, “are you finally dating?”

“My cousin,” I said quickly. “From Brazil. Visiting. This is Raphael.”

His accent slid effortlessly into Brazilian Portuguese as he greeted her, because of course it did. He even managed a shy smile that made him look less like an apex predator and more like someone’s charming relative.

Camila relaxed. A little.

“What happened to your arm?” she asked.

“Hiking accident,” he said smoothly. “Very stupid.”

I shot him a look that promised consequences later.

“I fixed him up,” I said. “He’s fine. And leaving before we open.”

“Of course,” he agreed. “I don’t want to be in the way.”

The universe has a savage sense of timing. Ten minutes later, a man in a black suit walked in through the back door without so much as a knock.

He moved like Raphael—controlled, deliberate, the kind of person who notices every exit the second he steps into a room. Silver threaded his dark hair. His expression didn’t change when he saw me.

“Boss,” he said.

The word hit like another bullet.

“Franco,” Raphael acknowledged.

“Came through the service road,” Franco said. “No one saw. You need to see this, Dr. Cruz.”

He held out his phone.

A photo. A man’s body on asphalt, blurred enough that my brain skated over the worst of it. In his jacket pocket, half-visible, was one of my business cards.

Franco swiped. Another photo—my clinic, taken from a car at night.

“They know he came here,” Franco said. “They’ll come looking for you. That card is proof.”

As if he’d summoned them, headlights swept across the front windows. A black SUV pulled up and parked right in front of the clinic, engine running.

Raphael moved faster than his shoulder should’ve allowed, pulling me behind the reception desk in one smooth motion, his body a solid wall between me and the windows. Franco disappeared toward the back, hand inside his suit jacket.

“Stay quiet,” Raphael murmured. “Don’t move.”

Two men climbed out of the SUV. Through the blinds, I saw dark jackets, broad shoulders, no visible logos. They looked like every vague threat you don’t want near your business.

The knock was heavy, insistent.

I forced my voice to stay level. “We’re not open yet.”

“We’re looking for someone,” one of them said, accent thick, Eastern European. “Man injured in accident last night. We heard there was a clinic here.”

“This is a veterinary clinic,” I said, keeping irritation in my voice because that was safer than fear. “I don’t treat people.”

“Maybe you made exception,” he said, flashing a smile that didn’t come close to his eyes. “For friend.”

“I don’t have friends who get shot,” I snapped. “Try the emergency room in Forest Grove. They’re used to patching up idiots.”

A silence. Then the second man pulled out a phone, showed me a photo through the glass.

Raphael. Uninjured. In a tux, somewhere that screamed federal-tax-bracket problems. Looking like he fully expected the world to move when he did.

“You see this man?” the guy asked.

“No,” I said, and lied smoother than I’d ever lied in my life.

He slid a plain white card through the crack at the bottom of the door. Just a phone number, black ink.

“If you see, you call,” he said. “Right away.”

I took the card and smiled like a woman with nothing to hide.

They stared at the building, at my car, at the windows, then finally drove away. Slowly. Deliberately.

“They’ll be back,” Raphael said quietly when the sound of the engine faded.

“Then you need to leave now,” I said. “Take your mysterious war and go.”

He shook his head. “If I disappear, they assume you helped me. They already have your card. They already have photos. They come back looking for you anyway.”

“So what exactly are you suggesting?” I demanded. “That I go on the run with you? I have patients, Raphael. A business. A life.”

“Forty-eight hours,” he said. “You come with me. Let my people protect you and your clinic. After that, Versani will have bigger problems than one veterinarian.”

“Versani?” I repeated.

His eyes cooled. “The man who wants Portland. And me.”

Franco stepped forward. “Dr. Cruz, with respect, whether you helped the boss or not, you’re involved now. They found your card on a dead man. That doesn’t go away.”

It wasn’t fair. I had opened my door like any decent person would. I’d saved a life. Now there were SUVs and men with accents and a dead body holding my business card.

Thor padded over, sat firmly at Raphael’s feet, and leaned into his leg like he’d already chosen.

Traitor.

“Forty-eight hours,” I said at last, my voice tighter than I wanted. “Not a minute more.”

Three black SUVs idled on the dirt service road behind my clinic half an hour later. My entire life fit into one duffel bag and a backpack. Thor jumped into the middle vehicle without hesitation, circled twice, and flopped down like he’d been born into this.

Raphael slid into the seat beside me. Franco drove. Another SUV led, another followed. A convoy, like I’d seen on US news channels whenever some politician visited a city.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“My property,” Raphael said. “North. Cascade Mountains. Isolated. Protected.”

“You mean a fortress,” I said.

He met my gaze. “I mean safe. For both of us.”

The sky slid from gray to deep blue as we drove. Small Oregon towns flickered past and vanished. Pines rose taller. Civilization thinned. Raphael made calls in Italian, his voice low, rolling through the language like he’d been born in Naples and raised in the Pacific Northwest at the same time.

When he finally hung up, I asked, “Who is he really? This Versani.”

“Runs operations from Seattle to Sacramento,” Raphael said calmly. “Or did, until he decided Portland was worth starting a war over.”

“And you run Portland,” I said slowly. “Your family.”

“For sixty years,” he said. “Since my grandfather landed at JFK with a suitcase, took a bus across the country, and decided the West Coast was where our line would rise.”

There it was—the American angle. The immigrant story the news loved. The kind no one watching from a couch in Ohio or Florida ever really believed ended like this.

“We have rules,” Raphael added. “We don’t touch children. We don’t trade people. We keep certain things out of our neighborhoods. Not everyone in our world agrees.”

“Vertani doesn’t,” I guessed.

“He aligned with a Russian group that doesn’t care about rules,” Raphael said. “They want the ports. The highways. The money. I said no. They started a war.”

The words were matter-of-fact, not theatrical. That somehow made them worse.

“And you?” I asked. “Do you regret choosing this… business?”

He was quiet long enough that I almost repeated myself.

“I regret what it costs,” he said finally. “But when my grandfather died, two hundred families depended on us for work and safety, and my uncle was going to sell them all to the highest bidder. I was twenty-two. Young enough to still believe I could fix things. Old enough to know someone had to.”

“Congratulations,” I said softly. “You’re the most complicated emergency patient I’ve ever had.”

The road narrowed into what looked like a private drive, no sign, no mailbox, just tire tracks leading deeper into the forest. Ten minutes later, gates appeared—tall wrought iron between stone pillars, cameras winking in the trees. They opened silently.

The estate beyond looked like it belonged in a glossy West Coast lifestyle magazine. Glass. Stone. A sweeping view over a valley under a vast American sky. Security men stood at subtle posts. Sensors were buried so neatly I only recognized them because I have an unfortunate talent for worrying.

A woman waited at the top of the steps.

She was maybe late twenties. Dark hair pulled tight, ice blue eyes like Raphael’s. Tailored pants, silk blouse. Everything about her said law school and power.

“Rafa,” she said, her voice cool and controlled. “You brought a civilian into the house.”

“Lucia,” he said, embracing her carefully. “This is Dr. Valentina Cruz. She saved my life. And she’s in danger because of it.”

Lucia’s gaze felt like a scan. “The veterinarian.”

“Yes,” I said. “As of three days ago, I also apparently run an underground trauma center.”

“At least she’s honest,” Lucia murmured. “Come inside. We need to talk about how to keep you alive.”

What followed felt like stepping into someone else’s life, someone who read about organized crime in the US on their phone instead of bandaging it in their exam room.

There was dinner at a long table while Raphael and his captains discussed strategy like it was a corporate board meeting—territories instead of markets, patrols instead of sales teams. There was Lucia asking if I knew how to shoot (no) and suggesting I learn (also no). There was a guest suite the size of my entire clinic apartment, with clothes in the closet I hadn’t owned ten minutes earlier.

There was Raphael knocking softly on my door so I could redo his bandage, his eyes closing briefly as my fingers brushed the edges of the wound.

“Thank you,” he said quietly. “For all of this. Even the yelling.”

“Don’t thank me until you survive the week,” I said. “And stop tearing out my stitches.”

Our eyes met and held for a moment too long.

Then Thor barked, the spell broke, and he retreated with a half-smile and a “Sleep well, Valentina.”

I didn’t.

By the time sunlight poured over the mountains, I understood two things with brutal clarity: one, this man could get me killed. Two, he’d already gotten under my skin.

Over the next forty-eight hours, everything spiraled faster than my brain could keep up, the way it always does in those wild US true-crime stories people binge with popcorn.

I saw Raphael at his most human—cooking breakfast like his Neapolitan grandmother taught him, talking about the grandmother who’d crossed an ocean through Ellis Island and the grandfather who’d carved out a piece of the American dream with blood and stubbornness. I told him about my own parents, who’d come from Brazil, worked themselves sick to see me graduate from Oregon State, and then died on a slick US freeway because a stranger chose to drink and drive.

We talked in the library, surrounded by books that proved he was more than a stereotype—Dostoevsky, history, economics, law. We shared truths we didn’t tell other people: his exhaustion; my loneliness.

We also argued. Hard.

Especially when I discovered, via a stray text on Franco’s phone at midnight, that I had been part of a plan from the beginning.

Operation MOUSETRAP, the message thread called it. Subject Cruz established as Luminari weakness. Phase Three: use subject as bait to draw out enemy.

Boss confirms veterinarian acceptable collateral.

I confronted Raphael in his own kitchen, wearing his T-shirt and shaking with betrayal. He didn’t try to deny it.

“It started that way,” he said hoarsely. “Strategy. Then I called it off. Yesterday morning. You stopped being leverage.”

“Convenient timing,” I said. “Right after we—”

He flinched. “It was before that. Valentina, look at me.”

I didn’t want to. I did anyway.

“I won’t lie and tell you I’m a good man,” he said. “I will tell you this: what I feel for you now is not strategy. It terrifies me, but it’s real.”

The awful part? I believed him.

The stupid part? It didn’t matter.

“I’m leaving,” I said. “Tomorrow. You can send an escort. You can send the whole cast of an FBI show for all I care. But I’m going home.”

He didn’t argue.

A few hours later, in classic American cable-news fashion, everything exploded.

Literally.

On the twisting mountain road back toward my clinic, the lead SUV in our convoy blew apart with a flash and a roar. The shock wave slammed through our vehicle. Gunfire erupted. A black van boxed us in. Men in tactical gear appeared out of the trees like the world’s worst reality show surprise.

“Down,” Raphael barked, throwing his body over mine as the rear windshield shattered.

Someone shouted in Russian. A canister bounced across the floor. There was a bang like the world shattering, a white flash that swallowed sound and sense. Hands grabbed me, a cloth pressed over my mouth, a sweet chemical burn in my lungs.

The last thing I saw was Raphael fighting like a cornered animal, blood streaming down his face, trying to reach me while Franco held him back—because if he broke free, they’d both die.

I woke up in what every US crime show uses when they want you to know things are bad: a concrete warehouse with fluorescent lights and no windows.

My wrists were zip-tied behind my back. My head pounded. Two armed guards watched me from across the room. A man in a suit crouched down in front of me.

He had movie-villain cheekbones and eyes that never warmed.

“Dr. Cruz,” he said in smooth English. “I’m Adriano Moratoni. We’ve heard so much about you.”

“Can’t say the same,” I rasped, even as ice crawled along my spine.

“We’ve been watching since the night you patched up Luminari on that quiet little highway in Oregon,” he said, pulling up photos on his phone as casually as if he were scrolling social media. “You made quite an impression. On him. On us. On our employer.”

“Your employer being the man who wants Portland,” I said.

“And more,” Adriano replied. “Sergio Versani is expanding. America loves a success story, yes?”

He sauntered away, took a call, barked orders in Russian and Italian. While he was distracted, I worked at the zip ties. Veterinary school doesn’t technically prepare you for hostage situations, but it does teach you how to free your hands without losing fingers when a panicked dog gets tangled in something.

Pain burned through my wrists. Blood slicked my skin. The plastic cut deep, then finally gave.

I kept my hands where they were, pretending I was still bound.

Hours ticked by, measured in footsteps and phone calls and the ache in my shoulders. My mind settled into the high, cold place it goes during surgery. Assess. Plan. Don’t assume someone’s coming to save you; be ready if they do.

When the opening came, it was small and stupid. Adriano started yelling into his phone. One guard moved over to him. The other looked just slightly away.

I bolted.

The loading dock door was twenty feet away. It might as well have been twenty miles. My legs were numb, my balance off, but adrenaline is a powerful drug. Fingers brushed cold metal. Hope flared—

An arm snagged around my waist, yanking me backward.

I slammed my elbow into a rib cage and heard a grunt, but the guard didn’t let go.

And then the world ruptured.

The door I’d been grabbing was ripped off its hinges with a metallic scream. Men in tactical gear surged through the gap, weapons raised. The sound of gunfire cracked through the warehouse, deafening.

At the front of them, eyes burning, shoulder strapped, hair matted with dried blood, was Raphael.

He saw me.

The whole chaotic space narrowed to a single line of sight. His focus locked on where the guard had me in a chokehold. His jaw flexed.

“Down!” he shouted.

I dropped. The guard behind me hesitated; by the time he adjusted his aim, one of Raphael’s men had already taken him down.

Adriano lunged, grabbed me, and hauled me up again, this time holding me in front of him like a shield, a gun cold against my temple.

“One more step, Luminari,” he shouted, “and your veterinarian becomes a memory.”

Raphael stopped. His men stopped. It was like someone hit pause on a very violent movie.

“Let her go,” Raphael said, voice flat. “This ends one of two ways. You die quick, or you die slow.”

“I choose option three,” Adriano sneered. “I walk out of here with the girl. You let me go, the building doesn’t blow, and everybody lives happily ever after. Don’t Americans love those stories?”

He held up a small device with his free hand. A trigger. Of course.

“Buildings wired,” he said. “You shoot, I drop this, you all go to heaven together.”

The smoke alarms started wailing as a small fire in the back flared higher. Someone shouted about flames in the southeast corner.

While every eye in the room tracked the glowing orange, I did the only thing I could: I went limp, dropping my full weight.

Adriano’s hold slipped just a fraction. The gun shifted away from my head for one heartbeat.

Raphael’s shot was clean.

Adriano spun, the trigger flying out of his hand. Raphael moved, shoulder screaming, and caught it before it hit the concrete. Three more shots, center mass. Adriano went down, eyes wide in shock.

Flames roared higher.

“Out, now!” Raphael yelled.

Smoke turned the air into something thick and clawing. He grabbed me, pulled my shirt over my mouth, and dragged me toward the exit, covering my head as part of the ceiling gave way with a crash.

We hit the outside just as the fire swallowed the roof.

The explosion knocked us flat. Raphael twisted mid-fall, taking the impact across his own back, arm caging my head so it didn’t crack against the asphalt.

For a long, breathless moment, we just lay there in the cold night air, the glow of the burning warehouse painting the sky orange, sirens faint in the distance.

“You okay?” he rasped finally.

I coughed, lungs burning. “I think so. You?”

“I’ve had worse,” he said, which was not reassuring considering the amount of blood soaking his vest.

Later, in a private medical facility that definitely never reported its more interesting cases to any federal database, I learned the rest. Versani had died in a separate operation Lucia led while Raphael was busy getting me out of the warehouse. The Russian crew had been wiped out. The war for Portland was over—for now.

On a pair of exam tables side by side, with oxygen in my nose and stitches going into his shoulder for the third time, Raphael reached for my hand.

“I can get you a new identity,” he said, voice quiet. “Anywhere in the States. Anywhere in the world. Clinic paid off, account set up. You can disappear, live a quiet American life with dogs and cows and traffic reports. No more men with guns. No more me.”

“And if I don’t want that?” I asked.

His fingers tightened.

“Then I spend however long you’ll give me proving that what happened between us wasn’t a scheme,” he said. “That the man who made you breakfast and showed you his library and offered to burn his territory to the ground for your life—that was real. All of it.”

I stared at him. At the bruises, the exhaustion, the absolute sincerity in eyes that had no business holding that much hope.

“I have conditions,” I said.

“Name them.”

“No more using me as a tactic without telling me,” I said. “If there’s a plan, I’m part of it. Partner, or nothing.”

“Done.”

“I keep my clinic,” I said. “My life. My name. I’m not a secret, and I’m not a decoration in your mountain house.”

“I never wanted you caged,” he said. “Only safe. You keep everything that’s yours.”

“And if we ever have kids,” I said, surprising myself with the word, “they get a choice. They don’t inherit a war. They get soccer games and school plays and boring parent-teacher conferences in some Oregon gym.”

He closed his eyes, exhaled, then opened them again.

“I’m already working on it,” he said. “Transition. Lucia can run things better than I can, honestly. Five years, maybe less. I step back. We build something different. I can’t erase what I’ve done. But I can change what I do next.”

It was insane. Dangerous. Complicated. The kind of story that would get turned into a five-part docuseries for a US streaming platform and debated on internet forums by people who’d never seen a gun up close.

But when I thought about the alternative—walking away, pretending none of it had happened, going back to a quiet life with only animals and Netflix for company—my chest hurt.

“Okay,” I said finally. “We’ll try it your way. Our way. But if you lie to me again, Luminari, I will tranquilize you like a feral bull and dump you at the nearest FBI office.”

His smile, even half-drugged, was blinding. “Fair.”

Two weeks later, back at my clinic with the mountain of paperwork that comes from pretending nothing dramatic ever happens in rural America, he walked in wearing jeans and a leather jacket, looking impossibly normal.

He put a fat envelope on the counter.

“The clinic is paid off,” he said. “Mortgage cleared this morning. And there’s a trust in your name. Enough that you’re never again stuck anywhere because of money. Whether you stay with me or not.”

“That’s a very expensive apology,” I said, throat tight.

“It’s not an apology,” he said. “It’s freedom. So if you choose me, I know you’re choosing me. Not security. Not obligation.”

“And if I say no?” I asked.

“I keep loving you from a distance,” he said simply. “And I make sure nothing ever touches you again.”

We both knew that wasn’t how the world worked. But somehow, I believed he’d try.

I said yes.

Six months later, I stood in his dining room while Lucia argued about city zoning and Franco pretended he wasn’t sentimental and my friend Gabby charmed a room full of people who’d once made the FBI’s organized crime briefings. Thor snored under the table, full of contraband treats.

Raphael slid an arm around my waist.

“You’re staring,” he murmured.

“I’m appreciating,” I corrected. “This. Us. The fact that we’re both breathing US air and not on the evening news.”

He laughed softly.

We announced our engagement over pasta and wine, not bullets and sirens. Lucia squealed. Franco actually smiled. Someone made a joke about whether we’d invite the mayor of Portland to the wedding.

Later, on the terrace overlooking that endless American valley, he draped his jacket over my shoulders and pulled me back against his chest.

“Cold?” he asked.

“A little,” I said. “But I like the view.”

“Of the mountains?” he asked.

“Of my insane, complicated, sometimes-illegal new family,” I said. “Of the life I somehow ended up in because I opened a door I should’ve kept locked.”

“Regrets?” Raphael asked quietly.

I thought about that night on the highway, about my hand hovering over the deadbolt, the sound of a stranger pounding on glass in the Oregon dark. About blood on stainless steel and Thor choosing him and SUVs and warehouses and the smell of smoke in my lungs while the US flag fluttered in front of a hospital I never checked into.

“Ask me again in fifty years,” I said. “But right now? No.”

He kissed my hair.

“Thank you,” he murmured. “For opening your door that night. For choosing the dangerous option.”

“Thank you,” I said, turning in his arms so he could see I meant it. “For being worth the risk.”

Not a fairy tale. Not clean. Not safe.

But real.

Ours.