Chapter 6 - Whispers in the Mountains
He didn't make me leave.
That was the first sign that something inside Declan had fundamentally broken—or perhaps, healed.
The old Declan Voss would have had me drugged, wrapped in cashmere, and loaded onto a private Gulfstream before the rain stopped. He would have installed me in a high-security penthouse with armed guards outside every door and biometric locks on the elevator, convinced that possession was the only true form of protection.
Instead, he stayed in the mountains.
He didn't bring an army into Black Mountain. Gavin Roarke and four plainclothes operatives took rooms at an inconspicuous motel four miles outside town, their black SUVs replaced by nondescript Ford pickup trucks with local plates.
Declan himself didn't sleep in the motel.
He rented the dilapidated cabin three hundred yards up the ridge from June Whitaker’s antique shop. The cabin had no central heat, a cracked wood-burning fireplace, and a gravel driveway that washed out whenever the spring creeks rose. Every morning at 6:30 AM, when I looked out the narrow window of my second-floor apartment, I saw him.
He wore heavy flannel shirts, worn denim, and work boots now. He chopped wood for my stove, stacking the split pine in neat, dry cords beneath the eaves of the shop. He carried the heavy crates of antique china June bought at estate sales. He sat on an upturned wooden crate by the back door, drinking black coffee from a thermos, his laptop open on his knees as he dismantled an eight-hundred-million-dollar criminal enterprise with terse, encrypted emails.
He was giving me space. And it was driving me insane.
“That boy looks at you like you’re the Virgin Mary and he’s a sinner waiting for lightning,” June remarked one Tuesday morning.
She was peeling apples at the counter, her clove cigarette smoldering in the chipped saucer. Through the front window, Declan was currently unloading a heavy walnut armoire from the bed of a pickup truck, the corded muscles in his back straining against his dark shirt.
“He isn't a boy, June,” I said, carefully applying gesso to a cracked wooden frame. “And he isn't a saint.”
“Never said he was a saint,” June snorted. “Saints are boring. Saints don't know how to wire money from the Cayman Islands to pay off my shop’s back mortgage without me even asking.”
I froze, the brush stopping an inch from the wood.
I whipped around to face her. “He did what?”
June didn't flinch. She sliced an apple quarter with precision. “Bank called yesterday. Said an anonymous commercial trust cleared the twenty-four thousand I owed on the deed. When I went outside to ask him about it, he just handed me an armful of kindling and told me the roof on the north shed was leaking and he’d fix it this afternoon.”
June looked at me over her glasses, her weathered eyes softening.
“Claire... or whatever your name is... a man who uses his power to build a fence around you while sleeping on a cot in a cold cabin isn't trying to cage you. He’s trying to earn the right to stand by the gate.”
My throat tightened. I looked back out the window.
Declan had set the armoire down. He wiped the sweat from his forehead with the back of his forearm, then paused, as if sensing my gaze. He looked up, his pale blue eyes finding mine through the wavy glass of the shop window.
He didn't smile—Declan rarely smiled—but the tight, brutal tension that usually lived in his face softened by a fraction. He tipped his head in a quiet, respectful greeting, then turned back to his work.
*Twenty-four weeks.*
My body was changing rapidly now. My lower back ached constantly; my ankles swelled if I stood at the restoration easel for more than two hours; and our daughter seemed to wake up every night at 2:00 AM to perform gymnastics against my ribs.
That evening, the temperature dropped sharply, bringing a late-spring mountain frost.
A knock sounded at my apartment door at eight o'clock.
Three measured, quiet taps.
I opened it. Declan stood in the drafty hallway, holding a steaming cast-iron pot in one hand and a paper bag in the other. He had showered; his dark hair was damp, smelling of the pine-tar soap he bought from the general store.
“The diner on Main Street was closing,” he said, not stepping across the threshold. “They had beef stew. I know you haven't been eating enough red meat. Your iron levels were low on the clinic chart Gavin checked.”
I crossed my arms over the mound of my belly, leaning against the doorframe. “You had Gavin pull my medical charts?”
Declan didn't apologize. “I had Gavin ensure the clinic wasn't billing you for substandard tests. The doctor who saw you last week is the chief of obstetrics at Duke University Hospital. He was ‘visiting’ the clinic because I paid his department a half-million-dollar research grant.”
I stared at him, caught between exasperation and a strange, fluttering warmth in my chest.
“You’re ridiculous, Declan.”
“I’m thorough,” he countered softly. He held the pot out slightly. “Can I come in? Just to set it on the stove. It’s heavy.”
I stepped back from the door.
It was the first time he had entered my private space since the day he arrived.
The apartment was tiny—a single room with a kitchenette, a small drop-leaf table, an iron bed beneath a patchwork quilt, and an old wicker bassinet I had spent three weeks sanding and repainting white.
Declan walked in, his broad shoulders instantly making the small room feel microscopic. He set the heavy pot on the two-burner gas stove, then turned around slowly, taking in the space.
His eyes stopped on the wicker bassinet.
He walked over to it with slow, reverent steps. He reached out, his rough, scarred fingertips tracing the smooth white paint of the curved rim.
“You painted this,” he said quietly.
“Lead-free enamel,” I murmured, watching him from the counter. “It took four coats.”
Declan didn't speak for a long moment. When he turned back to me, the shadows beneath his eyes looked darker, filled with a heavy, aching regret.
“Every night in Chicago,” he said, his voice dropping to a whisper, “I used to sit in that penthouse and think about what kind of nursery she would have had. Fifty rooms in that building, Amelia. Marble floors. Silk drapes. And none of it was worth a damn, because you weren't there.”
He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small, worn object.
He set it gently on the table between us.
It was a small, scorched glass jar. Inside lay the black, curled ashes of the ultrasound I had burned four months ago in my Pilsen kitchen.
I stared at it, my breath catching in my throat. “You... you kept that?”
“Gavin’s men found it in the trash can under the sink,” Declan whispered. “The night you left. I kept it in my pocket every single day. To remind me of what I destroyed.”
Tears pricked the backs of my eyes. The protective shell I had built around my heart cracked down the center, the fracture widening until I could barely breathe through the ache.
I walked over to the table. I picked up the jar. The glass was cool against my skin.
“You didn't destroy her, Declan,” I whispered, looking up into his tortured eyes. “She’s right here.”
Declan took a half-step forward, his hands twitching at his sides, fighting the urge to pull me against him. “Amelia... I am stripping Voss Maritime down to its bones. Gavin is transferring the legitimate shipping contracts to an independent trust. The docks, the warehousing, the private security—it’s all being sold or liquidated. I’m walking away from the Commission.”
My heart stopped.
I knew enough about Chicago to understand what he was saying. “Declan... nobody walks away from the Commission. You know what they do to bosses who try to retire.”
“Let them try,” he said, his voice flat, cold, and utterly lethal. “I don't care about their territory. I don't care about their bloodlines. The only territory I give a damn about is standing in this room.”
He reached out, his hand cupping my cheek.
His thumb was rough against my skin, calloused from a lifetime of violence, but his touch was so tender it made my knees weak. I leaned into his palm, closing my eyes as a single tear slipped down my face.
“Amelia,” he whispered, his forehead coming to rest against mine. “Come home. Not to Chicago. Not to the tower. Let me buy a home for us. Anywhere you want. Ireland. Maine. Here. Just let me be her father. Let me be your husband.”
Before I could answer—before the word *yes* could cross my trembling lips—the sharp, electronic shriek of a tactical radio shattered the silence.
Declan pulled back instantly, his hand dropping to his waist in a reflex honed by a decade of war.
He pulled a small radio from his pocket, pressing the receiver to his ear. “Roarke. Report.”
Gavin’s voice came through the speaker, tight, clipped, and breathless.
May you like
*“Declan, we have a breach on the southern perimeter. Two black Suburbans just bypassed the roadblock on Route 9. They aren't feds. It’s Marcus Calloway’s private security detail. They have heavy ordnance, and they know the address.”*
***
