Damian crossed the hallway without hesitation and put his hands on my shoulders, not pulling me in, just steadying, the way you’d hold something you were afraid might fall.
“You’re safe,” he said. “Whatever else is true tonight, you are safe, in this house, right now.”
“I don’t even work for you,” I said, half a laugh, half something closer to tears. “I was serving shrimp cocktail four hours ago. I don’t know how to—I’ve never—”
“You held a man’s life together with your hands for twenty minutes and didn’t flinch once,” Damian said. “I’ve had trained security contractors flinch less capably than you did tonight.”
“I flinch at everything,” I said. “I flinch when people look at me for too long. I flinch in dressing rooms. I’ve spent ten years flinching.”
I don’t know why I said it — exhaustion, maybe, or the strange intimacy that gets forced open between two people who’ve just survived something together. But once it was out I couldn’t take it back, and Damian didn’t let me try to.
“Then it seems,” he said quietly, “like tonight you found out what you actually flinch at. And it isn’t bullets.”
I looked up at him — really looked, past the reputation and the charcoal suit and the pale eyes that the tabloids described as cold — and saw something entirely different than cold. I saw a man who had spent the worst night of the year carrying an employee through fire and had still, somehow, in the sixty seconds before it all started, seen me. Not my body. Not my uniform. Me.
“Get some rest,” he said, stepping back, restoring the careful distance he seemed to know I needed. “There’s a guest room upstairs. Dry clothes. Whatever you need. Tomorrow we’ll figure out what happens next.”
“What happens next,” I repeated. “Damian — Castellano. He’s not going to stop because his attack failed.”
Something dark moved across his face. “No,” he agreed. “He’s not.”
“So what happens to me? I’m a witness. I know your gatehouse, I know this house exists—”
