Page 106 of At Your Mercy
I exhaled shakily, staring at the names. I laughed softly. “I was going to try to get you to kill me,” I confessed, making his eyes go wide.
“What?”
“I couldn’t kill myself. So when I was assigned to you, I met you and realized how different you were from my other marks… I decided to try to get you to kill me, like in self-defense, you know?”
A broken noise left him. “Oh, Ro, baby. I would never hurt you.”
I smiled at him, warmth filling my chest. “I know that now. And even at the beginning, after a while, I knew you’d never do it. But also, I stopped wanting it. I started thinking about a life with you, and how that would look. Christmas markets, maybe getting a cat together, celebrating birthdays, going to more of those fancy restaurants you kept dragging me to.”
Wes wrapped his arms around me, and I nuzzled into the space between his neck and shoulder.
“I love you so much,” he murmured.
The words settled against my skin as I breathed him in. “I love you too.”
When I finally pulled back, I reached into the pocket of my coat and felt the small, smooth weight there. The stone had been in my hand since we’d left the house, but I hadn’t been ready until now. I turned it over between my fingers, tracing the uneven letters I’d carved myself.
Andreas Hoff.
Wes noticed immediately. “What’s that?”
I looked at the space beside my sister’s grave—the one that felt like it had been waiting for me all along—and set the stonedown there, pressing it into the cold dirt. “A marker,” I said quietly. “For someone who isn’t here anymore.”
He stayed silent, eyes on me.
I sat back on my heels. “Andreas Hoff died the night my family did. I used to think maybe I could go back, find pieces of him, but… I can’t. He’s gone.” I drew in a slow breath. “Elias gave me the name Ronan, and I used to hate it because it came from him. But I don’t anymore.”
Wes’s brows furrowed. “You don’t?”
I shook my head. “He might’ve given me the name, but he doesn’t own it. I do. I’ve lived with it, bled under it, survived with it. And I’m not giving it up. I’m going to keep it and make it mine.”
A small smile tugged at Wes’s mouth. “Ronan fits you,” he said softly.
“Yeah,” I said, my voice rough. “It does.”
I looked down at the small stone one more time, at the name that used to be mine, and for the first time, I didn’t feel like it was a weight dragging me backward. It was just… part of the past. Something I could leave here with the rest of them.
Then I looked back at Wes. “There’s one more thing,” I said. “I want to change my last name.”
He tilted his head, curious. “To what?”
“Cohen.”
For a moment, he didn’t breathe. His eyes widened slightly, and then softened, something breaking open in his expression. “Ro…”
“I don’t want to be a Craig anymore,” I said, the words firm. “That name was his. It was a chain, and I’m done wearing it. I want yours.”
He swallowed hard, his hand trembling a little as it reached up to cup my face. “You mean that?”
I leaned into his touch. “I do. I want to be Ronan Cohen. If you’ll have me.”
Wes let out a shaky laugh that was half sob, half joy. “You have no idea how much I want that, babydoll.” He kissed me, slow and careful, and when he pulled back, he rested his forehead against mine. “Ronan Cohen,” he whispered like it was something sacred.
I laughed, a few tears threatening to fall from my eyes. “Fuck it kinda rhymes.”
Wes hugged me, the smile on his face blinding. “You can’t take it back now. Not allowed.”
Wes’s laugh rumbled against my chest, warm and grounding and everything I’d never had before I met him, and for a long moment I just stayed there—buried in his arms, surrounded by wind and silence and the faint rustle of leaves. It was the kind of quiet that doesn’t feel empty, just full of things too big for words.
