The hours after the attack passed in a blur of phone calls, armed men, hurried footsteps, and dread so intense that Helena felt she might stop breathing if she stood still long enough to notice it.
She remained near the study because that was where Bryan had ordered her to wait, though wait implied a patience she did not possess. Every few minutes, she rose from the chair only to sit again, crossed the room only to turn back, clutched her phone so tightly her fingers hurt, and listened for any sign that someone, somewhere, had reached her family.
Bryan moved around the room like a storm contained inside a human body. He spoke to his men in clipped instructions, read incoming messages, and gave more orders, all while maintaining a calm demeanor. Yet Helena had begun to understand that calm, and she knew now that the quieter he became, the more dangerous the situation truly was.
"Call them again," she said when he ended another conversation. Her voice cracked under the strain. "Please."
He did not tell her he already had. He simply dialed another number and spoke into the phone with that same hard focus that made people obey him before he had finished a sentence.
When the call ended, Helena stood. "That's not enough. I need to hear his voice."
"You will."
"How do you know that?"
Bryan looked at her then, and the force in his gaze made her chest tighten for reasons that had nothing to do with fear.
"Because I said you would."
She almost laughed at the arrogance of it, but the sound died before it reached her throat. There was something in him tonight she had not seen so clearly before—not just control, not just anger, but a relentless refusal to fail. It should have made her more afraid of him. Instead, it steadied her in ways she did not understand.
"I can't lose him, too," she whispered.
The sentence changed something.
Bryan's expression softened, not visibly enough that anyone else might have noticed, but Helena saw it. She had always seen the smallest shifts in him. It was part of what made this all so unbearable. She knew too well how much he hid.
He crossed the distance between them with a care that made her pulse unsteady. "You won't."
She shook her head, frustrated by how easily his certainty weakened her. "You don't understand."
His voice lowered. "I understand more than you think."
For a moment, they stood there with too much history between them and too little distance. Helena searched his face and saw, beneath all the hardness, the outline of pain he never spoke about. It lived in the set of his mouth, in the weariness behind his eyes, in the way his shoulders seemed built to carry violence because they had already carried loss.
"You shouldn't be helping me," she said quietly.
A faint frown touched his brow. "I'm not helping you."
The old sharpness returned, but it no longer hid everything.
"I'm protecting what's mine."
The words settled over her like heat. Helena drew in a shallow breath. It was not only their meaning that affected her; it was the way he said them, as though the statement had been decided somewhere much deeper than anger. She should have rejected it, should have reminded him that she did not belong to anyone, least of all the man she had broken up with.
Instead, all she could think was that she had not heard someone speak about her safety with such terrifying sincerity in years.
"Bryan," she said, but his name came out softer than she intended.
His eyes darkened slightly. "Don't say my name like that."
Her throat tightened. "Like what?"
"Like I forgot what you did."
The pain under the sentence was worse than the accusation. Helena lowered her gaze, unable to bear the force of it.
"I didn't forget," she whispered.
"No," he said. "You lived with it."
She looked up sharply. He was watching her in that unnerving, searching way again, as if he had begun piecing together parts of her suffering she had never confessed. The tenderness of that possibility frightened her more than his anger.
Then her phone rang.
The sound sliced through everything. Helena grabbed it instantly. Her hands shook so badly she nearly missed the call. "Hello?"
There was static, then a small, frightened voice.
"Didi?"
The relief that crashed through her was so powerful it hurt. Tears flooded her eyes. "Where are you? Are you okay? Put Mum on the phone."
"I'm home," her brother said. "A man brought me back. He said…"
The line cut.
Helena stared at the screen in horror.
"What happened?" Bryan asked.
She looked up at him, breathless. "He's home. Someone took him home."
Bryan's face went still.
"And?" he asked.
"He said a man brought him back."
Something changed in Bryan's expression then, something dark and immediate.
"They know where he lives," Helena said, the realization spreading through her in cold terror. "They know all of it."
Bryan's jaw tightened. "Yes."
The room felt suddenly too small. Helena took a step backward, then another, as panic built all over again. "So what now?"
Bryan crossed to her before she could retreat any farther. He did not touch her immediately, but his nearness alone steadied something inside her.
"Now," he said, "it becomes war."
The word should have terrified her, and it did. But beneath that fear was something else, something far more dangerous: the awareness that when Bryan said it, he did not sound uncertain. He sounded prepared, as if he had been waiting for someone to force his hand.
And as she stood there trembling in the aftermath of another threat, Helena realized that the closer danger moved toward them, the more impossible it became to ignore the pull she still felt toward the man facing it for her.
That was the cruelest part, not the war, not even the fear.
But the fact that somewhere in the middle of all this ruin, her heart still remembered him.