Marry me (Lyra's POV)

Cold metal pressed against the center of my forehead, carrying the smell of death.

My breath stopped. My heart slammed against my ribs, blood rushing into my ears with a low, relentless hum.

The gun in the man's hand didn't waver. Not even slightly.

Who is he? What does he want? Isn't this supposed to be a safe zone? Why is there a kidnapping—

Questions detonated in my mind, but I couldn't get a single word out. What I could feel was the small boy trembling in my arms, his fists locked into my shirt as though he were trying to press himself inside me and disappear.

Don't panic.

I forced myself to breathe, swallowed against a dry throat, and kept my voice as steady as I could manage. "I'm... I'm a bystander. I was passing through the arts district and found this boy being held. So I... I freed him."

"A bystander." The man repeated the words without any inflection. The gun didn't move. "You touched someone you shouldn't have."

Someone I shouldn't have touched — the boy? Or something else?

I didn't get to work it out. He stepped forward, the barrel shifting away from my forehead as he reached out to take the boy from my arms.

"Give him to me." Low. Absolute.

"No—"

I stepped back on instinct, pulling the child closer.

Then a small hand shot up and seized my collar.

The boy pushed himself up from my shoulder and stared at the man, shaking his head with everything he had, his arm around my neck tightening until I could barely breathe.

"No..." His voice was small and hoarse, scraped raw with tears. "No..."

It was the first time he had spoken.

From the moment I found him bound, he had been completely silent — communicating only through stillness and the movement of his eyes. But now, with this man reaching for him, he had found one word.

I watched the outstretched hand stop in midair. For just a moment, something crossed the man's face — shock, confusion, or maybe something closer to hurt. Then it closed again.

His gaze moved to the boy's face, brow drawing together, an emotion flickering through his eyes that I couldn't name.

"Cassian." His voice dropped lower. "I'm your father. Come with me."

Cassian. So that was his name.

I looked down at the boy — at Cassian — still burrowed against my shoulder, his face turned entirely away from the man.

"Cassian. Listen to me." The man tried again, his tone fractionally softer.

Cassian shook his head and dragged my collar sideways with the motion. I reached up and put a hand on his back to steady him — and that was when I felt it. Heat radiating through his thin shirt like an open flame pressed against my palm.

A fever?

"Hey—" I pulled back to look at his face. His eyes were half-shut, his lips drained of color, his cheeks blazing red.

He had lost consciousness.

"Hey!" Panic broke through. I tried to lay him flat to check his breathing, but his fingers — even now — were still knotted in my collar, refusing to let go.

I looked up at the man with the gun and let the calm I'd been holding onto go entirely. "He's burning up. He's passed out. He needs a hospital right now."

The man's expression shifted.

He reached for Cassian again, urgently this time. But Cassian's grip held, and as the man pulled, the fabric of my collar dragged sideways and downward, exposing the skin of my chest. The man's hands stopped immediately. He stepped back. My collar fell back into place.

I heard him exhale.

I understood the frustration, even if I couldn't explain it. No one wants their child clinging to a stranger. But here we were.

"You hold him." His voice carried a resignation I could plainly hear. "Come with me."

I stared at him. He was asking me — a woman he'd held at gunpoint minutes ago — to get into a car with him.

He must have read my hesitation. "He only recognizes you," he said, and the irritation in his voice was audible enough to almost make me feel sorry for him. Almost. "You carry him. We go to the hospital."

I looked at Cassian's face — the flushed cheeks, the shallow breathing, the heat pouring off him — and made the only decision I could. One of the bodyguards had already pulled open the rear door of the Maybach at the curb. I walked toward it and got in, holding the boy against my chest as the car pulled away from the arts district.

The silence inside was the kind that has weight.

I kept to my side of the seat. His gaze came across to me at intervals — measured, taking inventory — and it made my skin prickle.

"Who are you?" I finally asked, because the silence had become less bearable than the alternative.

He looked at me with the unhurried certainty of someone accustomed to being the most significant person in any room. "Alistair Voss."

The name landed and resonated. Voss. Everyone in Verona knew that name — the way you know the names of things that shape the landscape whether you acknowledge them or not. The most powerful commercial family in the city. The kind of family that governments gave ground to.

The boy in my arms was a Voss.

I didn't ask anything else.

Twenty minutes later, the car stopped outside a private hospital.

I carried Cassian to the entrance. Within minutes he had been transferred to a gurney and wheeled behind closed doors, trailing doctors, nurses, and bodyguards. The corridor emptied around me until I was the only one left standing in the middle of it.

I let out a long breath and turned over everything that had just happened.

Finding Cassian bound. Freeing him. The man with the gun. The Maybach. All of it had moved too fast to process.

What exactly have I walked into?

The night had fully given way to dawn by the time the acute care doors opened again. Alistair came out, the furrow in his brow somewhat less severe than before. "High fever complicated by pneumonia. He'll need to be admitted for observation."

I nodded and said nothing.

"What's your name?"

I met his eyes — still assessing, as they had been from the beginning. "Lyra. Lyra Vane."

He repeated it once, quietly, as though testing the weight of it.

Then he reached into his breast pocket, produced a check, and held it out to me. "Your payment. For saving Cassian. I don't leave debts unpaid."

I kept my hands at my sides. "I don't need it. I only did what anyone should have done."

"Take it." He pressed.

"No."

A brief pause. "I also have a request," he said. "Hear it first."

A man like Alistair Voss didn't make requests. He issued directives and called them softer names when the situation required it. I knew that walking away without listening would likely create more trouble than staying. So I waited.

What I didn't expect was the pause that followed — long enough, and strange enough, that I found myself watching his face with genuine attention. This was the man who had held a gun to my head without flinching, and now he stood in the fluorescent light of a hospital corridor and visibly searched for words.

Whatever he was about to say, it cost him something.

"Would you be willing," he began, and then stopped, and started again, "to marry me. And become Cassian's mother."