Switched Bride, True Luna - Chapter 80: Chapter 80

Logan
The fire had burned low—nothing left but slow-moving embers and the occasional crack of a stubborn log splitting down the middle.
Outside, the wind howled like something wild was circling the estate. But inside my study, everything was still.
Except me.
Emily’s case file was spread across my desk in carefully ordered stacks. Legal summaries, historical property maps, letters scrawled in that old Blackwood hand I’d seen only once before.
I’d read them all twice. I wasn’t absorbing anything now.
My focus kept drifting to the page on top—one of the notarized witness statements. A thin margin note in Emily’s handwriting curved along the edge. Sharp, precise pen strokes.
Thoughtful. Measured. Hers. And then there was her signature.
It sat near the bottom of the affidavit, elegant and clear. Emily A. Bennett. Not the practiced swirl of someone trying to impress, but the confident line of someone who no longer needed to.
I found myself reaching out.
My thumb brushed across the ink. Just once. I wasn’t even thinking—just... remembering. The feel of her hand when she passed me that page in the archive room. The way her fingers had lingered in mine for a breath too long. The faint callus at the base of her thumb from writing so much by hand.
The warmth. The quiet.
I stood and moved toward the shelves behind me, scanning without really seeing—my eyes flicking past volumes I’d memorized years ago. It didn’t matter. I just needed to move. Needed to do something besides feel.
She didn’t say thank you when I brought her tea. She didn’t have to. But she’d let me stay.
That mattered more.
I sat back in my chair and stared at the document again. It wasn’t the legal strength of her case that made my chest ache.
It was the fact that, even after everything that had been taken from her, she still fought with dignity. With clarity. With fire.
She didn’t try to impress anyone. She just... was. And I was starting to realize I would burn down half the world to keep her that way.
The thought startled me.
I wasn’t supposed to feel this much. This wasn’t part of the arrangement. Our alliance had been born of necessity. Our proximity born of shared enemies.
But somewhere between her honesty and the soft way she looked at me across a document-covered table, I’d crossed a line.
A dangerous one.
And I wasn’t sure when it happened—only that I couldn’t go back.
The fire popped behind me, but I barely noticed. My eyes were still on her signature. My hand resting just beside it, tracing it.
Like I couldn’t quite let go.
She wasn’t mine. Not officially. Not by title. Not by promise.
But in all the ways that mattered—in the ways I’d tried to ignore—Emily had found a way inside me. And she wasn’t letting go either.
I thought of the way she leaned into the silence lately, not as avoidance but as trust. How she didn’t press when she sensed my anger toward Reid. How she reached for my hand, even when she didn’t know the whole story.
And gods help me, how I wanted to tell her the whole story.
Not as a confession. Not as a warning. But because I wanted her to know I saw her. That I believed in the fire she carried, because it was hers.
That was the part that shook me most.
I didn’t want to protect her because she was fragile. I wanted to protect her because she wasn’t.
And the realization of that—the quiet, inescapable weight of it—settled into my chest with something dangerously close to reverence.
I looked at her name again. Spoke it aloud to the empty room.
“Emily.”
The way I said it didn’t sound like a name anymore. It sounded like a prayer.
I pushed away from the desk and stood, needing distance, but not finding relief in motion.
The office felt too full of her. As if the chair she’d once sat in still held the shape of her body. As if her voice still echoed in the walls.
I paced once, twice, then crossed to the wet bar and poured myself a glass of water I didn’t drink. I stared at it for a moment, then set it down untouched.
My chest ached with the kind of pressure I couldn’t name. Not tension. Not desire.
I felt something close to… affection.
I crossed to the window. The storm outside had quieted to a fine mist, low clouds sliding like breath over the treetops. My reflection stared back at me in the glass—tense, guarded, every line in my face sharper than usual.
I didn’t recognize the expression in my own eyes.
Because I’d finally let myself see it.
This wasn’t infatuation. It wasn’t pride in her achievements, or desire tangled in admiration. It wasn’t even the protectiveness I’d come to accept as inevitable.
It was all of it. Twisted into something I couldn’t shove down anymore.
I returned to the desk, fingers brushing the page again—her signature. My name had never looked so complete beside someone else’s before.
The words came out before I could stop them. Low. Rough. Not a declaration—just truth.
“I’m in love with her.”
There. Out loud. It didn’t unravel the room. But it left me raw, all the same.
I sat again, slower this time, my body heavier with the weight of saying it.
I wasn’t someone who believed in softness. Not for myself. Not for the position I held. I’d learned early that vulnerability was a blade turned inward, always waiting to be twisted.
I’d made a life out of control. Out of distance.
But Emily…
She unraveled those instincts like it was the easiest thing in the world.
I told myself I was just helping her for the good of the Pack. Told myself it was convenient strategy. Stability.
But no strategy explained the way her presence comforted me more than anything else ever had.
No excuse accounted for how I remembered the scent of her tea or the way her eyes flicked to the side when she was about to challenge someone.
And no sense of duty should have made my hands ache to hold hers again.
I pressed the heels of my palms into my eyes.
“I love her,” I whispered again, quieter now. Like saying it softer might make it less real.
It only made the truth settle deeper. And gods, it scared me.
I wasn’t afraid she would reject me. Or that it would interfere with our public alliance.
But I knew what love cost.
I’d seen what it did to men in power. I’d seen how it was used against them—how it could be twisted, exposed, weaponized.
I’d built my life around the promise that no one would ever have that kind of power over me.
And now she did. Without even asking for it. Or trying.
I looked down at her signature one last time and closed the file slowly, carefully.
Before sitting again, I gathered the stacks she'd left and re-aligned them, smoothing their edges, straightening the pages. My movements were exact—ritualistic. I couldn’t control what I felt, but I could still control how I held it.
Loving her might ruin me. But not loving her would be worse.
And I wasn’t sure how much longer I could pretend I still had a choice in the matter.