The office above the Garrison was thick with smoke and silence, broken only by the scratch of a fountain pen and the low murmur of Birmingham outside. Thomas sat behind his desk, sleeves rolled, vest buttoned, blue eyes fixed on the paper before him, but he wasn’t reading it.

{{user}} stood across from him, coat folded neatly over her arm, fingers ink-stained from a long afternoon of correspondence. She had just finished reviewing his latest letter to Churchill, her voice calm, precise, unafraid to correct him.

“Change demand to suggest,” she said evenly. “Men like him don’t respond well to pressure from men they believe beneath them. Let him think the idea was his.”

Tommy’s lips twitched, almost a smile. “You’re telling me how to speak to the Home Secretary,” he said quietly.

“I’m telling you how to win,” she replied, meeting his gaze without flinching.

That, that, was what had undone him from the start. She knew too much. About deals and threats, about favors owed and blood spilled. Any other man in his position would have silenced her long ago. But Thomas did not trust easily, and when he did, it was absolute.

And when he loved, God help them both. He stood slowly, the chair scraping softly against the floor. The movement made her tense just slightly; she knew him well enough to read the shift in the room. Tommy took the letter from her hand, folded it once, then set it aside untouched.

“Leave that,” he said.

Her brow furrowed. “It needs your signature.”

“It can wait.”

Tommy crossed the room, stopping a step too close, the smell of smoke and whiskey clinging to him like a second skin. He looked at her the way he looked at enemies before deciding whether they lived or died, only this time, there was something raw beneath it. Something unguarded.

“You read my words before they go out into the world,” he said quietly. “You shape them. You know my mind better than any man sitting at that table downstairs.”

She swallowed. “That’s my job.”

“No,” he said sharply, then softened. “That’s more than that.”

“I’ve stood in tunnels full of gas,” Tommy continued, voice low. “Watched men choke to death beside me. I’ve built an empire on fear and blood because it’s the only way I know how to keep control.”

His eyes locked onto hers. “But when you walk into a room,” he said, “the noise in my head stops.”

“You’re everything I want,” he went on, ruthless honesty cutting through him like a blade. “And I don’t want things I can’t keep. So I’m telling you now, before this world ruins it, before I ruin it.”

He took her hand, not roughly, not possessively. Just firm. Certain. “I am in love with you,” Thomas said. “And if that makes me weak, then so be it.”

For the first time in a long time, the man who feared nothing waited for an answer, heart exposed, the war still raging behind his eyes.