At 7:01 a.m., the shop is mine.
The bell over the door hangs quiet. The street outside is still a blur of gray and soft headlights, the city not quite awake yet. I’m alone with the hum of the old fridge, the sweet-green breath of cut stems, and my hands stained with chlorophyll and soil.
I check the wall clock anyway, even though I don’t need to.
7:01.
My chest tightens in a way I pretend not to notice. It’s ridiculous, how precisely my body knows what comes next. I wipe my fingers on my apron, straighten the stack of blank kraft-paper sleeves for bouquets, and tuck a loose curl behind my ear.
7:02.
The bell chimes.
He steps in like he always does—like he belongs to the second between one minute and the next. Black coat, black shirt, black slacks. The clothes are tailored enough that I can tell he’s wearing a shoulder holster under the fabric even though I’ve never actually seen it. Polished shoes dark with a sheen that catches the weak morning light. Black hair, a little too long at the nape, brushed back from his forehead. A face that shouldn’t be familiar to me, but is.
I don’t know his name.
I know the way he moves. Smooth, controlled, careful of space the way people are when they know exactly how much damage they could do if they weren’t paying attention. I know that his eyes are almost black—not in color, but in intensity. I know that he always smells faintly like clean soap and cold air, as if he’s just stepped out of a different world and into mine.
And I know that every single morning, at exactly 7:02, he walks into my flower shop and buys the same bouquet.
“Good morning,” I say, because the silence feels suddenly too big.
His gaze lifts from the floor to my face. There’s a half second where it lands, sharp as a blade and then softening, and I feel it like a touch along my skin.
“Miss Lynn.” His voice is low, a rumble that doesn’t match the delicate world of petals and ribbon. There’s always something formal about the way he says my name, like I’m a client at a bank instead of a girl in a faded green apron. “You’re early on the hydrangeas.”
I blink. “You noticed?”
He glances past me to the buckets. “They weren’t here yesterday.”
Right. Of course he noticed. He notices everything.
“I got a good deal at the market.” I fumble with the twine on the counter. “Mother’s Day rush is coming. Thought I’d be prepared.”
He nods, but his eyes are still on my face, not the flowers. It sends a little electric awareness through me, every nerve suddenly tuned to him. He doesn’t flirt. He doesn’t linger. He doesn’t ask personal questions beyond the polite—Did you receive that shipment? How’s business?—but there’s always this…watchfulness.
“Your usual?” I ask, reaching for the bucket without waiting because of course it is. White cornflowers, small and stubborn and easily overlooked until you realize how bright they are.
He pauses. Just a fraction of a second, but enough for my fingers to hesitate above the stems.
“Yes,” he says. “The usual.”
I pull six of the best blooms; habit makes me choose the ones with the cleanest petals. My scissors click as I trim the ends. The stems are cool and damp between my fingers. I wrap them in white paper, twist the bottom, and tie it with a simple piece of twine. It’s a ritual now, one we never agreed on but keep performing anyway.
“One of these days,” I say, the words escaping before I can stop them, “you’re going to have to tell me who they’re for.”
His eyes flick to the bouquet and back to me. Something flashes there—fondness, pain, I don’t know. I’m not sure I want to know.
“One of these days,” he says quietly, “I will.”
It’s an odd answer. Not a deflection. A promise. My fingers tighten on the paper when I hand him the bouquet, our touch nearly but not quite brushing.
He pays in cash, always exact. I’ve tried to catch his name off a card, a receipt, a stray comment, but he leaves nothing behind but the scent of cold air and cornflowers and a suggestion of something dangerous pressed under all that control.
“Have a good day, Miss Lynn.”
“You too,” I manage, but he’s already turning.
The bell rings again as he steps back into the street. The clock reads 7:04, and the shop feels a little emptier than it did two minutes ago.
I exhale and tell myself it’s just routine, that I’m not building a whole secret life around a man who buys anonymous flowers. That my world is small on purpose and that’s a good thing.
I rinse the scissors in the sink. The water runs clear, then pink when I nick my knuckle on the blade. I hiss softly, stick my finger under the stream, watch a tiny streak of red coil down porcelain.
Outside, an engine idles.
It’s not unusual. Main Street is a one-way; people stop, pull over, check their phones. But this engine is loud, a low, throaty growl too big for the sleepy street. It seeps through the glass, sits wrong on my skin.
I frown and wipe my hands on my apron, wandering toward the front window. The glass is cold when I lean close, peering past the display of tulips and daisies.
A black SUV is parked at the curb, directly in front of my shop. Not the sleek kind my regular sometimes steps out of, but bulkier, more utilitarian. Tinted windows. No stickers, no plates I can see clearly from this angle.
My stomach goes tight.
Someone sits in the driver’s seat. I can’t make out a face through the tint, but I see the faint orange glow of a cigarette when it flares. The SUV’s front bumper is almost kissing the metal trashcan bolted to the sidewalk.
There’s a prickle at the back of my neck that has nothing to do with drafty old windows or overactive imagination. It’s older than this shop, older than my tidy life. It whispers from the pieces of my memory with jagged edges and missing chunks. Don’t look too long. Don’t ask questions. Stay small. Stay quiet.
The bell rings again.
I start, heartbeat tripping, and turn too fast. I expect a customer, maybe Mrs. Kowalski from the bakery or one of the yoga moms from down the block. Instead, it’s him.
The man in black.
He shouldn’t be here. He’s never come back in the same morning once he’s left. His presence presses against the fragile routine of my day like a thumb against thin glass.
“Ava,” he says.
It’s the first time he’s used my first name. It lands heavy, like he’s had it in his mouth before, too many times, and finally let it slip.
The way he says it—too familiar, too certain—makes my knees go a little unsteady.
“Is something wrong with the bouquet?” I ask, because my brain is scrambling for normal.
His jaw tightens. He’s not looking at the flowers. He’s looking at me, and then past me, through the front windows.
“Come here,” he says, and the softness is gone from his voice. What’s left is command. Not loud, but absolute. “Now.”
Indignation flares, almost comforting in its familiarity. “Excuse me?”
He crosses the distance between us in three long strides. Up close, he feels even larger, the air around him charged. I smell rain on his coat, even though the sky outside is bone-dry.
“Ava.” Lower now, pitched just for me. “Step back from the window.”
Fear and annoyance wrestle in my chest. “You can’t just—”
His hand lands on my elbow, firm but not bruising. The contact jolts through me. My breath stutters.
“Please,” he says, and somehow that single word is more unnerving than all the commands. Urgent, threaded with something like panic carefully strangled down. “Trust me for thirty seconds.”
My protest dies. Maybe it’s the way his fingers tremble, barely, against my sleeve. Maybe it’s the engine still growling outside like some caged animal. Maybe it’s the distant part of my brain that has always known the man who walks into my shop every day is not just a charming eccentric.
I let him pull me away from the glass, behind the counter. The tile is cool under my boots. My heart is punching at my ribs like it recognizes something my mind doesn’t.
“What is it?” I whisper.
His eyes cut to the SUV. There’s a flicker of something in them—calculation, recognition. “On the floor,” he says. “Now.”
My spine stiffens. “Absolutely not, I—”
The world goes white.
Light. Heat. A sound like the sky splitting open. The windows shatter inward in a storm of glass and shrieking metal. One second I’m staring at his eyes, angry and confused; the next I’m weightless, yanked sideways as if the gravity in the room has changed its mind.
We hit the floor together. His body covers mine, a shield of bone and muscle and dark wool. The breath blasts out of my lungs as shelves crash around us, as flowers turn to a blur of color and shattered water buckets.
My ears ring. I can’t hear myself scream, but I taste dust and metal and the copper tang of fear.
Something heavy smashes into his back with a sickening thud. He doesn’t move. His arm is over my head, his hand cradling the back of my skull, forcing my face into his chest. It smells like smoke and that same clean soap and something charred.
Heat licks at my exposed wrist. The air is thick with burning rubber.
It takes a long time for the sound to come back. When it does, it’s in fragments: the crackle of fire, the distant wail of a car alarm starting and dying, someone shouting on the street, sirens already rising like ghosts.
“Breathe,” he says above me, voice dark and close in my ear, and this time I feel the word more than hear it.
I drag in air that hurts.
The ringing recedes just enough that a new sound takes its place—a strange, hitching noise. It takes me a second to realize it’s me.
My hands are fists in his coat. I don’t remember grabbing him, but my fingers are knotted in black wool, holding on like the world is still spinning and he’s the only solid thing.
“What—what happened?” My voice is broken glass.
He shifts, easing some of his weight off me but not enough that I feel exposed. Dust falls from his shoulder in a fine gray curtain.
“Car bomb,” he says calmly, like he’s naming a type of flower. “Outside your shop.”
The words don’t fit together at first. Then they do, in a nauseating snap.
The SUV. The engine. The inexplicable certainty in his voice when he told me to get down.
“Bomb,” I repeat, stupidly.
He finally looks down at me fully. There’s a shallow cut along his cheekbone, a thin line of red against pale skin. A piece of glass is embedded in his forearm, glittering under the soot.
“You’re not bleeding,” he says. It sounds like an observation and a prayer all at once.
“Wh-why is there a bomb outside my shop?” Panic claws up my throat, ragged. “I sell peonies and succulents and those ridiculous gnomes Mrs. Cannon insists on—”
His hand tightens in my hair for a second, not painful but insistent, like he’s anchoring himself as much as me.
“Because of you,” he says, and there’s no easy softness left in him. Only something hard and steady. “Because someone wants you dead.”
The floor tilts.
“No.” The denial is automatic, reflexive. “No, that doesn’t make sense, I’m nobody.”
He exhales, a slow, controlled thing that makes me suddenly aware that his calm is not natural; it’s constructed, piece by piece, like a wall.
“You’re not nobody, Ava.” My name again, familiar on his tongue. “And this was only the first attempt.”
The sirens swell louder, too close now. Blue and red lights dance across the shattered display window, fractured a dozen times in the shards still clinging to the frame.
“I need you to listen to me,” he says, each word measured. “The police are going to come. They’ll ask questions. You will answer. But until I say otherwise, you trust no one. You go nowhere without me.”
My muscles lock. “Who the hell are you?” The question explodes out of me, raw. “You walk in here every morning at 7:02, you buy the same stupid flowers, you barely say anything, and now you’re what—my bodyguard? My kidnapper? How did you even know—” I cut myself off because my throat is choking on soot and fury and something else.
He studies me. For a second, some of the ice on his features cracks, and what’s underneath steals my breath more than the blast did.
Guilt. Old and deep.
“My name is Damian Rossi,” he says.
The name means nothing to me.
It tastes like familiarity in my mouth anyway. My vision swims.
“I am the reason you’re alive,” he continues, “and I may also be the reason they’re trying harder now.”
That…is not reassuring.
“Rossi,” I repeat, like rolling the word around will unlock something in my broken memory. It doesn’t. But there is a flicker. A hospital room. A woman’s voice. Cornflowers pressed between pages of a book.
“You should have left,” I whisper. “If the bomb was for me—”
His mouth twists, the faintest hint of something like anger or disbelief, but not at me. “I’m not in the habit of leaving you to die.”
You. Not people. Not customers. You.
The sirens screech right outside now. Doors slam. Shouts get closer.
He shifts off me completely, rising in a fluid movement that makes me wonder how many times he’s done this before. Not here. But in other places. Other lives.
He offers me his hand.
The ceiling above us is smoky. The air tastes like burnt rubber and snapped eucalyptus stems. My shop is destroyed. My safe, small, carefully controlled world is rubble around my knees.
I stare at his hand.
I shouldn’t take it. I don’t know him. I don’t know why he knows me, why his voice feels like it’s been folded into the blank places in my memory.
But I also just watched him throw himself between me and a bomb.
My fingers slide into his.
He pulls me up, steadying me when my legs threaten to give. His grip is warm, solid. I feel the flex of tendons and the restraint in his strength, like he’s holding back on purpose.
Voices shout from the doorway. “Fire department! Police! Is anyone inside?”
He releases my hand quickly, his face smoothing into something more neutral, more public.
“Remember,” he says under his breath, eyes locked on mine. “Answer their questions. But trust no one.” A beat. “Except me. Just for today.”
The word should terrify me.
Instead, it feels like a deadline.
I swallow, my throat raw, my fingers still tingling where they wrapped around his.
“Why,” I ask before the uniforms burst through the broken doors, “should I trust you?”
Damian’s gaze flicks, just once, to the crumpled metal where the SUV used to be, twisted and smoking at the curb. Then back to me.
“Because,” he says quietly, “I’ve been protecting you for a very long time, Ava. And whoever did this just broke the rules.”
My heart stumbles over that.
Before I can ask what rules, or how long, or why any of this is happening, a firefighter steps between us, guiding me toward the door, peppering me with questions.
I look back once over my shoulder. Through the haze and flashing lights, Damian stands in the wreckage of my shop, coat dusted with ash, a cut on his cheek and a storm in his eyes.
He’s watching me.
Something about the way he stands there, braced like he’s preparing for another hit, tells me that whatever just shattered in my life—the bomb was only the beginning.
And for reasons I can’t name, the part that scares me most isn’t the explosion, or the way my past feels suddenly too close.
It’s the fact that when everything blew apart, the first thing I reached for was him.
That, and the certainty coiling low in my gut as the paramedics lead me away: tomorrow at 7:02, nothing about my life will be the same.
