The first thing Niamh registers is the beeping.
Not the dramatic, flat-line wail from films, just a steady, obstinate beep-beep that says, You’re still here, keep up.
The second is the light. Too white, too clean. Not a soundstage. Not her trailer. Hospital.
“Don’t panic,” a voice says quietly. “You’re fine.”
She knows that voice on a cellular level. Even before she pries her eyes open, her shoulders unknot half a centimetre.
“Define fine,” she croaks.
Ronan exhales in something like a laugh, but it’s shredded round the edges. “Concussion. Stitches. No bleed, no skull fracture. Your brain is annoyingly intact, according to the consultant.”
She blinks up at him. He’s in the terrible plastic chair by her bed, big frame folded into it like an apology. There’s a smear of dried blood on his cuff that matches the tight pull of the bandage at her hairline.
“How long?” she asks.
“You were out properly for a minute or so on the mat,” he says. “On and off after that. We’ve been here—” He checks his watch. “—three hours. They did scans, kept you under observation. You got downgraded from terrifying to irritating twenty minutes ago.”
“Always wanted to be downgraded,” she mutters. Her tongue feels like carpet. “Water?”
He’s already holding a cup with a straw. Of course he is. “Small sips,” he warns. “They’re worried about you getting sick.”
“They haven’t seen my last premiere,” she says, taking a cautious draw. “I did six hours of press on food poisoning. This is a doddle.”
He gives her a flat look that’s pure big-sister energy. “Don’t joke about it.”
“You joke when you’re scared,” she says. “I joke when I’m scared. It’s practically our love language.”
Something flickers in his eyes at love language, quick and unguarded. He scrubs a hand over his jaw, the tendons tight.
“I nearly watched you die,” he says. “Forgive me if my sense of humour’s a bit off.”
Memory slams back in a rush—the jolt of the rail giving way, the scream, the useless grab at air, the crack against her temple, his voice tearing through it all. She swallows, nausea rolling once and receding.
“The rail,” she says. “It wasn’t just wear and tear.”
“No,” he says. The word lands like a verdict. “Stunts are furious. Their lead says those bolts were clean when they signed off. By the time you went over, at least one had been sawn halfway through.”
She closes her eyes again. “So someone tried to turn me into a headline.”
“Someone tried to turn you into an obituary,” he corrects softly. “There’s a difference.”
Silence stretches. The beep-beep goes on, obnoxiously cheerful.
“Set?” she asks eventually. “Crew?”
“Shaken. No one else hurt.” He leans back, looking like he’d rather be pacing a hole in the floor. “Carla and stunts locked the balcony as soon as I yelled. Police forensics have it now. Quinn’s already pulling every frame of footage from every camera in that room and three others, plus whatever your friend with the phone thought they were doing. The studio’s legal team arrived pretending this was all an unfortunate accident. I told them to save their script for someone who hadn’t seen the bolts.”
There’s a small, mean satisfaction in that. “And Victor?”
“Trying to work out whether to cry or spin it.” His mouth twists. “He’s terrified of losing his poster shot and his budget. I told him he should be terrified of losing you.”
She studies him, the rigid line of his shoulders, the tired bruises under his eyes. “You haven’t slept.”
“You were unconscious,” he says. “Didn’t feel like nap time.”
“You can’t keep that up,” she says. “You know that, right? You’ll start making mistakes.”
“I didn’t say I was going to keep it up,” he replies. “I said I wasn’t leaving you alone in a French hospital while you looked like you’d gone ten rounds with a lighting rig.”
She reaches for his hand. The cannula tape tugs on her skin; she ignores it. He hesitates half a second, then threads his fingers through hers, careful, like she’s made of glass and he’s trying not to leave fingerprints.
His hand is hot. Always has been. Big and warm and steady as a handrail that actually does its job.
“You did everything right,” she says quietly. “You moved the mat. You argued. You called it. This isn’t on you.”
His jaw works. “My job is that you don’t fall.”
“Your job is that I don’t die,” she counters. “I’m currently not dead. You’re smashing it.”
He huffs, looking away, but his thumb strokes once across the back of her hand. “Don’t do that.”
“What?”
“Make me feel better about nearly losing you.”
“You didn’t nearly lose me,” she says. “You nearly watched someone else’s sabotage do its best. Different thing.”
He doesn’t answer. It scares her, in a different way. Ronan without words is like a set without power.
“What aren’t you telling me?” she presses.
He sighs, leans forward, elbows on his knees, their joined hands dangling between them. “Press got wind before the ambulance doors closed,” he says. “Somebody was shooting vertical the whole way down. SpotlightNow has already run three pieces—‘on-set chaos’, ‘reckless stunts’, ‘controlling bodyguard’. Hashtag protectNiamh is trending. So is hashtag fireRonanKeane.”
The words land like another hit to the head. “They’re blaming you?”
“Some of them,” he says. “Others are blaming Victor. Others are arguing about whether you should have done the scene at all. Everyone’s very brave in the comments.”
She can picture it without seeing a single pixel: her fall cut into six-second loops, strangers analysing the angle of the rail and her scream, think pieces written between lunch breaks. Her career dissected as content.
“Security board?” she asks.
“I reported the incident myself before the set finished wiping the shock off their faces,” he says. “They’ve opened a preliminary review. Which is code for, ‘We’re watching you, Keane, don’t make us regret your licence.’”
“They can’t actually think you—”
“They don’t think I pushed you off a balcony,” he says, dry. “They think I failed to prevent you going over one. Different box on the form, same weight.”
Her chest tightens. “I hate this.”
“Welcome to fame,” he says. “Where everyone has an opinion and none of them were there.”
As if summoned, his phone buzzes on the bedside table. The screen lights with Quinn’s name. He glances at it, then at her.
“Take it,” she says. “Speaker.”
He answers, toggles it on. “Go ahead.”
Quinn’s voice fills the little room, brisk and threaded with concern. “How’s my favourite reckless movie star?”
“Concussed and insulted,” Niamh says. “Apparently I’m irritating now.”
“Oh, you were irritating long before the fall,” Quinn says. “But I’m very glad you’re still in one piece. Keane, I’ve got early pulls.”
“Tell me you’ve got something I can use,” he says.
“I’ve got several things,” she says. “One: that rail was fine at 07:12 when stunts did their sign-off. We’ve got that on internal camera. Two: at 09:03, someone from grip adjusts the mat position and checks the bolts again. Still fine. Three: at 10:41, there’s a gap in the feed from balcony cam for ninety seconds. When it comes back, the angle’s shifted half a degree and the bolts look… different.”
“Different how?” Niamh asks.
“One has what I’d politely call pre-existing stress lines,” Quinn says. “Like someone started sawing and then got interrupted. I can’t prove tampering from the footage alone, but the timing is very convenient. Want to guess who was on that catwalk in the ninety-second blackout?”
Ronan’s shoulders go even tighter. “Don’t make me guess.”
“Our friend the second AD,” Quinn says. “Luca. He went up there with a radio and a coffee and came down without the coffee. I’m pulling line-of-sight on who he talked to, but he’s definitely our most interesting boy today.”
Niamh swallows. “He smiled in my face in the briefing.”
“Smilers are the worst,” Quinn says. “Also, someone leaked the internal incident report to SpotlightNow before Carla even finished filling it out. The gossip site’s ‘on-set source’ is using phrases that only appear in that form. So either someone in production is reckless as hell or we’ve got a fixer with a very good pipeline.”
The room feels smaller. Niamh glances at Ronan. His expression has shifted from raw fear to something colder, more familiar. The look he gets when he’s drawing lines between red pins on a board in his head.
“So what do we do?” Niamh asks. “Because I can’t stay in this bed forever, and I’m not letting whoever did that rail win by shutting down the shoot.”
“You’re not going back tomorrow,” Ronan says immediately.
“No,” she agrees. “I’m going back when the doctors clear me. And when we have a plan. Those are my terms.”
He opens his mouth, clearly ready to argue on the first part, then closes it again. “You’re supposed to avoid screens and stress for forty-eight hours,” he says instead. “That’s in the discharge notes.”
“You read my discharge notes?”
He gives her a look. “Of course I read your discharge notes.”
It hits her then, not just the physical care but the shape of it: this is what he does. This is how he loves—through checklists and boundary lines and insisting ambulances be called now, not later.
“Okay,” she says slowly. “So no doomscrolling. You and Quinn spoon-feed me only what I need to know so my brain doesn’t melt. In return, you listen when I tell you how to handle the press.”
He grimaces. “I was afraid you were going to say that.”
“You’re brilliant at threat assessments,” she says. “I’m brilliant at camera angles. We use both.”
Quinn hums approvingly down the line. “I like that plan. Also, for what it’s worth, the way the narrative is shaping? You’ve got public sympathy on your side, Niamh. People are furious on your behalf. Hashtag protectNiamh is louder than fireRonanKeane by about three to one.”
“Not loud enough,” Niamh says. “We need to control the frame, not just react to it.”
Ronan rubs a hand over his face. “Here it comes,” he mutters.
She squeezes his fingers. “We lean in,” she says. “We stop pretending we can keep the job and the relationship separate in the public eye. They’re already using your protectiveness as a stick to beat you with. So we pick up the stick and use it ourselves.”
“Translate,” he says. “Preferably into short sentences. I have a head injury by proxy.”
“We go deliberate,” she says. “No more blurry long-lens shots of me looking half-dead and you looking murderous. We give them images that say exactly what we want: that I’m not a reckless diva, you’re not a violent liability, and we are very much a united front.”
“You mean staged,” he says.
“I mean choreographed,” she corrects. “We’ve been together for months and trying to keep it mostly ours. That ship’s sailed. They’ve already decided you’re my overbearing bodyguard. Let’s show them you’re my partner instead.”
He looks genuinely thrown. “You want to do a PR relationship?”
“It’s not PR,” she says. “It’s real. That’s the point. We just… turn the volume up in public long enough to drown out the narrative they’re trying to stick on you.”
“You’re concussed,” he says. “You’re not making big decisions about our life while concussed.”
“Oh, that’s adorable,” she says. “You think this is big? Ronan, I already told the paramedics you’re my partner, didn’t I?”
Colour crawls up his neck. “You heard that?”
“Hard to miss,” she says. “Also very hot, by the way. Highly recommend more terrified declarations in future.”
Quinn coughs delicately. “Do you want me to hang up, or…?”
“Stay,” Niamh says. “You’re going to have to help us execute this.”
Ronan pinches the bridge of his nose. “Explain the execution part before you start dressing me in coordinated outfits.”
“First,” Niamh says, shifting slightly on the pillow. Pain flares and recedes. “I put out one statement. Calm, clear, no drama. I don’t cry on camera, I don’t post the wound, I don’t rage at Victor even though I want to. I say I’m okay, I thank the crew, I make it very clear that you saved my life.”
“You’re not putting my name in—”
“Yes, I am,” she says. “Because right now the story is ‘controlling bodyguard shuts down stunts.’ I want it to be ‘bodyguard moved the mat and called the ambulance’.”
Quinn makes an approving noise. “People eat competence for breakfast.”
“Second,” Niamh continues. “When they discharge me, we don’t sneak out the back. We walk out the front. Together. Cameras will be there either way. If we try to hide, it looks like we’ve done something wrong. If we come out hand in hand, no sunglasses, no ducking, it looks like we’re not ashamed of a thing.”
Ronan stares at her. “You realise that means every tabloid from here to Dublin will run those pictures for the next decade.”
“They were going to run some version of me in a wheelchair and you looking like a criminal anyway,” she says. “I’d rather pick the frame. Let them see you steadying me. Let them see me letting you.”
Silence drops for a moment. He looks at their joined hands like they’re something holy and slightly dangerous.
“And third?” he asks.
“Third,” she says, “we use the fake-date energy on set. We treat every movement like a choreographed romance scene. Every coffee walk, every car to the studio, every time you appear on a monitor behind me. If someone on that lot is feeding the fixer, we give them bait: three different versions of where we’ll be and when, each tied to a different person.”
Quinn actually sounds delighted now. “Oh, I love it. You turn the stalker narrative into a love story and a sting operation at the same time.”
“Exactly,” Niamh says. “They want a spectacle? We’ll give them one. On our terms.”
Ronan leans back in the chair, eyes closed briefly like he’s reconsidering all his life choices. When he opens them, they’re clearer. Still scared. But clearer.
“Rules,” he says.
“Of course,” she replies. “You’d shrivel up without rules.”
“You do not push yourself to prove you’re fine,” he says. “If you get dizzy, we stop. If you get blurred vision, we stop. You sleep when the doctors tell you. You let me say no to anything that smells like a stunt, even if you think you can hack it. And the second this feels like it’s costing you more than it’s protecting us, we pull the plug on the performance and go back to boring.”
“You’ll never be boring,” she says. “But yes. Agreed.”
He studies her a long moment. “You’re sure you want this?”
She squeezes his hand again, feeling the roughness of his skin, the way his thumb keeps finding that same spot on her knuckles like it’s home.
“I already have it,” she says softly. “The only difference is who’s watching.”
He swallows, throat working. “Alright,” he says at last. “We’ll do it your way. We weaponise the spotlight.”
Quinn hums. “I’ll draft copy for your statement, pull the least rabid press to be at the hospital doors, and map out three test ‘dates’ on the call sheet once you’re cleared. Luca won’t know what hit him.”
Niamh lets her eyes close again, suddenly exhausted. But the fear has shifted into something sharper, more controllable. Not just survival, but strategy.
“Ronan?” she murmurs.
“Yeah?”
“When we walk out there,” she says, “you’d better hold my hand like you mean it.”
He leans in, presses his forehead very gently against the back of her bandaged hand. It’s almost a kiss and somehow more intimate.
“I’ve never done anything with you I didn’t mean,” he says.
Somewhere outside the room, a phone buzzes on a desk. A notification pops up on a gossip reporter’s screen:
▶ SPOTLIGHTNOW DM — anonymous tip:
You’re asking the wrong question. It’s not “why did she fall?” It’s “who wanted her protector out of the picture?”
***
They discharge her just after lunchtime, which feels rude.
Niamh sits on the edge of the hospital bed in a mercifully soft jumper Quinn had delivered, the collar arranged carefully around the bandage at her temple. The room smells of saline, cheap coffee, and the faint metallic tang of nerves.
“You’re sure they’re not just sick of me?” she asks as the consultant signs the last of the forms.
“We have done the scans, Ms Rowan,” the woman says in careful English. “You have a mild to moderate concussion, five stitches, and a very stubborn blood pressure. You need rest, quiet, and someone to monitor you. The hospital is not the only place this can happen.” She glances at Ronan. “He seems… motivated.”
Ronan stands with his hands in his pockets, like if he doesn’t physically restrain himself he’ll start rearranging the entire neurology ward. “Motivated is one word,” he says.
“Obsessed is another,” Niamh adds.
The consultant smiles faintly. “You may be concussed, but your humour is intact. That is also a good sign.” She sobers. “No driving for seventy-two hours. No alcohol. Limited screens. If you vomit more than once, if you become confused, if your headache worsens significantly, you return immediately. Yes?”
“Yes,” Niamh says obediently.
Ronan doesn’t nod. He memorises. She can see it, the way he files each instruction under things he will enforce like a one-man health service.
“And you understand that work should wait?” the consultant adds. “Stunts are out of the question for at least a week.”
“No arguments there,” Niamh says. “My stunt double will be delightfully offended if I steal her thunder.”
The consultant leaves them with a stack of paperwork and a headache leaflet that looks like it was last updated in 1998. The door closes. The quiet feels different without medical authority in the room.
“You feel steady?” Ronan asks. “We can wait, if you want. There’s no rush.”
There is, though. Not to leave, but to choose how. She takes a breath, tests the room. It tilts slightly, then settles. “Help me stand,” she says.
He’s there instantly, one hand under her elbow, the other hovering at her waist without quite touching. His eyes are wary, like he’s watching for invisible cracks in the floor.
“Footing?” he asks.
“I’ve had worse in stilettos on cobbles,” she says. “Hospital linoleum is a dream.”
He doesn’t laugh, exactly, but some of the tightness in his shoulders eases. “We don’t have to do the front-door bit,” he says. “Quinn’s mapped us three side exits. We can get you into the car with minimal exposure.”
“Minimal exposure is what they expect,” she says. “And fear is what they’re banking on. I’m not giving them either.”
“You’re not giving them your head on a stick either,” he counters. “Those flashes are going to hurt.”
She reaches up, fingers brushing his wrist where his pulse beats, too fast. “Then stay between me and the worst of them,” she says. “We agreed, remember? We weaponise this. We show them what we want them to see.”
He closes his eyes briefly. When he opens them, the wariness is still there, but it’s layered over with something steadier. Resolve. “Quinn’s got your draft ready,” he says. “We do that first. Short and sweet, before they wheel you to the slaughter.”
“You’re very dramatic for a man who hates drama,” she says.
“I hate preventable harm,” he replies. “Drama’s just a side-effect.”
He picks up her phone from the bedside locker, unlocks it with the code only the two of them know, and holds it out to her. The brightness is already turned down to almost nothing.
“One pass,” he warns. “If your head starts pounding, we stop and Quinn posts what we have.”
The notes app is open. Quinn’s left her usual editorial footprint—clean lines, no frills.
To everyone who’s reached out: I’m okay. We had an incident on set today when a safety rig failed. Thanks to fast work from the crew, stunt team and my security lead, I was treated quickly and I’m already being discharged. I’m shaken and sore but very grateful to be walking out of this hospital. Please be kind to the cast and crew who have to go back to work tomorrow. We’re human beings, not just headlines. Love, N x
Below that, Quinn has left one private note: she can name Ronan if she is sure.
“Subtle,” Niamh mutters.
Ronan shifts his weight. “You don’t have to.”
She reads it again, tasting each word. “Change ‘a safety rig failed’ to ‘a safety rig appears to have been tampered with’,” she says slowly. “We’re not pretending this was random.”
Ronan’s eyebrows go up. “You want to poke that hornet’s nest?”
“The hornets already tried to throw me off a balcony,” she says. “They’re not going to be calmed by euphemisms.”
She edits, thumbs moving carefully. The room sways once. She waits it out. Adds another line before she can second-guess it.
And to answer the question a lot of you seem to be asking: yes, my bodyguard is exactly as good as he looks. Ronan Keane moved the mat, made the call and hasn’t let go of my hand since. I’m very lucky he’s in my corner.
She feels him go still beside her, like she’s touched some live wire in the air.
“You sure?” he asks quietly.
She hits save. “I don’t say things I don’t mean.”
For a second he looks like he’s going to argue. Then he leans in, presses a quick kiss to her shoulder, just above the jumper seam, like he can’t quite help himself. “Send it before I lose my nerve and grab the phone,” he mutters.
She taps post. The message goes out to millions of followers and a small army of aggregators. Somewhere across the world, comment sections ignite.
Her head aches a little more now, but it’s a clean pain, with purpose.
“Right,” she says. “Let’s go sell the hand-holding.”
He rolls the wheelchair closer with obvious reluctance. “You walk out there and faint because you’re too proud to sit, I’m never letting you live it down,” he warns.
“You already don’t let me live anything down,” she says, lowering herself into the chair carefully. “Besides, this image is for them, not for me. Me in a wheelchair with you pushing says: I’m hurt, but I’m cared for. I can live with that.”
He swallows. “You’re giving them too much credit if you think they’ll read that much nuance in a photo.”
“I don’t need them all to,” she says. “Just enough.”
He checks the bandage one more time, the drip site on her hand, the angle of the chair’s footrests like this is some high-stakes mission instead of a short trip through a corridor full of bad art.
“Ready?” he asks.
“No,” she says honestly. “But let’s go anyway.”
The corridor outside is quieter than she expected. Either the hospital has excellent soundproofing, or the noise is waiting in the lobby. Ronan pushes the chair with one hand, the other resting lightly on her shoulder. She can feel the heat of his palm through the wool.
“Quinn?” he asks, tapping his earpiece.
Her voice crackles in his ear, faint enough that Niamh only catches the cadence. “Press cluster at the main entrance,” Quinn says. “Mostly photo agencies, a couple of local news crews, one SpotlightNow stringer. No one has breached inside. Your route is clear until the elevators.”
“Any long lenses outside?” he asks.
“Always,” Quinn says. “But you’ve got a cone of relative sanity for about sixty seconds once you hit the doors. After that, it’s a scrum.”
“Copy,” he says. “We only need thirty.”
The lift ride feels longer than the ambulance journey up. Niamh watches their reflections in the brushed steel doors: her pale face, the purple bruise blooming under the bandage; his jaw like granite, shoulders filling the space.
“You alright?” he asks, catching her gaze.
“You’ve asked me that fourteen times,” she says.
“And I’ll keep asking till I get an answer I like.”
She smiles faintly. “What’s the answer you like?”
“That you feel absolutely fine and you’ve decided to take early retirement to a cottage in Donegal,” he says. “Failing that, ‘I can walk in a straight line and I don’t hate you for making me do this’ will do.”
“You’re safe on the second part,” she says. “The first we’ll negotiate.”
The lift doors slide open onto the hospital foyer. The sound hits her first—an indistinct roar of voices, the rapid-fire stutter of camera shutters. Security has set up a loose cordon inside, but she can see shapes pressed against the glass doors beyond, like a weather front made of people.
Her stomach flips. For a second, she’s back on the balcony, staring down at the drop. Ronan’s hand presses more firmly into her shoulder, grounding her.
“Last chance,” he murmurs. “We can U-turn now, take a side exit. We’ve proved enough to ourselves for one day.”
She lifts her chin. “We’re not proving it to ourselves,” she says. “We’re proving it to them.”
He nods once, then signals to the hospital security guard. The man pushes open the inner doors. Noise swells, bright and hard.
“Niamh! Niamh, over here! How are you feeling? Did the director push you too hard?”
“Was it a stunt gone wrong?”
“Is it true your bodyguard refused to let you do the scene?”
“Ronan, are you being investigated?”
They move into the space between the inner doors and the outer glass like a diver breaking the surface. Ronan parks the chair for half a second, steps around to her side, and offers his hand.
“Ready, Rowan?” he asks, voice pitched low enough only she can hear the tiny tremor under the words.
It’s the surname that does it. Not Ms Rowan. Not Niamh. Rowan, like she’s something rooted he’s holding onto. She slides her fingers into his, lets him take some of her weight as she stands.
Flashbulbs pop. The lobby becomes a storm of light. Her head throbs, but she keeps her expression calm, a fraction wry. Her free hand lifts in a small wave.
“Hello,” she says. No shouting, no grandstanding. Just her voice, steady enough to carry to the front row. “I’m alright. Bit banged up, but alright.”
Questions fly at her. She ignores most of them, picking her own beats.
“We had an incident on set,” she says. “A safety rig appears to have been tampered with. That’s under investigation now, and I’m very grateful to the stunt team and the crew who moved fast. I’m especially grateful to Ronan—” She squeezes his hand for emphasis. “—who made sure there was a mat under me and an ambulance called before anyone thought about liability.”
The SpotlightNow stringer leans forward, eyes bright. “Do you blame production for what happened?”
She lets the question hang, feeling Ronan tense beside her. This is where they want the soundbite. Where they want her to torch Victor on the steps of a hospital.
“I blame whoever thought my life was worth gambling for a shot,” she says instead. “And I trust that between the police, the studio and my security team, we’re going to find out exactly who that was.”
Another voice cuts through. “Are you and Mr Keane together?”
This is the other soundbite they came for. She doesn’t even have to look at Ronan to feel the heat spike off him.
She could dodge. She’s been dodging versions of that question since red carpets were invented. Today, she doesn’t.
“Yes,” she says simply. “We are.”
The lobby goes electric. A dozen cameras lean in as if the answer has gravity. Ronan goes very, very still at her side. His hand tightens infinitesimally on hers.
“How long?” someone shouts. “Since before the stalker? Is this a security breach?”
“My personal life is not a breach,” she says, letting steel thread her tone. “It’s my life. Ronan has been my security lead and my partner for months. He’s very good at both.”
A ripple of laughter breaks some of the tension. She leans into his side just enough to make it impossible for any halfway decent lens to crop him out of the frame.
“Now, I’m under orders to go home and rest,” she says. “So if you’d be kind enough to let us through without giving my doctor a heart attack, I’d really appreciate it.”
Ronan guides her towards the doors. Security parts the sea of lenses into a narrow path. Even through the glass, she can see long lenses perched like birds of prey on the wall opposite, catching every angle. She keeps her eyes on the car waiting at the curb and the faint reflection of their joined hands.
As they step out into the weak Paris sunlight, someone yells, “Ronan, do you have a comment on the calls for you to be fired?”
He’s not supposed to answer. They agreed he wouldn’t. But he looks at her, just once, and she sees it—the flash of every indignity, every comment thread that painted him as dangerous for doing his job.
She nods, barely. Permission.
He turns his head, meets the nearest camera lens straight-on. “My only comment,” he says, “is that my job is to keep her alive. Today I did my job. If anyone has a problem with that, they’re free to put it in writing.”
The shutters go feral. Somewhere behind them, a producer will be screaming. Somewhere else, a fixer will be reassessing their fee.
They reach the car. He opens the door, helps her in like they haven’t been performing for a wall of lenses, then slides in beside her instead of taking the front passenger seat. The driver pulls away as security closes the gap behind them.
Only when the hospital drops out of sight does he let out a breath like he’s been holding it since the balcony gave way.
“You did well,” he says.
She tips her head back against the seat. “You mean I didn’t faint or sue anyone on the steps?”
“I mean you held the line,” he says. “You were clear. You were calm. You didn’t hand them any more than you wanted to.”
She turns her head to look at him. “You said we weaponise the spotlight,” she reminds him.
“You said that,” he corrects. “I just stood there trying not to throttle anyone.”
“You stood there and let me lean on you,” she says. “That’s the image that will stick. Not the fall. This.”
Her phone buzzes in her lap. She glances down long enough to see Quinn’s name and a preview of the message.
Quinn: Trending: #protectNiamh, #ThankYouRonan, and—because people are degenerates—#BodyguardBoyfriend. You broke the internet, kids.
Niamh huffs a soft laugh and passes him the phone. “See?” she says. “We’re already ahead of the narrative.”
He reads, mouth twisting into something that isn’t quite a smile and isn’t quite horror. “Bodyguard Boyfriend,” he mutters. “Christ.”
“What?” she teases. “Too on the nose?”
“My sisters are going to have a field day,” he says. “They’re in a group chat making stickers as we speak.”
“They’ll love it,” she says. “Your ma will pretend she doesn’t but secretly she’ll be delighted I said nice things about you on the internet.”
He looks out the window, jaw working. “They’ll be relieved you’re in one piece,” he says. “They like you more than me.”
“They have incredible taste,” she says solemnly.
The car turns off the main road, heading for the rented apartment Quinn secured for them off-location—safehouse by any other name. The adrenaline that’s been propping her up drains all at once, leaving her limbs heavy.
“Hey,” Ronan says quietly. “Don’t crash on me yet. We still have to get you upstairs.”
“I’m not crashing,” she lies. “I’m… power-saving.”
He snorts. “Sure. Sleep mode when we’re behind a door. Until then, stay awake for me.”
“Bossy,” she murmurs.
“Feminist doesn’t mean doormat,” he says. “My mum didn’t raise me to watch women fall over twice in one day.”
She smiles, eyes slipping closed for half a second. “Your mum did a good job,” she says. “You can tell her I said that. After you explain the hashtag.”
He groans softly. “I’m never explaining the hashtag. We’re pretending it doesn’t exist.”
“We absolutely are not,” she says. “We’re going to use it. It’s free advertising.”
He shakes his head, but there’s affection in it now, threaded through the exasperation. Outside, Paris moves past in a blur of stone and light and people who have no idea that the woman in the back of the car nearly died for a poster shot.
Inside, in the small bubble of leather and low engine noise, it’s just them and the faint echo of camera shutters, already fading into memory and content.
“This is the easy part,” she says suddenly.
“Getting concussed and paraded through a hospital?” he asks. “I’m afraid to ask what you think the hard part is.”
She turns her head, meets his eyes, lets him see all of it—the fear, the fury, the determination not to be written as a victim in anyone’s script. “The hard part is going back,” she says. “Walking onto that set and pretending to be someone else in front of people who tried to kill me.”
He holds her gaze, something fierce and steady burning there. “You won’t be doing it in front of them,” he says. “You’ll be doing it over them. While we run them to ground.”
Her mouth curves. “Now who’s dramatic?”
“I learned from the best,” he says.
Outside, another notification pings through to a SpotlightNow inbox: a reply to their anonymous DM.
You wanted scandal. Fine. Here’s your headline: SHE FELL. HE CAUGHT HER. HE’S THE PROBLEM. Find who paid you to write it that way.