Chapter 10 When Sinners Defend Saints
Chapter ten
When Sinners Defend Saints
The bar feels different tonight.
Not in a bad way. Not in a way that makes my ribs tighten or my thoughts scatter like leaves on the wind. No—tonight, the air tastes like promise. Like maybe the world can be kind for longer than five minutes.
Cain’s hand finds the small of my back as I slide past him to grab a clean towel. Warm, grounding. A subtle reminder that I’m not alone.
“You keep touching me like that,” I murmur over my shoulder, “and we’re going to have a situation with the drink orders.”
He leans in close, voice rough as ever, but soft just for me. “Sweetheart, if I don’t touch you every ten seconds, I’ll combust.”
“Cain,” I whisper, trying to sound scolding, but it comes out like a prayer. A plea.
He grins. Actually grins. Like some rare eclipse only I get to witness.
Across the bar, Hank is polishing a glass that’s been clean for a full minute. His eyes crinkle with amusement as he watches us like a proud uncle watching the two awkward kids at prom finally figure it out.
“Y’all better cool it,” Hank calls. “I ain’t got the insurance for spontaneous combustion behind the bar.”
Cain winks at me and brushes past, slow and intentional, his hip grazing mine.
Every touch tonight is like a secret handshake in a language only we speak. Between refilling beer pitchers and swapping out whiskey bottles, he keeps finding reasons to touch—fingers brushing mine, a palm at the base of my neck, lips ghosting my temple when no one’s looking.
And I let him. God, I let him.
Because I’m happy.
For the first time in… longer than I want to admit.
Everything is easy. The regulars are in good moods. The jukebox is playing something bluesy and low. The lighting’s warm. Cain’s eyes are warmer.
Hank’s smile doesn’t fade once.
The storm, when it comes, doesn’t announce itself. It slithers in like rot beneath floorboards.
The door creaks open. I don’t look up.
Cain’s laughing behind me, voice warm like whiskey in winter. I’m smiling—actually smiling—as I set a glass down and reach for the next.
And then I hear it.
That voice.
"Still playing pretend, Magdalena?"
The glass slips from my fingers and shatters on the floor.
I can’t move. I can’t breathe.
It’s like my lungs forgot their job, like the air turned to concrete and I’m buried alive inside my own body. My vision narrows, tunneling straight to the man standing just past the entryway, smug and cold and so goddamn familiar it knocks the sense from my skull.
Warren.
His name is a scream I can’t push past my lips.
Cain is in front of me before I realize I’ve stepped back—before I even understand I’m trembling. His hand brushes mine, and that’s all it takes. The dam inside me breaks, but the tears don’t come yet.
He turns, slow and dangerous. “You need to leave.”
Warren has the audacity to smile. “Didn’t realize the whore had a bodyguard.”
Cain doesn’t flinch. But his voice is different now. Low and sharp and steady in a way that feels like violence wrapped in velvet.
“I said—leave.”
Warren's eyes flick to me. “We’re worried about her. Her mother especially. She's not well. There was talk of checking her in.”
That breaks it.
Cain surges forward.
“Get the fuck out,” he snarls, shoving Warren back with a force that makes chairs scrape. “You come in here again and I won’t be asking.”
Warren stumbles but catches himself, sneering like a coward who thought he still had power. “Touch me again and I’ll call the cops.”
Cain laughs—dark and full of teeth. “Call ‘em. Tell them why you were trespassing and harassing a woman you have no connection to. I dare you.”
Hank is already behind the bar, arms crossed, eyes cold. “You heard him. Time to go, asshole.”
“I’d listen if I were you,” mutters someone from the back. “Nobody messes with our Mags.”
Warren's face twists. He looks back at me—like I’m a thing. A possession. “This isn’t over.”
Cain moves again, but Hank grabs his shoulder. “We got it.”
Warren finally turns and leaves.
The second the door shuts, I collapse.
Not to the floor—but inward. Like my bones vanish. Like the gravity of what just happened finally caves in my chest.
Cain doesn’t hesitate. He wraps an arm around me and doesn’t say a word. Just pulls me close and presses a kiss to the crown of my head.
“You’re safe,” he says, over and over, as if he says it enough, it’ll be true.
But I can’t feel it yet.
I can’t feel anything.
Cain doesn’t wait.
The second the door locks behind Warren, he’s moving—an arm tight around my waist, guiding me toward the stairs. My legs feel like paper, like if he let go, I’d fold in on myself and crumple right there on the barroom floor.
I don’t speak. I don’t blink. I just exist, barely, floating in a skin I no longer recognize.
By the time we reach the apartment, I’m shaking. Quiet, invisible tremors rippling under my skin like distant aftershocks.
“C’mon, little rabbit,” he murmurs, voice gentler than I’ve ever heard it. “Let me take care of you.”
I don’t answer. I can’t.
He gets me to the bathroom. Turns on the shower. Steam fills the space as water rushes behind the curtain. He’s saying soft things—nonsense things—but they’re warm and grounding and his, and I cling to them like driftwood in a hurricane.
My hands are ice.
He undresses me slowly. Carefully. As if any sudden movement might break me. And he’s not wrong.
By the time I step into the water, I’m hollow.
And then—
Then the heat hits.
Scalding and alive and real.
That’s all it takes.
I collapse against the tile and finally, finally break.
A sound rips from my throat—high and raw and ugly. The kind of sound you don’t make unless something inside you is dying.
Cain’s there in an instant, fully clothed, stepping right into the spray without a second thought. His arms wrap around me, pulling me into his chest as I sob like the world ended.
“I can’t—I can’t do this,” I gasp. “Why won’t they just leave me alone?”
He holds me tighter. “They will. I promise they will.”
“I want to fucking die. I want it to be over. I want to stop hurting.”
His voice breaks when he whispers, “Don’t say that, Mags. Don’t say that. Not when I just found you.”
I bury my face in his soaked shirt, my screams muffled by cotton and safety and the man who won’t let go.
I don’t remember sinking to the floor. Don’t remember my knees hitting tile. Just the blur of panic closing in, swallowing me whole.
Everything’s too loud.
The water.
My heartbeat.
My thoughts.
I can’t breathe.
It’s like drowning in my own skin—lungs screaming for air that won’t come, ribs cinched tight by invisible hands.
“I—I can’t—” I gasp, clawing at my chest like I can dig the fear out with my nails. “Cain, I can’t breathe—oh God—something’s wrong—”
He doesn’t panic.
He drops with me, arms caging around my body as I convulse, as sobs turn to gasps and gasps to wheezing terror.
“Rabbit, look at me.” His voice is steady but soft. Grounding. “You’re having a panic attack. Just breathe with me, alright? In… come on, baby, in.”
I can’t. I can’t. I can’t.
My body curls in, shoulders shaking, chest spasming, and my nails dig into his arms hard enough to bruise. I want to disappear. To cease. To not be.
“Breathe, divine thing. That’s it. I’ve got you. Just breathe.”
He talks to me through it all—low, unshakable, a voice in the storm. Not afraid of the wreckage. Not afraid of me.
And when I start to slip—really slip, into that dark place where the pain feels easier than surviving—he cups my face with both hands and forces my gaze to his.
“I will not let them break you,” he growls, voice trembling with something bigger than anger. “You hear me, Mags? They don’t get to win. Not while I’m breathing.”
My vision swims.
Tears. Water. Steam. I don’t know anymore.
I just know his hands. His voice. His heart against mine.
And little by little, the shaking slows.
My lungs start to work again.
The world stops spinning quite so fast.
But I’m still a wreck.
A sob hiccups from my chest, smaller now. Broken. Childlike. “Why does it always hurt so much?”
He pulls me onto his lap, cradling me like something sacred and shattered. “Because you’re still here, little rabbit. Still fighting. And it’s gonna be okay. I swear it on my soul.”
Cain dries me off with slow, careful hands.
He never rushes. Not once. Even when my skin’s still damp with tears and I’m shivering from more than just the shower, he moves like I’m fragile glass—and he refuses to let a single crack go untended.
He wraps me in the thickest towel he can find, then kneels in front of me on the bath mat like I’m some holy thing he’s vowed to protect.
"You’re okay, baby," he murmurs. "You’re safe now. I’ve got you, Mags."
His Mags.
The words sink in like balm and burn all at once.
When I blink up at him, dazed and hollow, he just kisses my knee and stands.
“Arms up,” he says gently, tugging one of his big, worn shirts over my head.
It swallows me whole, soft and safe and smelling like cedar smoke and the man who’s made me feel more human in a week than the world has in years.
Then—like it’s the most natural thing in the world—he sits me on the closed toilet seat and picks up my hairbrush.
I expect him to fumble.
He doesn’t.
Cain brushes my hair in slow, smooth strokes, untangling every knot with maddening care. His fingers skim my scalp like he knows I need to be touched but not grabbed. Needed but not taken.
"Soft as silk," he murmurs. "My little rabbit with wildfire in her bones."
He finds the jar of face cream I brought with me when I moved in upstairs, something I never thought he’d even notice. But he unscrews the lid, dips two fingers in, and starts dabbing it gently onto my cheeks.
"My girl takes care of herself," he says. "So I’m gonna take care of you too. Even when you can’t. Especially then."
I crumble a little more at that, in the best way.
Cain presses a kiss to my forehead and lifts me into his arms like I weigh nothing. He carries me to his bed and tucks the covers around us both like armor.
Then he just holds me.
Not like a possession. Not like a responsibility.
Like I’m his.
His arms around me are iron and silk. His chest is warm against my spine. His voice low in my ear, constant and steady as a heartbeat.
“I’ve got you, baby. I’ve always got you.”
“You’re safe now, Mags. They can’t touch you here.”
“My little rabbit. My divine thing.”
“Sleep. I’ll be right here. Always.”
And when I finally drift off, exhausted and held, I hear it one more time, like a prayer he’s sealing between the sheets.
“My Mags.”