Chapter 13
“You called him.”
The words hang between us. I stand in the doorway where I've been frozen since speaking them, watching the tear tracks on her face catch the lamplight like accusations.
I came up here to confront her about the stolen phone, the broken rule.
But she's already turning from the desk, and the word she throws at me changes everything.
"Leverage." Her voice carries an edge I haven't heard before. "That's what someone said downstairs. Through the door. I'm just leverage."
My discipline cracks. She overheard something from the family dinner. Not everything, she couldn't have from outside, but enough. The confrontation I planned dissolves. She's taken control before I could establish my ground.
"What did you hear?" I keep my voice controlled, but the Saint Michael on my forearm flexes as my fist clenches.
"Fragments. Voices through a door I shouldn't have been near.
" She stands, and there's nothing of the soft teacher in her posture now.
This is the real Daphne, sharp-edged and angry.
"Something about my father painting in a garden.
Someone named Hallstein. That I'm just a tool in something I don't understand. "
I step fully into the room, closing the door behind me. The apartment shrinks around us. Her scent, vanilla and something purely her, fills the space between us.
"Your father was in our garden. Three weeks ago. The timing—"
"The timing was coincidence." Her voice cuts through my attempted explanation. "Papa found that garden through a church commission. The priest at Sacred Heart asked him to paint local gardens for their new prayer room. Your back gate was open. He saw the bougainvillea and couldn't help himself."
The theory I've been building wobbles. I keep my face neutral, but she sees it anyway.
"You never asked about him," she continues, stepping closer. The heat from her body makes my jaw clench. "Three weeks. Never pushed for information. Some part of you knew I wasn't… whatever you thought."
"The timeline—"
"Stop." She's close enough now that I can see her pulse in her throat, rapid with anger. Close enough that my body responds despite my control. "Tell me why I'm here."
Nine years press down. I move to the window, needing distance from her heat.
"Hallstein." The name tastes bitter. "His name has been put forward for a Pentagon advisory position."
"Who is he?"
"Someone from before."
"Before what?"
The wall goes up. Some things stay buried.
Silence stretches. In that silence, she moves behind me, close enough that her warmth presses against my back.
"My father's going half-mad with worry. You've been managing my phone, turned him away at your door."
The betrayal in her voice lands hard. But I have ammunition too.
I turn to face her, and the movement brings us too close. I can feel her breath on my chest.
"I heard what you told him in the phone call. You told him you were safe." My voice stays flat, operational. "Said you were figuring things out. Needed more time. You had your code word, blue. Didn't use it."
She goes still. The anger doesn't leave her face, but something else joins it. Recognition.
"That's different."
"Is it?"
We stand in the middle of the apartment, inches apart, twenty-one days of unspoken truths finally surfacing. My cock stirs at her proximity, at the fire in her eyes, at the way she doesn't back down even now.
"Papa's not a spy," she says, her voice dropping lower. "He's a sixty-three-year-old painter who talks to my mother's roses every morning. Who hasn't been the same since she died when I was seven. Who's probably not sleeping because I'm gone."
Something in my chest shifts, an ache I refuse to acknowledge.
"He can barely kill spiders. I have to do it for him. The idea that he's working for someone like this Hallstein…" She laughs, bitter and beautiful. "You built this on coincidence."
She's right. I know she's right. Have known for days, maybe longer. But I can't admit it aloud. My jaw works, but no words come.
"So what happens now?" She asks the question I can't answer. "Am I free?"
I can't say yes. The operation is still live, and something deeper, something that makes my chest constrict at the thought of her leaving, keeps the word trapped.
"No. It's not safe," I manage. "For you or Nicolas. If Hallstein notices—"
"So I'm under protection now? Not leverage?" The skepticism in her voice cuts deep. "Convenient."
She moves even closer, deliberate, testing. Her breasts brush my chest for just a moment, and my whole body goes rigid with want.
"You never believed I was connected to this Hallstein guy." It's not a question. "Three weeks, and you never really thought I was part of this."
I stay silent. Every word I might say is a confession I'm not ready to make.
"Why am I still here?" Her voice is barely above a whisper, but it fills the space between us.
The truth burns in my throat. That I've been watching her not flinch for twenty-one days. That she danced for me painted in my garden's flowers. That the thought of her returning to Pristine makes something in me go feral.
"You belong here."
It's the only truth I can give her. Her eyes search mine, dark and demanding, finding only the edge of something I won't name.
"My mother's roses are blooming," she says quietly. "Pink heritage roses she planted the year before she died. Papa tends them religiously, and we usually celebrate their blooming with a cup of peppermint tea and Mom's choc-chip cookies. But not this year."
The detail cuts deeper than she intended. This is what I've cost them. A father and daughter who speak in paint and gardens, separated by my paranoid theory.
"You asked about Hallstein," I deflect, needing to give her something. "Nine years ago he had me discharged from the Army. He framed me."
"For what?"
The wall holds. Six women's names stay locked in my throat.
"Can't say."
"Can't or won't?"
"Both."
She stares at me for a long moment, then nods slowly. Not acceptance, but acknowledgment that this is where I stop.
"So I'm stuck here. For safety from someone I've never met. Because of something you won't explain. While my father loses his mind."
When she puts it like that, it sounds exactly as insane as it is. My hands clench at my sides, the only acknowledgment of the truth in her words.
"He stood outside this club for thirty minutes," she continues. "In his paint-stained clothes. Trying to find me. Your people turned him away."
Each word lands precisely. An innocent man, worried about his daughter, dismissed at the door of the place where I'm keeping her.
"I'll send him another message—"
"No." Her voice is firm. "No more lies through texts. My voice or nothing."
"That's not—"
"Safe? I don't care. Those are my terms."
The negotiation has shifted. She's not asking permission anymore. She's taking control, and fuck if that doesn't make me want her even more.
"You can call him tomorrow."
She nods, accepting this small victory, though we both know I'll be monitoring the call. But her eyes stay on mine, still searching.
"Is he innocent? My father?"
The admission sticks in my throat. I can't say it aloud, but something in my face must answer because she nods again, slower this time.
"Then I want to see him."
"Nicolas?"
"Hallstein." Her chin lifts, regal in her defiance. "If my life's been destroyed because of him, I want to see the man who caused this."
"No."
"Yes."
"That's not how—"
"You made me part of this." She steps closer, and I have to fight not to step back. "When you took me. I'm involved now."
Every rule I've lived by for nine years tells me this is a mistake. Taking her into the field violates everything.
But something in her eyes, not pleading, just demanding to be included in her own story, wears my refusal down.
"Drive-by only. The house. Nothing more."
"That's all I want."
I don't believe her. But I'm already moving toward the door, and she's already following. The discipline that's kept me alive nine years crumbles with each step.
We descend the back stairs in silence. Past the second landing with its flickering bulb. Through the loading dock with its industrial chill. My truck waits in the shadows, black and anonymous.
She climbs into the passenger side without being told. The cab immediately fills with her scent, and my hands tighten on the steering wheel. I start the engine, knowing I'm crossing a line I can't uncross.
We pull out into the Miami night, and I've already given her more than I should.
Coral Gables unfolds around us in Mediterranean perfection. Barrel-tile roofs and perfect lawns, old money pretending it's always been clean.
The truck cab is torture. Her thigh six inches from mine. The windows starting to fog from our breathing. Her scent, that vanilla and something else, filling every breath I take. My cock hardens despite my control, and I shift slightly, trying to ease the pressure.
I park across from Hallstein's house. Cream stucco walls, white columns, circular drive.
The lights glow in the front room. Through the window, a shadow moves — then resolves into the man himself.
Hallstein. Silver-haired, straight-backed, crossing the lit room with a drink in his hand like the world owes him the ice in it.
He pauses, says something over his shoulder, and a younger woman in scrubs wheels his wife into frame.
His hand comes to rest on his wife's shoulder for exactly the length of a laugh at something no one in that room could have found funny.
The caregiver steps back, out of his reach, in a movement so practiced it looks like choreography.
Nine years of photographs, and the sight of him breathing still floods my mouth with copper.
"That's it," I say, my voice rougher than intended. "Where he lives."