Grace
The sheets are crisp, the air heavy with that same scent I’ve started to associate with him, something clean and dark. He leans against the headboard, the sheets barely covering him, sunlight catching the sharp edge of his jaw.
I lie beside him, the distance between us deliberate. It’s easier to think when he’s not touching me.
“You’re quiet,” he says after a moment.
“I’m thinking.” I don’t elaborate. I don’t tell him that my mind is not on my previous life and the way it fell apart, because all I can think about is how it feels to be here, with him.
How I’ve never felt this heady connection to anyone before.
That I’m worried it’s just great sex and adrenalin fuelling feelings that aren’t really there.
Because no one falls in love like this.
“That sounds dangerous.”
“Maybe.” I turn onto my side, watching him. “I’m just trying to understand what this is.”
He studies me for a long moment. “This?”
“Yes. You. Me. All of it.” I hesitate, searching for the right words. “I don’t know what comes next. What I’m supposed to be to you now.”
Something flickers in his eyes. Not surprise, but the careful calculation of a man weighing truths. “You’re mine.”
“That’s not an answer,” I say softly. “It’s a sentence.”
His mouth twitches, half amusement, half warning. “I don’t do uncertainty, Grace. I deal in outcomes.”
“Then tell me the outcome,” I press. “What happens when all this is over? When Hartley’s gone, when my name’s cleared?”
He exhales slowly. “By then, you won’t want to leave.”
I laugh quietly. “You sound awfully sure of yourself.”
“I am.”
The confidence in his tone should irritate me. Instead, it just tightens something low in my chest. “Iris said you don’t bring people here.”
His gaze sharpens. “Iris talks too much.”
“She meant it as a compliment,” I say, softer now. “That you’re… different here. Softer, maybe.”
He shakes his head slightly. “I’m not soft. I’m careful.”
“And yet you brought me home. A wanted criminal.”
Now he really laughs. “We’re all criminals here, milost.”
For a moment, silence. Then he says, “My father built this house. Everything in it. The land, the company, the name. He was Bratva. Through and through. Ruthless. Unforgiving. He taught me what power looks like.”
I listen, unsure if he’s ever said this aloud before.
“My mother,” he continues, his voice quieter, “is Irish Mafia. Her family dealt in information and blood oaths. She married him knowing she’d be crossing lines that couldn’t be uncrossed.”
“Did they love each other?” I ask.
A shadow passes over his expression. “Deeply. Unreservedly. In ways I never understood possible.”
I imagine it. The steel of one world colliding with the fire of another. “And now you run both?”
“I keep them balanced,” he says. “My father’s gone, so I handle the Orlov business, the shipping, the trade, the alliances.
My brother who you saw when we arrived, Killian, oversees our eastern routes.
My mother manages what’s left of her family’s network from here.
Iris stays out of it, mostly. I have three other brothers who dabble in the parts that they can’t fuck up too much. Then my cousins do the rest.”
“And that makes you the head of the family.”
“This side of it, yes.” The word lands heavy. “Which means anyone under my protection becomes part of that world. Whether they like it or not.”
I shift closer, searching his face. “You mean me.”
He nods once.
It shouldn’t make me shiver, the idea of belonging to something so dark, so permanent, but it does. “I never planned to end up in your world, Liam.”
“No one ever does,” he says quietly. “But they tend to stay.”
“Why?” I ask.
“Because there’s an honestly in criminality that you don’t get elsewhere. The transparency. The terms. The expectations.”
I lie back against the pillow, staring up at the ceiling. “Maybe that’s what scares me. That I could start to like it here. Start to forget what normal felt like.”
He reaches for me then, his hand sliding across the space between us until his fingers brush my wrist. “Normal’s overrated.”
“You really believe that?”
“I stopped believing in normal when I watched my father die in a room full of men who called him brother.”
The admission catches me off guard. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be,” he says. “It taught me what loyalty costs. And what it’s worth.”
I turn my head to look at him, the tension between us humming again, softer this time. “And what’s loyalty worth to you now?”
He leans in, voice barely above a whisper. “Everything.”
The air thickens. The distance between us disappears by degrees. His fingers trace the inside of my wrist, the slow drag of skin against skin.
“You don’t have to be afraid,” he murmurs.
“I’m not afraid of you,” I say, and I mean it. “I’m afraid of what this is.”
He studies me for a long moment, then reaches up to cup my face, his thumb brushing my cheekbone. “Then stop thinking.”
His lips find mine. The kiss starts as a question and ends as a promise.
I melt into it, my hand sliding to his chest, feeling the solid thud of his heartbeat beneath my palm. Maybe I was never meant to survive alone. Maybe the only way out of the fire was to fall into someone who could walk through it with me.
His phone buzzes from the pocket of his trousers that are still strewn on the bedroom floor. He groans when he breaks the kiss.
“I need to check this.”
I watch him stand, all strong lines of muscle and ink and scars. Every bit of him, every movement, could tell a story of its own.
Once he has checked the message, he looks up at me and grins.
“That’s it milost, the news has begun to break.” He pulls me up into his arms and leads me through to his office, grabbing the television remote and putting on the TV.
Breaking news banners scroll across the top of the screen, the news casters voice serious and flat. Video footage of Edward being handcuffed and lead away from his family home plays beside her as she reports what’s happened.
“That didn’t take long.”
A weight I thought I could bear lifts from me, and for the first time in days I feel like I can breathe.
“What else are you going to do with the information I gave you?” I ask, though once the words leave my mouth, I don’t know why. I don’t feel like I care. My old life is truly gone.
“I’ve cannibalised most of it for my own interests,” he says matter of fact. “It will add a small amount to an account I opened up earlier. An account for you, if you want it.”
My head snaps from the television screen to him.
“Why would I want it?” I ask. “That would make me what he accused me of being.”
“No,” he says. “It would make you an income while you figure out what you want to do next. No one will know. But you will know that you took what Hartley did to you and finished him with it. He will do time in a fancy country club prison, but he will never work in politics again. His wife is already separating herself from all this. She has old family money that will see her and the kids safely removed.”
I frown. The picture in my mind isn’t quite fitting with how I feel.
“The business in that dossier, the arms deal he tried to frame you for creating, they were always going to happen. This way I hold the contracts instead of him. The difference is, I will never sacrifice you to save myself.”
He’s terrifying, but he’s mine. And that’s the difference. He doesn’t destroy for pleasure. He destroys for me.
Something begins to crack inside me.
Maybe I should be terrified of what this means, how much of me he already owns. But the truth is, I’ve never felt safer than when he’s near. I used to think love was compromise, polite smiles and empty promises. Now I know it’s something darker, heavier. Something that looks a lot like this.