5. Emilia
EMILIA
Darkness swallows the garage whole.
One second the fluorescent strips are buzzing overhead and Justice is standing beside me and the alarm is screaming.
The next second, nothing. He kills every light source in a single motion, some switch or breaker I never see him reach, and the only illumination left is the red pulse of the tablet painting his jaw in bloody intervals.
His hand closes around my upper arm. Not hard.
Not like the hands I know. But absolute.
There is no negotiating with the grip of a man who can dead-lift a transmission block.
He steers me through the pitch-black garage and I can't see a thing but he moves without hesitation, navigating around the workbench, the tool box, the hydraulic jack, all of it invisible to me and mapped permanently in his muscle memory.
A door opens. Metal, from the sound of it. Heavy.
He pushes me through.
"Stay here. Don't make a sound."
"Justice—"
"Not a request."
The metal door swings shut and something heavy slides into place on the other side. A bolt. A bar. I don't know. The alarm cuts off mid-pulse and silence crashes over me so hard my ears ring with the phantom of it.
I push my palms flat against the door. Cold steel. I push. It doesn't give. Not a millimeter.
The room is black. Absolute, suffocating, underground black.
I wave my hand in front of my face and see nothing.
My lungs grab for air that tastes like concrete dust and gun oil and I back up until my spine hits a shelf.
Something metal shifts behind me. Cans, maybe.
Supplies. The shelf is bolted to the wall.
I slide down until I'm sitting on the floor. Justice's flannel shirt is four sizes too large and it tents over my drawn-up legs like a blanket and the fabric still carries the signature of his body heat, cedar and motor oil and something clean underneath, like cold mountain air trapped in cotton.
I count my heartbeats because it's the only thing I can control.
Forty-seven. Forty-eight.
The floor vibrates. Footsteps above me? Outside? I can't tell. This room is a tomb. Reinforced walls. No windows. The kind of space a man builds when he expects trouble and wants a place to put something precious while he goes to meet it.
Or someone.
Seventy-one. Seventy-two.
My father's men are efficient. They found me in Tucson in nine hours.
They found me in Portland in fourteen. The sedan I bought with cash from a pawnshop in Reno was supposed to be untraceable but nothing is untraceable when your father owns the kind of people who make things traceable for a living.
One hundred and three. One hundred and four.
I lay my forehead to my knees and my throat locks tight and my eyes burn but I refuse.
I refuse to cry in this room. I've cried enough.I cried when Aiden wrapped his hand around my wrist at the engagement dinner and squeezed until the bones ground together.
I cried when my father looked at the bruises and told me to wear longer sleeves.
I cried in the bathroom in Nevada while I counted the cash I'd stolen from my own dresser drawer and calculated how far it would take me.
No more.
I dig my fingernails into my kneecaps and breathe.
Two hundred and nine. Two hundred and ten.
Three hundred.
Four hundred.
Somewhere around five hundred, the bolt slides back.
Light spills in from the garage. Not the fluorescents.
Something lower, warmer. A single work lamp on the bench, its glow orange and muted.
Justice fills the doorway. All six feet five inches of him, shoulders spanning the frame, and he has a rifle slung across his back and a handgun in a thigh holster that wasn't there before.
"Buck."
"A stray buck tripped the sensor wire on the lower road. I checked every camera. Walked the perimeter. Nothing else out there." He unslings the rifle and leans it against the wall. "It's clear."
The air leaves my lungs in a rush so violent my ribs ache with it.
I drop my forehead back to my knees and my shoulders start shaking and I hate it, I hate that my body betrays me like this every single time, but the adrenaline has nowhere to go.
It just pours out through my muscles in tremors I cannot stop.
His boots cross the concrete. He crouches in front of me. I know because the temperature changes. His body radiates heat the way an engine block does after a long drive, and constant, and I feel it on my bare ankles and my folded arms before he touches me.
He doesn't touch me.
"Emilia."
I lift my head. His face is inches away. Those blue eyes, always so cold and cynical, have something fractured in them right now. Something raw that he is trying very hard to put back behind the wall where it belongs.
"Nobody is taking you off this mountain."
My fingers uncurl from my kneecaps. I reach out and grip the front of his shirt.
He goes completely still.
I wake up wrapped in a wool blanket that smells like him.
The couch is too long for me. My feet don't reach the armrest. I'm curled in the center of it like a comma, wearing his flannel and his sweatpants with the drawstring pulled so tight it bunches at my waist, and for three disorienting seconds I don't know where I am.
The ceiling is vaulted pine. The air smells like woodsmoke and coffee.
Pale gray light filters through windows that overlook nothing but trees and snow and more trees.
Then I remember. The mountain. The garage. The dark room and the five hundred heartbeats.
I sit up. The blanket falls to my lap. I don't remember him giving it to me.
I don't remember getting from the concrete floor of that safe room back to this couch.
The last clear memory I have is my fist knotted in his shirt and his body gone rigid and still, like a man who has never once been grabbed by someone smaller than him and has no protocol for it.
The cabin is quiet.
I pad barefoot across the living room. The wood floor is cold but not punishing.
He keeps the fire banked overnight, I think, and it still radiates a steady warmth from the stone hearth.
The kitchen is simple. Heavy butcher block counters.
Cast iron on a rack above the stove. A single mug, still half full of black coffee, still warm when I touch its side.
He left recently.
I reach for the mug without thinking. Drink from it. The coffee is brutal. Thick and bitter and scalding and nothing like the delicate lattes that appeared on silver trays every morning at my father's house. It hits my stomach like a fist and I drink again, deeper, and the warmth blooms through me.
That's when I hear it. A rhythmic crack. Steady. Resonant. Wood splitting.
I carry the mug to the kitchen window.
And stop.
Justice stands in the clearing behind the cabin, twenty feet from the back door, surrounded by a scattered constellation of split logs.
He has an axe. The handle is long and dark and looks like it weighs more than my entire arm.
He sets a log on the stump, steps back, lifts, and brings the blade down in a single arc that starts at his shoulders and ends with a sound like a gunshot.
He is not wearing a shirt.
The morning air is freezing. I can see my own breath fogging the window glass when I exhale.
There is frost on the ground. Frost on the woodpile.
Frost glittering on every surface the early sun touches.
And he is standing in it bare from the waist up, wearing only canvas work pants and unlaced boots, and steam is rising off his skin.
I forget the coffee.
His back is to me. The muscles move under his skin with mechanical precision, each one firing in sequence as he lifts and swings and splits.
Shoulders first, rolling forward as the axe comes up.
Then lats, spreading wide as his spine rotates.
Then the abdominals contracting, pulling the blade down with his entire body weight behind it.
Every movement efficient. No wasted energy.
Just force applied along the exact correct vector, over and over and over.
I knew this. I have stood next to him. I have been carried by him.
But seeing it like this, in daylight, with nothing between his body and the cold air, is different.
His shoulders are obscenely broad. His arms are thick and ropey with veins that stand out against his forearms like cabling.
A scar runs along his left side, old and silver, curving from his ribs toward his hip.
Another one, shorter, sits high on his right shoulder blade.
His skin is brown from sun and weather even in winter and the muscles of his back shift and bunch beneath it like tectonic plates.
He swings. The log explodes.
Heat crawls up my neck.
I rest my fingers on the window and the glass is ice-cold and I need the ice right now because my pulse has gone strange and fast and a man chops wood and my mouth has gone completely dry and this is absurd.
I have spent the last eighteen months as a bargaining chip traded between violent men in expensive suits.
The last thing I should want is another man's body occupying this much space in my brain.
But Aiden never looked like this. Aiden was lean and manicured and his strength was the kind that only showed when his fingers closed around my wrist under the dinner table. His power was inherited, delegated, exercised through other people's hands.
Justice lifts the axe again. His stomach flexes. A bead of sweat tracks down the centerline of his body despite the freezing air and vanishes below his waistband. The axe comes down. Another log splits clean.
This power belongs entirely to him.
He turns to grab another log from the pile and catches me in the window.
I don't move fast enough. The mug is frozen halfway to my lips. His eyes lock onto mine through the glass. Those cold blue eyes. They hold me there for one beat. Two.
I yank the mug up and drink. Too fast. Coffee burns my tongue.