Diomid
She asks who I’m protecting her from.
The question hangs between us like the second before a trigger is pulled. Her breath is steady, her chin lifted in quiet defiance, and she has no idea how much that steadiness tempts me.
I step past her without asking permission.
The house seems to exhale as I enter, closing ranks around us.
Shadows cling to the corners like they’ve been waiting for me.
Elizabeth’s hand hovers near the door, fingers curled slightly, not quite brave enough to push it shut… not foolish enough to leave it open.
“Lock it,” I say.
She blinks once, then reaches back and turns the bolt. The soft click feels louder than the gunshots I’ve heard. It feels final.
The storm brewing outside groans against the windows. Inside, the silence sharpens.
I take in the details of the home I glimpsed earlier: the cracked molding, the peeling wallpaper, the photographs of ancestors who stare as if judging their descendants’ weakness. This place used to be something. A family. A future. Maybe even a fortress.
Now it’s a mausoleum made of sighs and disappointment.
Elizabeth stands with her back straight, hands clasped like she’s holding herself together. The faint scent of lemons clings to her skin, warm and clean and completely at odds with the cold violence buried beneath it.
“You know why I’m here?” I ask her.
She lifts her chin a notch, icy gaze cutting. “That isn’t a question.”
There it is again. That spark. Too wild to be ignored. Too bright to belong in a dying house like this.
I step closer, testing the edges of her courage. Her pulse flutters in her throat like a tiny bird beating its wings against her skin, but she doesn’t retreat.
“Your father is vulnerable,” I say, voice low. “The family is fractured. Piotr’s death leaves a power vacuum. Enemies smell blood.”
“And?” she challenges.
“And you’re alone.”
Her breath catches with something akin to recognition.
She turns toward the kitchen without answering, forcing me to follow. The lemon cake sits cooling on the counter, glaze shimmering under the low light. Domesticity laid over a bedrock of violence. A tableau of contradictions.
She touches the oven door with fingertips that I know measured poison.
“You think someone will come for me,” she says, not looking at me.
I move behind her. Close enough to feel the warmth radiating from her back. Close enough that if she turned, she would collide with my chest.
“They will if they figure it out.”
She goes still. Utterly. Beautifully. Still.
“And you?” she asks, voice no louder than a breath. “What do you want from me?”
Everything.
“I want the truth,” I murmur. “And I want it from your lips, your mouth.”
Slowly, she turns.
We’re only inches apart.
She looks up at me like she’s deciding whether I am salvation or another kind of purgatory. I’m not sure she understands the answer is both.
“I already told you I didn’t love him,” she whispers through clenched teeth. “It was a match organized by him.”
I lean in, letting my breath brush her cheek, letting her see the hunger I’ve stopped trying to hide.
“I know that much,” I say. “Because love wouldn’t have killed him.”
A tremor of recognition curls through her. Her throat moves as she swallows. She’s fighting herself, the part that wants to trust me and the part that knows trust is fatal.
“I’m not confessing anything,” she says, but the denial lacks conviction.
“You already have,” I reply.
My gaze drops to her hands and her long elegant fingers. Fingers steady enough to deliver death one careful dose at a time.
I raise my hand and take her wrist lightly between my thumb and forefinger, my touch a quiet claim. She inhales sharply.
“You’re not afraid of me,” I say.
“I’m not afraid of anyone, anymore.” Her voice wavers, and the vulnerability in it hits me like a blow.
“Tell me why,” I coax gently, sliding my fingers up the inside of her arm where her pulse thunders beneath fragile skin. I lean closer, lips near her jaw, my voice a vow sealed in heat.
“Tell me why you killed him.”
Her breath stutters. Her gaze flicks to my mouth for a traitorous second before she snaps it back to mine.
“You don’t know what I’ve done,” she argues back.
“Oh, I do,” I answer, my grip tightening ever so slightly on her armt. “And I’m not here to punish you for it.”
Her chest rises in a quick, sharp breath. “Then why are you here?”
I let the truth slip free, dark and quiet and irreversible.
“To make sure you never have to kill alone again.”
The silence shivers. Her eyes widen but not in horror. It’s relief that swirls there. And want.
She should push me away and scream or run or threaten me with the sharpness she hides behind her calm.
Instead, she simply closes the breathless distance between us in surrender.
The kind that happens deep beneath the skin.
A shift in the air, a loosening in her spine, a single breath that stops being resistance and becomes invitation.
My hand slides from her wrist to her waist, fingers fitting into the fragile dip just above her hip. She stiffens with, I suspect, the shock of wanting something she never thought she’d be allowed to want.
“I don’t need protection,” she whispers, but her voice betrays her. “Not from you.”
A lie she wishes were true. I can feel the tremor of it vibrating through her bones.
“No,” I murmur, my lips brushing the edge of her cheek. “You need to be shown there’s a place for you in this world. And that it’s beside me.”
Her inhale shivers against my mouth.
I tilt her chin up with two fingers. She doesn’t break eye contact. If anything, her gaze sharpens, crystal blue and furious that her body has already begun to make decisions her mind hasn’t approved.
“You think you see me,” she says almost too quietly for me to catch.
“I do see you.” I drag my thumb across her lower lip, slow, deliberate. “You killed a man who deserved to die. And you saved yourself in the meantime.”
Her breath ghosts over my skin, hot and uneven.
“And now?” she manages.
“Now,” I tell her, leaning in until the darkness between us disappears, “I’m the one who decides what happens to you next.”
Her pulse jumps. She holds her ground.
“You don’t want me,” she argues. “I’m nothing.”
“I do want you. Because you’re everything, but more than that, you’re dangerous,” I correct. “And you’re already mine.”
Her lips part on a soft gasp, and I take that as my invitation.
I close my mouth over hers.
The first touch of her lips is a collision, not a kiss. Teeth and breath and a desperate, furious need neither of us meant to feel. She grabs the front of my coat as if she needs the anchor, as if force is the only language she knows how to speak anymore.
I cup the back of her neck and press her harder against me, taking the kiss deeper, claiming every hidden tremor in her body as mine. She tastes like citrus and defiance. Sweet heat wrapped in danger.
When she kisses me back, it hits like a shot to the spine.
Not tentative or afraid. Hungry.
Her fingers twist in my lapel, pulling me closer, like she wants to crawl inside my chest and burn there. I swallow her soft sound, a broken little sigh that tastes like years of silence giving way to a single moment of want.
I break away only when I feel her lungs straining. I rest my forehead against hers, breathing her in.
Her lips are kiss-bruised and her eyes are blown wide and dark.
Elizabeth looks at me like she’s trying to decide if she should slap me or drag me upstairs.
“You feel that,” I say, my voice rough. “Stop pretending you don’t.”
Her answer isn’t a word. It’s another kiss.
This one slower.
Deadlier.