Chapter 8
DAMIEN
I wake in the silver hour before dawn with Lucy cocooned in my arms, her heartbeat steady against my chest. The terror from yesterday has faded, but it’s been replaced by something that cuts deeper—the weight of possibility, of a future I’m scared to dream is actually possible.
Lucy stirs, and the rhythm of her breathing shifts. She turns to face me, snuggling into my arms and tracing patterns on my chest with her fingertips.
“Can’t sleep?” she whispers.
“A lot on my mind,” I admit, my voice rough with exhaustion and the overwhelming feeling that I can’t relax enough to sleep for a few hours.
I know I need to, but I…can’t. I have to protect Lucy.
It doesn’t matter that a sensor was knocked loose by the storm or disturbed by a mountain animal last night, which set it off.
It doesn’t matter that it would be damn near impossible for anyone to track Lucy up here, especially after nearly a week.
She tilts her head to study my face in the low light of the breaking dawn. I know she can see the tension there, the worry that’s been eating at me since that alarm went off and I watched her disappear into terror.
“What are you thinking about?”
I’m quiet for a long time, trying to find the words for fears I’ve never spoken aloud. When I finally answer, I choose each word carefully. “What happens when this week is over and we leave this cabin.”
Her body tenses against mine. “And?”
“I keep thinking about what we were saying before the alarm went off.” My arm tightens around her, needing her closer. “How you looked when I opened your door—like you thought it was the end.”
She presses closer to me. “But you kept me safe. I’ll be okay. I’m still scared, but not as much now that we’re together.”
My voice is low. “But what about next time? What if they can’t find and deal with Kozlov?
What then? Are you still going to keep pushing things that will put you in danger?
Or can you let Harley and whatever criminal court in Europe take over?
You’ve found who was responsible for Mila, and the authorities know.
You have to let them do their jobs. Do you have to publish the article you’re working on? ”
She tenses in my arms, and I know we’ve reached a conversation we’ve both been avoiding.
“Damien—”
“You should have seen yourself yesterday, Lucy. When that alarm went off, you were terrified in a way that I never want to see again.”
“You went somewhere, too,” she says quietly, her words cutting into my heart. “The moment you heard that alarm, you became someone else. Someone dangerous, who I didn’t recognize.”
My exhale is sharp because she’s right. “That’s different. That’s who I’ve become, Lucy. I was a soldier for nearly a decade. When there’s danger—especially to the woman I love—I will run straight into that danger so I can protect you. Nothing is going to change that.”
“Is that true?” She shifts so she can see my face better, and I feel exposed under her scrutiny. “You scared me, Damien. Not because you were protecting me, but because…you were ready for violence.”
“I was doing my job,” I say, closing my eyes for a long moment. She’s not wrong. Protection duty here or in another cabin always carries a risk, but so far, none of us have seen danger while we had someone under our watch.
“Okay,” she says, though the uncertainty in her voice is clear as day. “Is that what always happens? I know you were keeping me safe, but I was also a little scared by how…intense you were.”
When I finally speak, the words feel like they’re being torn from my chest. “Ready to fight? Yes, that’s what happens.
But,” I turn to her, cup her face, and stare straight into her eyes, “it’s the first time that’s happened in a long time.
I live up here on the mountain to stay away from danger.
When we work with Ghost Security and host people in one of these cabins, there is always an element of danger.
But no one has found any of these cabins.
Jake and his team have taken a lot of security precautions, some of which you’ve now experienced. ”
I watch her eyes fill with a reluctant understanding. “Then promise me something.”
“What?”
“Promise me that if you ever start to return to that dark place, you’ll talk to me. Promise me you won’t disappear inside that darkness and shut me out again.” She cups my face, and I lean into her touch. “I can’t go through losing you again because you choose darkness over me.”
My eyes close as the war plays out in my chest. Every instinct I have tells me to protect her from the worst parts of myself. But she’s asking for the opposite—she’s asking me to trust her with my demons.
“Lucy...”
“Promise me,” she insists, steel in her voice now.
“Whatever this is between us, it only works if we’re honest. This week has been amazing and unexpected, but we both know that this isn’t real life up here.
Real life is when we leave and aren’t in hiding.
We have to trust each other with the hard parts, too. ”
The words feel like they’re being torn from somewhere deep inside me, but I force them out.
“I promise. But I need something from you, too.” I open my mouth, but the words won’t come out.
I thought I knew what raw emotion felt like, especially with Lucy coming back into my life, but I can’t say what I’m most afraid of.
“Tell me,” she says softly.
“What I need, Lucy, is to figure out how to protect you. It would be hard to protect you if you are always changing dangerous stories.”
“But…writing is who I am now. This is what I do.” She pauses and looks away from me. “I gave up social work to write the stories of people who needed their truth told.”
“So what do we do?” I ask, and the question feels like it carries the weight of our entire future. “Because I can’t go back to pretending I can live without you, and I can’t live with the constant fear that loving you means losing you.”
She’s quiet for a long moment. I watch her processing everything that brought us to this point. When she speaks, her words surprise me.
“I have an idea,” she says, looking up and meeting my eyes.
I look at her in surprise, not having expected this kind of openness. “What do you mean?”
“What if I find other stories to tell? Harley told me about Renee Cooper. He worked with her on a trafficking expose once, but she does other writing now. I could talk to her. I don’t know all the details. She might have ideas about how to cover these stories safely. Would you be okay with that?”
“Lucy, I’d be okay with whatever keeps you safe and makes you happy.
I just need to know that when you make decisions about your safety, you’ll include me in them.
” I watch something shift in her expression, and I press on.
“We’re more similar than I realized. We both run into danger to help other people.
We both choose to put ourselves at risk because we think it’s worth it if we can save someone else. ”
“But?” She senses there’s more coming.
My voice breaks slightly when I continue because this is the heart of it—the truth I’ve been too afraid to say. “But I ran into danger because I thought I didn’t have anything to lose. That’s not true anymore.”
I watch tears spill over onto her cheeks at my words, and my eyes burn with unshed emotion.
“Damien...”
“I know it’s selfish,” I continue, my voice thick with tears I refuse to let fall. “I know you have important work to do, and I would never ask you to stop being who you are. But I can’t—” My voice breaks completely, and I have to stop and gather myself.
“I can’t bear to lose you again either,” she whispers, and hearing her say it breaks something open in my chest. “I spent eight years convincing myself I was fine alone, but I wasn’t fine. I was surviving. There’s a difference.”
“So what do we do?” I ask again, and this time it sounds less like desperation and more like hope.
“We figure it out together,” she says, wiping tears from both our faces with gentle fingers.
She leans forward and presses her forehead against mine, and I breathe in her scent, her warmth, her presence. “I love you, Damien. Not the version of you that thinks you need to protect me from your darkness. I love us exactly as we are.”
“I love us, too,” I say, and a heavy weight is lifted. We still have a lot to work out, especially until Kozlov is caught and the threat to Lucy is neutralized, but those are doable things. “All of it. The good parts and the broken parts and everything in between.”
“So we’re doing this?” she asks, hoping lighting up her blue eyes.
“We’re all in,” I confirm, and I mean it with every cell in my body. “No running, no hiding, no protecting each other by disappearing.”
“Promise?”
“I promise.” I kiss her softly, tasting salt from our tears. “Do you promise?”
“With all my heart, I promise.”
The kiss that follows is different from our previous frantic lovemaking. This is slow and deliberate, full of the weight of the future that lies ahead for us. When I roll her beneath me, my touch is tender and filled with more love than I knew I could experience.
I kiss her again, deeper this time, my tongue claiming her mouth with a hunger that’s been building since she walked back into my life.
I feel the shift in myself—the way protective love transforms into something more primal, more possessive.
The walls around my heart are fully gone now that Lucy is mine again.
She shivers beneath me as my fingers trail down the column of her throat, across her collarbone, reminding me of what I lost but by some stroke of cosmic luck was able to find again.
When I cup her breast through the thin fabric of my shirt she’s wearing, her breath catches, making my cock throb with desire.
“I need you,” I murmur against her neck, my voice rough with desire. “All of you.”
She arches into my touch, gasping as I slip my hands under the hem of the shirt. Her silky skin is hot beneath my palms as I push the fabric up and over her head, baring her to the soft light of dawn streaming through the windows.
“God, you’re beautiful,” I breathe, my hands spanning her ribcage, thumbs brushing the undersides of her heavy breasts. “I’ve dreamed of this. Every damn night I’ve dreamed of this.”
When I lower my head to take one perfect nipple into my mouth, she gasps my name, her fingers weaving through my hair. I lavish attention on each breast, circling with my tongue, nipping gently with my teeth until she’s writhing beneath me, desperate little sounds escaping her throat.
“Mine,” I whisper against her skin.