Chapter 17
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
ERIN
Moving should have the decency to arrive at midnight under a storm, with thunder and ominous music and enough warning for everyone to run. Instead, it comes while Ryan is playing with plastic dinosaurs in a cardboard castle in the living room.
Cass is in the kitchen trying a new recipe for lemon bars, arguing with Gregory about what ingredients self-rising flour contains, and I am trying to convince Lucian that toast counts as a meal if one is emotionally exhausted.
“You need protein,” he says.
I stare at the plate he has placed in front of me.
Eggs. Fruit. Some expensive-looking ham. Toast cut diagonally because apparently even mafia kings have sandwich aesthetics.
“I need coffee and no more drama before bed.”
Across the kitchen, Cass lifts her mug. “Seconded.”
Lucian’s eyes do not leave mine. “Eat.”
I stab a piece of egg with my fork and hold his gaze while putting it into my mouth.
His expression shifts.
Not much.
Enough.
I swallow. “Happy?”
“No.”
“Shocking.”
Ryan appears in the doorway. The same Spider-Man sweat suit he wears every day.
We wash it while he sleeps. He has a T-Rex in one hand, his fingers wrapped around the neck of a brontosaurus in the other. “Why isn’t Uncle Lucian happy?”
Every adult in the kitchen stills.
Lucian looks at Ryan.
A strange thing happens to his face then. The hard edges remain, but something gentler moves underneath them. Not softness, exactly. Lucian does not soften so much as redirect his intensity toward not terrifying children.
“I’m not unhappy,” he says. “I’m working. And taking care of your Auntie Rin is a big job.”
Ryan nods solemnly. “And you’re her boss.”
Cass coughs into her mug.
Gregory adjusts his glasses.
Narrowing my eyes, I press my lips together, daring Lucian to confirm.
Lucian inclines his head, opting not to speak.
He’s really growing.
Bayne comes into the room. “Has she eaten?”
“Yes, she has,” I say.
“Everything is loaded. The men are ready.” He gives a pointed stare at Lucian who had insisted we eat something before we board the private jets that will take us to our new destination.
“Let’s go.” He looks around the table. “You three are to stay as close to me as humanly possible.”
And Isobel? Where does she go?
I’m relieved when a set of guards comes to usher her outside.
I’m annoyed that she’s coming.
She is still in love with him. You can read it on her face. Not that we need to.
She was bold enough to profess it to a room full of people.
The three-hour plane ride is not good for me. She sits apart from us, but where I can see her in all of her quiet elegance.
I had too much time to mull.
My empathy for her begins to wane.
I just want her anywhere but here.
We are moved from the private tarmac to what looks like a bulletproof fleet of SUVs.
The interior is quiet and dark and plush, smelling of clean leather, and with Lucian’s protective arm around me and my head on his chest, I begin to drift off.
His chest rises and falls with a deep breath.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper.
“What?” He strokes my hair, leaning closer. “Why are you sorry?”
“Because I know how hard this must be for you. You’re having to relive the pain from your past.” I take my own deep breath. “And I’m sure it’s hard, confusing even, seeing her again.”
“It’s not,” he says in his very Lucian way.
I smile with my cheek against him. “Okay. But if there is anything I can do to help make things easier…”
“There is no ‘easy’ in this life.” His arm tightens around my shoulders. “Be with me. That’s all I want from you. Stay by my side.”
“I will,” I promise.
As long as he’ll let me.
My new prison does not look like a safe house.
It looks like a rich man got paranoid at the edge of the world.
It sits on a shelf of black basalt cliff jutting over the North Atlantic, the rock beneath it jagged columns that look intimidating enough to scare off predators.
Below, the beach is volcanic sand the color of char, packed hard and glittering, and the waves geyser white water thirty feet up the cliff face before the wind snatches it sideways.
And the house is glass. Black steel framing holds vast panes that make it intimidating and strong, daring the ‘bad guys’ to try and come. From the outside, looking in, the glass has a hazy tint. From inside, you have a clear view of your entire surroundings.
Honestly, it reminds me of him. Dark. Dangerous. Beautiful. At least, the first version of him I met that night.
He’s getting softer.
The icy air is salt and grit, the mineral, sulfur-edged smell of the volcanic ground beneath everything. To my left, a black-sand beach stretches into fog, and the sea beyond is dark, the water and sky blending into one in the distance.
A private road curls up through a stand of birch and rowan, all bent permanently sideways, their trunks shaped by years of wind coming off the water from one direction only.
The kind of place that would be beautiful if I weren’t being delivered to it in an armored convoy, with Lucian’s hand locked around mine like he could keep my pulse inside my body by force.
The wind up here is brutal as we walk the path to the house. It’s cold enough to strip the air from my lungs.
Lucian’s eyes are on me every second, as if he’d carry me if I let him. “Are you sure you’re okay?”
“I’m fine,” I manage between chattering teeth, despite the face he’s forced me into, many layers of high-tech all-weather gear his brother suggested he buy when he brought the store to Red Shutters.
I look behind me, grateful for his purchases, when I see Ryan wearing his heavy red down coat and matching knit cap and scarf, as snug as a bug in my sister’s arm.
“It’s not meant for winter,” he says. “I built it as a summer house, a place to come when the city gets hot and overbearing. Then I thought, why not add a war room and some extra tech so it could double as a safe house for the family.”
And I remember just how rich my billionaire boyfriend is.
No one speaks for the first five minutes after we arrive.
Not because there is nothing to say, but because everyone is desperately busy.
Bayne’s men fan out across the property, dark shapes moving fast against the paler dark of the rock, their breath torn away by the wind before it can even show.
New York Bachmans will soon arrive to replace them.
I’m relieved they can go—Bayne’s been away from his wife long enough, and his men must be ready to be home.
We stand to the side so Mack can get Cass and Ryan inside first, his body angled between them and the night to shield them from the wind. Lucian and I enter, and Blaze follows with one hand near his gun and a joke already dying on his tongue because that’s how exhausted we all are.
Isobel is brought in behind us. I notice because Lucian notices. Not openly.
Not with a look he would admit to.
But his shoulders tighten by half an inch, and that is the problem with loving Lucian Bachman. The man is made of tiny tells wrapped in terrifying control, and I have become far too fluent in both.
He wanted to ensure she was safe.
Honestly, would I want to be with a man who didn’t?
Inside, the wind disappears so completely it startles me.
The glass here is triple-layered, I would guess, and thick enough that the storm becomes something you watch instead of something you survive—waves breaking against rock far below, soundless behind the pane, lit orange-black by floodlights bolted into the cliff.
It should be peaceful. It is not. There are too many men moving about, bringing in supplies and weapons and securing every corner of the already impregnable fortress.
The entry floor is raw stone, bringing some of the outside in — slabs of black rock left rough and unfinished where they meet the wall, jagged in places, more sculpture than floor.
I am tired in the specific, bone-deep way that comes after fear finally lets go of you, and my boot catches on a lip of stone I never see coming.
I go down hard, and some animal instinct throws my hand out to catch the fall before my body can.
It is not the floor that catches me.
It is a spur of raw basalt jutting up at the edge of the stone, sharp enough that whoever designed this room clearly never imagined anyone touching it.
Pain opens across my palm, bright and immediate, and when I pull my hand back, there is blood, a lot of it, welling fast and dripping onto the black stone where it barely shows until it catches the light.
“Erin—”
Lucian is on the floor beside me before I have even registered that I fell, one hand cradling the back of my head like the ground might still be coming for me, the other already closing around my wrist.
“Let me see it. Let me see it. Look at me. Let me see your hand—”
“It’s fine. It’s just a cut—”
“It is not fine.” His voice has dropped into something low and clipped, the register he uses right before he becomes genuinely frightening.
He turns my hand over with a gentleness that does not match the tension in every other part of him, and the sight of the blood seems to cost him something physical. “Someone get a cloth.
Now. Bayne—”
“Lucian. It’s fine.”
“On it,” Bayne says, already moving.
“Damnit, what was the designer thinking? I’ll have their head,” Lucian hisses.
“I tripped, Lucian. It happens.”
“Not to you.” He takes off his coat, pressing the sleeve against my palm, his jaw tight enough to crack. He is not looking at the cut anymore. He is looking at me like I nearly disappeared.
I glance past his shoulder without meaning to.
Isobel is standing near the wall, an Icelandic statue of a Norse goddess, watching the two of us with an expression I do not have a word for. Not jealousy. Something sadder than that. Something that looks like memory.
And it lands on me, unwelcome and immediate — this is not new.
This exact posture, this exact voice, the diehard protection, the misplaced anger because he’s so fearful you’ll break…
He’s been like this before. For her. Probably more than once.
I hate how much pain that thought brings.