Chapter 28
HARVEE
The dripping has become its own kind of torture.
He's been gone for hours. Long enough for the unfinished conversation to loop in my head until I've worn grooves in it. Long enough to hate how we left things, which is not a feeling I expected to have about the man who chained me to a couch.
His truck growls up outside and something moves through me that I don't want to look at directly.
The door opens.
"Hey," he says.
The tension walks in with him, thick and charged, settling between us like a third presence in the room.
"Hi," I say, and my voice comes out smaller than I mean it to.
"I'm sorry it took so long." His eyes go to my ankle cuff instead of my face. He fidgets with his thumbnail, worrying a rough edge, and that small involuntary tell gives him away more than anything he could say.
"It's fine."
"It's not." He exhales. "Nothing's fine right now."
"What do you mean?"
"Forget it."
"DJ—"
"Stop." The word cracks through the room and I flinch before I can catch myself. Then I glare.
"I just want to help."
"You can't, Goldilocks." His mouth twists into something humorless.
"Please." Softer than I intend. Almost begging.
He drops his head. The air goes out of him. "My mom's in the hospital. I just got the call. I think it's her medication, but I don't know anything yet."
The fight drains out of me completely. "Is she okay?"
"I don't know." He drags his fingers through his curls and leaves them a mess. "I'm scared."
The dripping counts time in the corner.
"Is she on Plex?" I ask quietly.
His eyes come up to mine. Then back down to his hands. "Yeah."
"Shit." My throat tightens. "My boss was just wrapping up a case about that drug."
"I know."
Something cold moves up my spine. "What do you mean, you know? How do you know about the case?"
"Forget it."
"No." My voice shakes but I don't back down. "I'm done with half-answers. Tell me."
He looks up. Studies my face like he's deciding whether I'm glass or something harder.
"Do you really want to know?" Low, careful. "Even if it changes everything?"
I hesitate. Just a second.
He laughs once, short and bitter. "I knew it."
"I can handle it."
"Prove it." He steps closer, slow and deliberate. "Can you keep a secret, Goldilocks?"
"Yes," I whisper.
He leans in until his lips are at my ear, his breath warm against my skin. "I'm the reason he's gone."
A small gasp slips out before I can catch it.
"Your boss. The case." His voice stays low. "Fuck that guy. He had it coming."
We sit in the silence after it lands. The only sounds are the dripping and the soft rasp of his breathing. I can feel him watching me, waiting to see which way I break.
"Wow," I manage. It's inadequate. There are a hundred questions ricocheting around my skull and none of them can find their way out.
"He pissed off the wrong people with that case," he says, like that's an explanation.
"What happened?" I ask. Barely above a whisper.
He exhales slowly. "The woman who died — she wasn't a number.
She was a mother. A wife. Her father's entire world.
And your boss stood up in that courtroom and turned her into an addict in front of a jury.
Twisted her story until her own death looked like her fault.
" His jaw flexes. "Someone hired me to correct that. "
"The firm defending Plex never sat right with me," I say quietly. "Those boys in the courtroom. Their father. Her father. I couldn't stop thinking about them after."
"That's where I come in."
"He was a fucking creep on top of it," I say, before I can stop myself.
A beat of silence. The truth sits between us, messy and mutual.
"Robin Hood," I add, half teasing, half meaning it.
He scoffs. "Robin Hood."
"Well, if I'm Goldilocks, it's only fair you get a fairy tale name too."
Something almost amused flickers across his face. "I'm not a hero."
"You are, a little. In my eyes."
He huffs out something close to a laugh. "I'm just trying to make my mom proud."
"You two are close."
"She's all I have. Her, my cousin, my uncle. Just the four of us. Always has been."
"That's really something," I murmur. A small ache flares in my chest. "My parents are religious. They disagree with almost every choice I've ever made."
"Ma wouldn't be thrilled with mine either." He pauses. "He was a dick to you. Turner. What happened?"
The shift is subtle. His voice roughens just enough.
"He used his position to take whatever he wanted, whenever he wanted it." The words taste sour.
"Did he touch you?"
His jaw is tight, the muscle ticking.
"Nothing reportable." I stare at a crack in the concrete. "Not him anyway."
The silence shifts. He doesn't push, just waits, and somehow that's worse.
"Back home," I say slowly. "I had a boyfriend. He wasn't a good person."
"Where's home?"
"Lewisburg, Tennessee."
He says nothing, but something in his expression settles, like that single fact explains several things at once.
"I was in law school. Completely buried in it — no social life, barely sleeping, barely seeing anyone.
He accused me of cheating constantly. Said I was hiding something.
" I follow a dark stain on the concrete near my bare feet.
"When we were together he'd pick me apart.
My weight, my clothes, how I looked. Like I was some project he'd invested in and I'd failed to deliver. "
The chain at my wrist clinks when my hand trembles.
"I finally ended it after months of that.
I thought walking away would be the hard part.
" I let out a humorless laugh. "I was wrong.
He didn't react well. He kept showing up, waiting outside my dorm.
Every day, every night. Sitting on the steps, smoking, just…
staring." My chest tightens just remembering that stare.
"Calling, texting from different numbers.
I'd block one and three more would pop up.
He'd leave notes on my door, on my windshield. 'We need to talk.' 'You owe me.'"
I blink hard, vision blurring at the edges.
"I finally…sat down to talk to him after about a week of him stalking me. I thought if I just explained it clearly enough, he'd accept it. That if I was calm enough, rational enough, he'd understand."
The room tilts, slow and nauseating.
"He forced himself on me," I whisper, the words barely making it past my lips. "Wouldn't take no for an answer. Held my wrists down when I tried to push him off. Told me I owed him one last time."
My throat burns. I stare at the floor so I don't have to see his face.
"Then he beat the shit out of me. Said there was no way I'd leave unless there was someone else. Couldn't understand that I just… didn't want him anymore."
The room goes very quiet. Even the dripping seems to pause.
"Holy fuck, Goldilocks."
I look up. There's a tear on his cheek, one clean track through the hard lines of his face. His hands are fists, tendons standing out, shoulders rigid.
"Don't." I shake my head. "I left. And I ended up here.
My parents blamed me — said if I'd been a better girlfriend he wouldn't have snapped.
My friends picked sides. Law school became a minefield.
So I took the first job offer far enough away that he couldn't just swing by.
" I gesture at the room around us. "Miami. "
"What's his name?"
It isn't a question.
"It's fine."
"What is his name, Goldilocks?" Low and lethal. A loaded gun set carefully on a table.
"No."
"Why won't you tell me?"
I look at him. At the barely contained fury, at the set of his jaw and the thing in his eyes that isn't curiosity. He's already decided what he'll do with the name. I can see it. And I can't tell which terrifies me more — what my ex already did to me, or what DJ is capable of for me.
The dripping resumes.
He hasn't moved, but something in the way he's sitting has changed. Shoulders coiled, forearms flexed, fists working open and closed like he's fighting something invisible. He looks like he wants to kill someone. He looks like he wants to hold someone.
Both of those things seem aimed at me.
"You're staring," I whisper.
"Yeah."
No denial. No deflection. Just that one word, rough and honest.
"Why?"
He pushes out of the chair slowly, closing the distance like every inch is an argument he's losing with himself. "Because I've been trying not to."
My stomach flips. My brain is still half in Tennessee, still in bruises and fluorescent dorm lights, and my body is here, right here, with him standing over me like a storm that already broke.
"That doesn't answer the question," I say, though we both know it does.
"It does."
He stops inches away. Not touching. Close enough that I can feel the warmth radiating off him, catch rain and soap and something underneath that is just him, close enough that the space between us crackles.
The room is suddenly too small, too hot, the air too thick.
My pulse thunders in my ears, drowning out the dripping.
"You shouldn't want me," I whisper, the words shaking as they leave my mouth. It sounds like a warning, but it feels like a dare.
His gaze drops to my mouth, lingering there for one long, dangerous beat before dragging back up to my eyes. There's hunger there. And fury. And something that looks an awful lot like restraint hanging on by a thread.
"I know," he says, voice roughened to gravel. He leans in just enough that his breath ghosts over my cheek. "That's the fucking problem."
His hand lifts, pauses mid-air like he's fighting himself again, then very carefully — so gently it makes my throat burn — he hooks one finger under the chain at my wrist instead of touching my skin.
"Tell me to back off, Goldilocks," he murmurs. "Say the word, and I'll move."
I should. I know I should. Every sane part of me is waving a white flag, screaming about kidnappers and chains and trauma I haven't even finished unpacking.
Instead, I hold his gaze and don't say anything at all.
"I don't want you," he says.