Chapter six #2
He made a sound that might have been agreement or might have been something else and turned his face toward the pillow, and within two minutes, the rhythm of his breathing had evened back out.
I reset the alarm and returned to the chair. I could have called Cinder at this point, but I didn’t.
The second check was the one where he talked.
I’d been expecting sleep again—the same brief surfacing, the same protocol questions, the same return to the deep. What I got instead was Dante Russo at three-forty in the morning, halfway between awake and not, with whatever filter he’d been running for two months temporarily offline.
“I used to be good at this,” he said, to the ceiling, before I’d asked him anything, and I sat down on the edge of the bed.
“At what.”
“Reading people.” His voice had the slow, slightly slurred tenor of deep fatigue—not slurred the way a head injury slurred, which I was careful to notice, but the slur of a man whose defenses had gone to sleep before he had.
“Antoine. I thought I was good at it. I thought I could tell when someone was—” He stopped.
His hand moved, a small gesture that didn’t finish.
“I was twenty-two. I thought I was smart.”
I said nothing.
“He was the first person who ever looked at me like I was worth—” He stopped again. Swallowed. “I kept the secret. Everything he asked. The whole time. I kept it.”
There was something underneath the words that I recognized without wanting to—a specific kind of pain, the kind that came from having done everything right inside a situation that was wrong from the beginning. I’d seen it before.
“He told them I went after their partners,” I said. “Their wives. Girlfriends.”
He closed his eyes.
“It wasn’t true,” he mumbled. Not defensive. Just the fact of it, laid down flat. “None of it was true. But Martinez and Brown would have backed him up. I never—”
“He mattered to you,” I said. “And he used that.”
“Yeah. I should’ve—” he started, then sighed and ran out of steam.
I became aware of my change in position incrementally—the mattress had a different feeling than the chair.
The lamp was still on, a low amber presence at the edge of my perception.
The room had that sort of deep-night silence, the hour just before dawn when even a city the size of Chicago ran out of things to say.
And there was warmth.
Specific, located warmth, the kind that came from proximity rather than bedding—a point of contact along my left side that had not been present when I’d last been conscious of my own position in the room. I held very still. Took inventory without moving.
The third check. That had been at—I glanced at my phone on the nightstand without moving my arm—four-twenty.
He’d been fine. Pupils responsive, answers coherent if drowsy.
I’d asked him the protocol questions, and he’d answered them, and then he’d said, with the directness of someone who’d lost track of what they weren’t supposed to say: “You don’t have to sit in that chair all night. ”
I’d said something about the chair being fine.
He’d made a sound that might have been disagreement and turned over, and I’d gone back to the chair like I’d done twice before, except this time when I’d sat down, I’d registered—actually registered—that my back was complaining in the specific way backs complained when you were over two hundred years old and had spent ten years playing professional hockey before spending another twenty standing behind benches, and the chair was designed by someone who’d never considered that a body might need to occupy it for longer than the time it took to put on shoes.
I’d lasted another forty minutes before my spine had made an executive decision about acceptable tolerances, and I’d moved to the far edge of the bed—on top of the covers, fully dressed, maintaining every possible boundary that could be maintained while still being in a position to hear if something went wrong in the night.
That had been the reasoning. The clear, professional, entirely defensible reasoning.
What I had not reasoned through—what I had specifically avoided reasoning through—was what my dragon would do with that proximity.
It had done what it always did when it decided something.
It had made its case quietly, persistently, through channels I’d spent two centuries learning to monitor and ignore.
The warmth in my chest that had started in the hospital parking lot.
The hyperawareness of his breathing, his position, the small movements he made in sleep.
The way my body had oriented itself toward his without consulting me about the decision, the way a plant turned toward light.
And now he was curved against my arm, and my dragon was making an argument that had nothing to do with concussion protocol and everything to do with the rightness that proximity to him produced—a sense of fit, of inevitability, that I recognized with the sick certainty of someone who’d felt it exactly once before and knew precisely what it meant.
No.
I said it internally, with the flat finality of someone delivering a verdict. My dragon stirred—not in protest, but in that patient, persistent way it had when it knew I was wrong and was prepared to wait me out.
I’d been wrong about Clara. I’d been catastrophically, irreversibly wrong in a way that had cost her everything and left me with one hundred years of scar tissue and the certainty that I would never, ever make that mistake again.
I would never again allow someone close enough to become a target.
I would never again trust my dragon’s certainty about bonds and mates and the feeling of rightness that was currently radiating through my chest like heat from a banked fire.
Because the thing my dragon didn’t account for—the thing it had never had to account for in its long, uncomplicated existence—was what happened when the person you decided belonged to you became visible to the people who wanted to hurt you.
What happened when proximity became a weapon.
What happened when the thing you valued most in the world became the most efficient tool available to anyone who wanted leverage.
I’d learned that lesson in smoke and silence and a grief that didn’t have an end.
I’d built everything that came after on top of that lesson.
And I was not—I was absolutely not—going to learn it again with a twenty-three-year-old hockey player who’d already been hurt by one man who should have protected him and didn’t need another.
Dante made a small sound in his sleep—not distress, something softer than that—and shifted closer.
My body responded before I could stop it.
My arm moved fractionally, accommodating his weight, and the warmth in my chest flared brighter, and for one unguarded moment I felt what my dragon had been trying to tell me all night: that this was right, that this fit, that every instinct I possessed was oriented toward the sleeping man pressed against my side in a way that had nothing to do with professional duty and everything to do with something older and more fundamental than duty had ever been.
Then I remembered the smell of smoke. The way Clara’s name had sounded in my mouth when I’d understood she was gone.
I looked at the ceiling and did not move my arm and waited for dawn with the discipline of a man who’d had two hundred years to get good at waiting.
The alarm went off at six-thirty. Dante stirred against my side, made a confused sound, and then seemed to register where he was and who he was pressed against.
He went very still.