Chapter Twenty-Four
Emerson
I t was Friday.
I started at White & Rivers two weeks ago and today would conclude my third week.
As exhausted as I was, it was everything I hoped it would be. From my first day, Mr. White had me assisting on cases that nineteen-year-old me could have only dreamed of working on.
This week we were working on a case with major business tycoon, Joshua Barlow, who was being accused of having his employees partake in insider trading. It was every bit as dramatic as I imagined it to be.
My office was in the far corner on the eighth floor, and it had a panoramic view of the New York skyline. The moment I saw ‘ Miss Emerson Fields, Junior Associate Lawyer’ engraved on the door was one I’ll never forget.
I even had an assistant, which had blown my mind for a second, after which I’d rang a jealous Clover. Sasha was a twenty-three-year-old J.D. student at Yale who had quickly become one of my favorite people.
Not only was she incredibly helpful, but she seemed to be a genuinely nice girl, and in this industry, you needed as many friends as you could get. Law was cutthroat .
Closing down my laptop, my phone buzzed and I smiled when I saw I received a text from Orion. Things between us had been amazing these last three weeks, and we felt like a real couple.
You know, if you ignore the fact that we’re hiding our relationship from my brother.
Orion had been taking me out on dates, spending less time at work so we could have dinner together every night, made an effort to get to know Clover and Arianna—despite how much he instinctively repelled against social interactions—to which they both had now given their official best friend stamp of approval on our relationship, and he’d even decked out his living room last weekend for a surprise movie marathon night, filling the space with blankets, candles, popcorn, and all my favorite snacks. Though he drew the line at The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants which I considered fair enough after I made him sit through the entire Bridget Jones series.
Sent Blake to pick you up. I’ll be home in an hour.
Blake was Orion’s driver. I’d only met him a few times, and not one of those times had he uttered a word. A silent journey home it is, then.
I locked my phone and started to get my things together. Atlas was due home in the morning, and I wanted to enjoy one more careless night with Orion before Atlas pierced the bubble we were in.
He had messaged a few times since he left for work. Mostly, checking Orion and I hadn’t killed each other, and that I was doing okay. There was the odd update on the water supply in our apartment building which, surprisingly, still wasn’t back on. Honestly, I hadn’t heard from him much.
Which allowed me to feel a hell of a lot less guilty for sleeping with his best friend.
Closing my office door behind me, I saw Sasha packing up at her desk. She was stationed directly outside my room which was ideal because the eighth floor was far too big to be wandering around in six-inch heels when I needed something.
She looked up at me and smiled when she noticed me waiting for her. We quickly fell into a routine of leaving the office together each night, chatting about what we would do for the rest of the weekend. Tucking her blonde waves behind her ear, she asked, “Got any plans this weekend?”
“Atlas is home in the morning,” I told her, my tone far less enthusiastic than it should have been. It wasn’t that I wasn’t excited to have Atlas home because I was, but the excitement was married with trepidation, and it was eating me alive. “He’s been gone for almost two months. So, we’ll probably celebrate tomorrow night.” Or argue when he finds out about Orion. “You?”
“That’s the brother, right?” she asked as we headed to the elevator.
I nodded, pushing the down button.
“I actually have a date tonight. He’s taking me to Dusk.”
Dusk is a ridiculously expensive restaurant in Manhattan, but they served a Tomahawk steak that was to die for. Though getting a reservation there was like trying to find a needle in a haystack. Usually, most of the tables were booked up by socialites, or people like Orion, who had surprised me with dinner there last week.
“Wow, he’s pushing the boat out for a first date.” I nudged her gently with my shoulder. “Tell me more.”
“Right?” She blushed, a subtle smile drawing on her lips. “He works in legal tech, or something like that.” We stepped inside the elevator and she continued “I met him here, actually.”
“At White & Rivers?” I asked, pressing the ground floor button.
“In the foyer. I think he was chatting with Mr. Rivers about upgrading the case management systems. Anyway, we got chatting and he asked me out. Gosh, Emmy, he is so dreamy.”
I laughed, resonating with that feeling far too well. “I want all the details on Monday.”
“You got it.”
The doors dinged open, and I saw Blake standing outside Orion’s RSQ8 through the glass windows.
He always seemed so serious, with his black suit and driving hat, though there was an air of mystery around him. I wasn’t sure how old Blake was, exactly, perhaps in his late fifties. But his eyes, they were all-seeing and all-knowing.
I gently squeezed Sasha’s shoulder. “Well, have an amazing time tonight, and I’ll see you next week.”
“Bye!” She smiled, before heading in the opposite direction.
I watched her to check if she got into a taxi safely, and when I was convinced she was fine, I started to turn towards Blake. But then something in my peripheral vision stopped me, my blood suddenly turning cold.
Or someone.
Someone was watching me, and if it wasn’t for the eerie voice singing as such in my mind like a Rockwell song, I could tell by the feeling of spiders crawling down my spine, and the goosebumps raking over my skin. A deep feeling of foreboding settled into my bones.
Frowning, I whipped my head back around and my eyes frantically searched the other side of the road. The feeling of being watched still icing me over from the inside out, turning the planted seed of doubt into an entire tree of dread.
I scanned the crowd in haste, but there were only unknown strangers getting on with their day, bustling about their weekend plans. Yet, the feeling, it was so… familiar. Almost how I would feel when— Miles!
The sixth sense of eyes on me dissipated, but my gaze lingered on the auburn-haired man walking away on the opposite side of the street. It was impossible to tell from here, and the chances were at almost zero percent, but something about him had my fight or flight mode screaming and my heart clawing up my throat.
Turn around , my mind screamed at the man who bore a resemblance to the same of my nightmares. But then again, so did every man who had short auburn hair and stood at around six-foot-one when I was looking at the back of their head .
“Miss Fields?” Blake called me, but my eyes were hopelessly fixated on the man who was just about to turn the corner. The fact that this was perhaps the first time I had heard Blake’s voice bore little weight right now.
Turn around, dammit!
I didn’t want it to be him, and I was praying with everything I had that it wasn’t, but my anxiety-riddled mind desperately needed reassurance.
“Miss Fields?” Blake called again, just as the man disappeared from my view altogether. “Are you all right?”
I looked back at him, worry stamped over his face. “Huh?”
“You’re shaking,” he told me. Lifting my hands, it seemed Blake was right. My whole body was trembling. Wetting my lips, I nodded. “I’m okay. Let’s go home.”
Blake hesitated, but when I opened the passenger door and slid onto the backseat, he sighed, accepting my silence for what it was, and got into the driver’s side.
It couldn’t have been him.
There’s no way.
Right?
Hey,” Orion called out, shutting the apartment door behind him.
A sigh of relief left me at the sound of his voice. I set my glass of wine down on the coffee table and got off the sofa, desperate to feel his arms wrapped around me after my earlier scare. “Hey, I— Holy fuck, Orion, what the hell happened? Are you okay?”
I rushed to him in panic. My feet were barely able to keep up with my legs, my eyes practically falling out of their sockets in alarm. The crisp white shirt he left in this morning was now painted in crimson blood, and a rush of nausea piled in my stomach.
I’d only just calmed down after convincing myself I’d seen Miles when obviously that wasn’t possible, and now my poor heart was working in overdrive at the thought of Orion being hurt.
My hands flung to his shirt, inspecting every inch of skin I could see for any wounds. I was vigorously searching for any explanation as to how the hell he was still standing when it seemed like most of his blood was now on his clothing rather than in his body.
“Relax, Tesoro , it’s not mine.” He leaned down and crushed his lips against mine. I swear I could actually hear the tension leaving his shoulders as he did.
Pulling away, my eyes darted to his. “Is that supposed to make me feel better?” I shrieked, my pulse fluttering in my neck. Did he get into a fight? Why did he seem so stressed?
What the hell happened?
“It should,” he said wryly, like the fact that he turned up at home drenched in someone else’s blood was no big deal. “I’m fine, Emmy. I don’t want to talk about this. ”
He reached out to cup my face, but I gripped his hand before he could. It was covered in blood. Dark, crimson, dried blood, and it was making my stomach churn.
He looks like he just stepped out of a massacre.
“Well, I do. What happened?” I asked, staring at his hand like it was a live tarantula and any second now it was going to try to sink its teeth into me. I drew back, the sight of him like this propelling me backward like a vortex into my haunted past.
Unsolicited images slammed into my mind.
Blood. Stairs.
Blood. Miles.
Scared. Blood.
Pain. Miles.
So much blood.
My blood.
I squeezed my eyes tightly shut, forcefully shoving the images free from my mind with every ounce of inner strength I could muster. I refused to let Miles still have such a hold on me.
Orion isn’t Miles.
Miles is long gone.
Orion sighed. “Work” is all he said, before pulling his hand away and undoing his shirt buttons.
I blinked, utterly stunned at the simplicity of his response.
It wasn’t as though I didn’t know Orion had a dangerous side to him. I did, and I accepted it. I accepted that there would be times he’d get his hands dirty, and he’d do things that I wouldn’t like. But I also assumed that accepting this side of him would mean he wouldn’t lie to me about it.
“Work,” I echoed, deadpanning at him as the air around us darkened with thick, heavy tension. “ Work ?” I repeated, shaking my head like a damn bobblehead doll. “Whose blood is that Orion?”
He slid his shirt down his arms and gave me his back as he headed into the laundry room. His muscles rippled beneath his tattoos as he walked, and it almost distracted me enough to forget that he hadn’t answered me.
Almost.
I followed after him when he washed his hands in the sink. “Orion,” I called him. He didn’t answer. Instead, he shoved the bloodied shirt into the washing machine.
“How do you work this thing?” he muttered, spinning the dial around on the washer. “And why in God’s name are there so many options?”
“Orion!” I snapped icily, my nails digging tiny crescents into my palms.
He returned his attention to me, but his hand was still fiddling with the fucking dial. “Yes?”
“Whose blood is that?”
“Don’t worry about it.” He turned back to the washing machine and started pressing random buttons. “Seriously, why isn’t there just one fucking setting?”
There hadn’t been many times in my life where I’ve found myself completely rendered speechless, but this? This was one of those times. Except, speechless as I may be, I also had the overwhelming urge to kick my foot up his fucking ass in hopes of rattling some answers out of him.
So help me, God, I’ll do it.
“Don’t tell me ‘ not to worry about it’ .” I stormed over to him, placing myself between him and his new favorite toy, my blood pressure reaching a record-breaking high. “You’ve come home covered in blood, and I want to know what the fuck is going on, Orion!”
He sighed, leaning back against the wall with a look of unease. “Everything is fine, Emmy. There was just a complication that I needed to fix. Okay?”
“A complication that ended with you covered in blood?”
“He was a stubborn complication. Can you pass me a glass of water please?”
I stared at him in disbelief. How is he so damn casual about this? “So, you aren’t going to tell me what this complication was?”
“No, please just drop it,” he answered curtly. “Water please, baby?”
I stormed into the kitchen in a huff, high-pitched beeping from Orion pressing all the damn dials on the washer echoing behind me. Maybe I should put him in the frigging thing, it might wash out whatever the hell was clouding his common sense.
Shaking my head, I twisted my lips and reached for a glass out of the cabinet while Orion continued fucking around in the laundry room. Then, because I was feeling particularly petty, I went to the ice dispenser in the fridge and filled up the glass.
When I slammed the glass down next to him, he frowned. “Baby, that’s a glass of ice.”
A smile cut across my face with the precision of a honed knife. “Wait.”
He called after me when I stormed out of the kitchen, but I ignored him, and climbed the stairs two at a time, hurrying to my room. Just when I went to twist the handle, a strong hand wrapped around my wrist.
Those long fucking legs.
He spun me to face him and pinned me against the wall. His body crowded mine, swallowing all the light from the landing, our noses practically touching. He radiated the same calm confidence he always did, and it was unnerving.
His eyes were a stormy shade of gray, desire and amusement marrying in them. I looked down to see he was holding the glass of ice in the hand that wasn’t holding me hostage.
“Think you’re funny, Emmy?” His tone dropped to a dangerously low baritone, and it went straight to my core.
I met his gaze, tipping my chin in defiance, and pushed the heat back down. “Yeah, actually, I do.”
He smirked. A sinful act that made my knees weaken. “Wanna know what I think?” Before I could answer, he added “I think you’ve got an attitude problem that needs fucking right out of you. ”
I licked my lips, an inferno blazing within me from his vulgar words. But I’ll be damned if I let him distract me with sex. “You won’t be touching me tonight.”
“No?” he asked, challenging me in a firm voice.
“No,” I repeated. “Or any night, for that matter. If you want to keep secrets from me, well that’s your prerogative. But letting you fuck me? That’s mine.” He studied me for a moment, and I swore I saw a sense of pride flicker across his features. “Now, move out of the way so I can get to my room and go to bed,” I ordered in the same harsh tone.
Then something in him snapped. One second, I was pressed against the wall, the next I was flung over his shoulder, and he was marching us down the hallway. “Orion!” I slapped his back, but it was no use, the bastard was like a concrete wall.
He swung his bedroom door open and threw me onto his bed. I struggled to my knees, blowing my hair out of my face, and saw him towering over me with a haunted look while he set the glass of ice on one of the bedside tables.
“Kick me. Scratch me. Yell at me. I don’t give a fuck. But don’t you ever say you’ll be sleeping anywhere but our bed.”
My eyes bore into his. “There is no ‘ our’ bed. Not when you keep things from me. This—” I move my finger between us “—is a relationship, which means honesty . So, you either trust me to handle whatever the hell you’re mixed in the middle of, or you don’t.”
Orion groaned, his expression pained as he ran his hands through the top of his hair, roughing it up and it only aggravated me further because he still looked devastatingly handsome. His cheeks hollowed, and he shook his head when our eyes met again. “You—” he bit down on his lip “—you frustrate me, incredibly.”
“Right back at you.”
He hesitated for a minute, and the silence stretched between us, settling on the gray plush carpet and the white, silky bed sheets like a winter fog, hazing our senses until it was all we could feel. Watching him, I could almost see the wires working in his brain, like he was walking himself through what he planned to say before he eventually blew out a frustrated breath and sat down beside me.
“I interrogated an ex-employee.”
I swallowed. “By interrogate…”
A flicker of reluctance swept across his face before he ultimately said, “He’s dead.”
My lower lip wobbled slightly. “Why?”
“He was part of a plan to hurt someone incredibly important to me. Someone I’m not sure would survive what we believe they have in store. But I’m not a complete monster, I gave him an out—a way to walk away and live—he just didn’t want it. By the end, it was him or them. I chose them. I’ll always choose them.”
My fingers bunched into the hem of my dress, aimlessly fidgeting with the material. It wasn’t a shock that Orion had the tendency to get violent, I already knew some of the things he’d done. But a seed of doubt still blossomed in my mind, nevertheless. Could I really handle who Orion was when, in some form, I’d always be healing from Miles’ scars?
I didn’t know what to think, my mind was like a record player stuck on repeat, echoing his words over and over.
Dead.
It was him or them.
I chose them.
His fingers gripped my chin, his hold was iron-clad as he turned my head to face him. There was no remorse written in his features, but I didn’t expect there to be.
“My job has me doing things that can be fucked up. I didn’t want you to know too much because it could be too much for you to handle, and I refuse to lose you, Emerson.”
I parted my lips to object, but he lifted his palm with a pointed look and my jaw clicked shut.
“Before I met you, I thought I was condemned to an eternity in Hell, God knows it’s what I deserve for the things I’ve done. But—” he inhaled a sharp, steady breath “—then you came along. And yes, I’m a demanding bastard. I’m selfish. I can be cruel and often, I’m extremely unreasonable. But I’m not him. I will never hurt you, but I’m also not ashamed to admit that if anyone else tried, they’ll end up six feet under and I won’t feel the slightest ounce of guilt for it because you, Emerson, are my salvation. My own personal slice of Heaven. And every time I look at you it terrifies me. It terrifies me because I don’t think there’s anything I wouldn’t do for you. And if you know all the things I’ ve done, the things I’ve been capable of, you may never look at me the same again, and that I couldn’t survive.”
My heart ached in my chest. There was something so undeniably beautiful about Orion as he sat before me, exposed and vulnerable, bearing his heart on his sleeve for me. His words tunneled into me like a ton of bricks, weighing me down with their meaning, and it was all-consuming.
I wasn’t a fool. I knew Orion wasn’t a saint from the moment I met him. But telling my heart that was useless, it was falling in love with him anyway.
Edging closer, I straddled his waist, my legs on either side of his thighs, and buried my hands into the back of his hair, tugging on it slightly so he lifted his chin.
His stormy eyes lacked their usual edge, instead, he was unguarded, letting me devour the sincerity in the way he looked at me. It had my breath halting, my heart completely stalling.
He was peering up at me like I was the center of his universe, like he was seeing stars in the night sky for the first time, or how one would admire a delicate painting, completely mesmerized. I’d never felt as seen as I did under Orion’s gaze.
“If I’m your salvation, then you, Orion, you’re my sin, and everything in between is our own twisted fairytale. I’m not romanticizing you into being my Prince Charming, Orion, because I know who you truly are. But if you’re the beast in this story, I don’t want to be saved. I want to embrace your darkness, to know your scars, and to learn your pain. I want to love you, but you have to let me. ”
His hand reached out, gently cupping my cheek as he studied me, reading my face for any doubt. But he wouldn’t find any, it dissipated as quickly as it arrived. “Where have you been?” His voice was multilayered, each veneer demolishing the remainder of my defenses and embedding him further under my skin.
“Waiting for you.”
And then he crushed his lips to mine in a soul-breaking, earth-shattering, oxygen-stealing kiss that had my head spinning and my lungs screaming. He had me drowning in him, taking all the air inside me for himself, and burying me alive in his scent, his touch, his taste.
But I meant what I said.
I didn’t want to be saved.
Not when being dragged to the depths of Hell felt this good.