Chapter 23 #2
My fingers hovered over the little jar of cold cream on the vanity. I unscrewed it, dipped two fingers into it, and began smoothing it over the mark on my throat.
His eyes tracked the movement of my hand, the bruises, the evidence I could no longer hide from him, even if I wanted to.
I tipped my head to the side and let my fingers drag lower, tracing cream over the bruise above my collarbone, then down the line of my shoulder.
His hand curled against the glass.
A thrill went through me so sharply it almost felt like shame.
There it was—proof. Proof that I could still affect him. That I wasn’t just a broken thing hidden away in this house. That I could still make him look like that—like I was both his salvation and ruin, like one more second of this might drive him through the window.
I wanted more of that look.
I wanted to drown in it.
The thought was so ugly I almost recoiled from it, but not quite enough to stop.
My eyes went to the brush again, and when I picked it up, I remembered that other life, the one we had shared.
He had brushed my hair for me after a ride in the rain because my fingers had been too cold to work the knots out.
I had sat cross-legged on the floor between his knees in one of the back rooms at the clubhouse, both of us half hidden from the rest of the world, laughing every time he tugged too hard and I called him names for pretending he knew what he was doing.
“You’re dramatic,” he had told me, voice warm against the top of my head.
“And you’re useless,” I had replied, leaning back into him anyway.
The memory hit so suddenly I almost dropped the brush.
My hand stilled.
Outside, Vienna’s expression changed too, as though he had felt it happen.
And that was the problem with games like this. They only stayed games for so long. At some point, the truth crawled in.
I set the brush down and rose from the stool before I could think better of it.
The hem of my dress brushed against my thighs as I slowly crossed the room. He didn’t move, didn’t back away, and didn’t try to hide the face that all of him was focused solely on me.
By the time I reached the glass, my breathing had gone shallow.
We were close enough now that I could see every detail of his face.
The beard that had grown thicker over the years.
The shadows under his eyes that were darker than they had been.
The line of tension in his mouth. He looked rougher than the boy I had loved. Harder. More dangerous.
But there were pieces of Luke still there if you knew where to look. In the shape of his mouth when he was trying not to say something reckless. In the softness that always betrayed him when he looked at me too long.
I lifted one finger and pressed it to the glass.
Right over his heart.
His eyes dropped to it, then lifted back to mine.
I swallowed.
My pulse was pounding now, no longer from anger alone. This had gone too far. I knew it. Every instinct I had spent the last ten years cultivating was screaming at me to stop, to pull away, to close the curtains and pretend none of this had happened.
But something vicious in me held firm.
I dragged my fingertip slowly down the glass, and his breathing hitched. Through the window, through the dark, I mouthed, “What?”
The word was barely a shape, but he read it anyway. His eyes narrowed, not in anger, but in disbelief. Like he couldn’t quite reconcile what he was seeing with the version of me he had forced himself to live with all these years.
My lips curved again, faintly. A challenge this time.
His free hand came up slowly and touched the glass opposite my cheek, as though he were cupping it, and his head tipped to the side.
I stopped breathing.
My hand moved before my mind could catch it, palm flattening over the same space from my side. Not quite touching him. Never touching him. Just a thin sheet of glass and a decade of blood between us.
The look on his face nearly destroyed me.
Because suddenly this didn’t feel like rebellion anymore.
It didn’t feel like punishment or provocation or proof of control.
It felt like missing him.
Missing him in a way that was ancient and painful and impossible to survive.
There had been men touching my body for years, hurting it, using it, claiming it for themselves with violence and force and filth, and not one of them had ever made me feel more naked than Vienna’s hand on the other side of that glass.
His lips moved. “Gabby.”
I saw it rather than heard it, but the effect was the same.
My throat tightened so fast that it hurt.
That was all it took. One look, one touch through glass, one old name in his mouth, and every part of me that had been holding itself rigid all night threatened to come apart.
Because Nico didn’t say my name like that.
No one did.
No one said it like something precious and breakable and infuriatingly beloved.
Only him.
Only Luke.
The anger drained out of me in one brutal rush, leaving nothing but exhaustion and sorrow and the awful ache of wanting what I could not have.
My forehead bowed forward until it rested lightly against the cool glass. I closed my eyes, and for a moment, neither of us moved.
Then I felt it—the faintest slide of his hand against the window, as though if there were no glass between us, he’d be smoothing my hair back, brushing the bruises from my skin, touching me gently enough to make me shatter.
A tear slipped free before I could stop it.
I hated that. Hated myself for it. Hated that he was the one person who could still pull something honest out of me without even stepping into the room.
When I opened my eyes again, he was still there, his forehead pressed against mine. Watching me with that same unbearable intensity, all the sharpness gone from his face now, replaced by something more raw. Something quieter.
I shook my head once.
I wasn’t even sure what I meant by it. Don’t come in. Don’t leave. Don’t look at me like that. Don’t make me remember.
Maybe all of it.
His jaw flexed, and for a second I thought he was going to ignore me. That he was going to do something reckless and irreversible and climb through that balcony door and blow both our lives apart in one final, selfish act of wanting.
So I pulled away first.
I had to.
Another second and I might have opened the door. Another second and I might have begged him for everything that was impossible.
He didn’t move at once. His eyes searched my face one final time, as if committing every crack in it to memory, and then slowly, reluctantly, he stepped back.
The loss of his nearness was instant.
I wrapped my arms around myself and stood there as he retreated across the balcony, one backward step at a time, never fully turning his back on me.
At the railing, he paused, held my gaze, and for one reckless heartbeat I saw it all there—the boy I had once met in secret, the man he had become, the fury, the love, the obsession, the grief.
Then he was gone.
Vanishing back into the dark the way only Vienna could. Like a threat. Like a promise. Like something that would always come back, no matter how many times the world tried to bury it.
I stood at the window for a long time after that, staring at my own faint reflection in the glass.
My hand drifted back to the place where his had been, and then I crossed back to the bed and sat on the edge of it, my body protesting the movement as I did so.
I had wanted to provoke him. That was what I told myself. I had wanted to feel powerful for five minutes. Wanted to remind myself that there was still one person in this world I could affect without permission. Wanted to spit some of my own poison back into the night and see what it did.
Instead, all I had managed to do was remind myself what his attention used to feel like when it wasn’t stolen through glass windows.
I wanted to feel chosen. Wanted. Cherished, even.
Because there had been a time, hadn’t there? A real time. Not this hollowed-out thing we had become, not the blood and betrayal and shadows of it.
A time when being with Luke had been easy.
When a whole day stretched ahead of us and the biggest problem we faced was how to spend it before someone noticed we were gone.
Before everything turned to war and ruin, there had been days when loving him had felt as simple as breathing.
And despite everything that had happened since, despite the bruises on my skin and the years between us and the life I had been forced to live, that was the memory that came for me now.
Not the break-up.
Not the blood.
Not the loss.
Just him.
Young and bright and impossible.
Luke, grinning at me beneath an open sky, with an entire day to waste and nowhere in the world he would rather be.