Chapter 4 – Ben
Chapter
Four
BEN
“I think my girl might have a death wish, Henry.”
That’s how I opened the call — no greeting, no preamble, just pure, simmering fury as I sat in the far-back corner of the Bayview Hospice parking lot, tucked into the shadows like I belonged there.
On the other end of the line, Henry paused just long enough to sound unimpressed.
“Alright. What did she do?”
“She left her damn car unlocked,” I growled, watching Chrissy Jones exit the hospice doors and step into the cold wind like she had nothing to fear in this world. “All day. In Bay Minette. Anyone could’ve climbed in.”
Her carelessness awakened something primal and ugly inside me.
Four years of watching her from the edges of her life and she still didn’t understand how breakable she looked to anyone who knew what to look for.
Not weak... Chrissy was the farthest thing from weak.
But she moved through the world like no one hunted women like her, like the monsters only existed in the stories she skimmed at midnight when she couldn’t sleep.
The truth was simpler and so much worse: the most dangerous monsters were human, patient, and driven by motive.
I’d spent years memorizing her routines, the way she locked her doors at night but forgot during the day, the way her guard fell when she was exhausted.
I knew her blind spots better than she did.
And Jesus H. Christ, it terrified me how easily the wrong person could slip right into her orbit. What terrified me more was how badly I wanted to be the monster she let in anyway… not despite the danger, but because of it.
“She left her car unlocked?” Henry repeated slowly. “That’s it?”
“That’s it?” I snapped. “Henry, she was in a mediation for hours with her mail just sitting there on the passenger seat like a buffet of personal information for any asshole to grab and use to his heart’s content.”
“…ah,” Henry said. “That’s what this is about.”
“Don’t start.”
“You’re pissed she made it easy for you.”
I gripped the steering wheel harder, leather biting into my palms.
“No, I’m pissed she made it easy for literally anyone. She was careless with her safety. Anyone could have gotten into that car.”
“She’s tired, Ben.”
I could practically picture Henry pinching the bridge of his nose, trying to fend off the frustration bubbling up inside him.
“She’s reckless,” I snapped. “She left her vehicle unlocked all damn day with her mail sitting out like bait. Somebody worse than me could’ve been waiting for her.
Do you know how fucking easy it would have been for someone to have laid down in the back seat with a gun, ready to do God only knows what to her once she got in? ”
Henry went quiet for a moment, listening and letting me spiral, but he didn’t let what I said go unanswered.
“I saw a lot of ugly things when I was in special forces, before I started working for your father, Ben. I know exactly what kind of threats people can pose to each other.”
“She didn’t check her back seat,” I continued, voice dropping into a growl. “Not before she got in. Not after. She didn’t sweep the mirrors, didn’t hesitate, didn’t look around. She has exactly zero situational awareness, Henry. None. She’s a walking invitation for a predator.”
“Ben—”
“She’s a hazard to her own safety through sheer negligence.”
“You’re overreacting.”
“The hell I am!”
“She made a mistake,” Henry said calmly. “People do that from time to time. You of all people should know that, Benjamin.”
“Not her,” I snapped. “Not when she’s running on fumes. Not when she’s this vulnerable. Not when she’s walking around with everything she loves resting on her shoulders like she’s the fucking reincarnation of Atlas.”
“So you’re angry because you care.”
“I’m angry because she’s oblivious.”
“She’s human.”
“She’s mine,” I snapped before I could stop myself. “She doesn’t get to just keep gambling with her safety like this.”
Mine.
The word slipped out of me on instinct, driven by something older than logic, older than the ruin I woke up in after the accident.
The scars that mapped my skin still ached when the weather changed, but the one Chrissy Jones gave me inside had never faded.
I hadn’t known her before the accident, before the coma, before I dragged myself back into a world that didn’t know what to do with me anymore, now that I was scarred, and broken beyond repair.
But the day she patched up my hand inside Stonewood Hardware — the first time since the accident that anyone besides Henry had looked at me without flinching — something in me knotted itself around her and claimed her.
The moment she touched my bleeding hand, something in my chest had fractured and refitted itself into a shape that made sense only when she was near.
I’d been hers from that moment on… and she’d been mine long before she ever had a say in the matter.
Silence stretched between Henry and me for a long moment.
“There it is,” Henry murmured. “The real issue. You’re not in control of what she does, and it’s driving you up the wall.”
I closed my eyes, breath hot and ragged in my chest.
“She doesn’t get to be careless with herself, Henry. Not in this world. Not when I’m this close to putting her exactly where she needs to be.”
“And where’s that, Ben?”
“Safe.” My knuckles went white on the wheel. “With me. She might think that towns like Bay Minette and Stonewood are safe because they’re small, but that’s not the reality of the situation.”
Henry sighed, not irritated this time, but something heavier and older.
“You can protect her, son, but you can’t bubble-wrap her whole damned life.”
“I don’t need to bubble-wrap her,” I said. “I just need her to live long enough to open the fucking invitation to the Game.”
Henry huffed a quiet laugh.
“Is that panic I hear in your voice?”
“It’s not panic.”
“Bullshit. You’re terrified she’ll just throw it away without even opening it.”
“I’m not terrified.”
“I bet you fifty bucks you’re gripping the steering wheel so tight your knuckles are white.”
I glanced down.
“…Fuck.”
Henry chuckled, his tone triumphant.
“Ben, she’s going home. You’re behind her, watching her back.”
“Because she won’t watch for herself.”
“Then teach her how, after she says yes to the Game. The only thing that’s going to happen to her now that you’re out of time is you’re going to drag her into your sphere, one way or another. No one else is going to be able to get to her once she’s in your orbit. It’s fine.”
I let out a sharp breath.
“She hasn’t opened the invitation. Fuck, she hasn’t even looked at it. She opened literally every other piece of mail in the car, but not the invitation.”
“And that scares you,” Henry drawled.
“No,” I said, even though my pulse was thundering in my ears.
“Yes, it does.”
“Henry—”
“Don’t bother trying to lie to me, Benjamin. I’ve known you since the day you were born.”
“She always opens her mail,” I groused.
“She opened everything except yours.”
“That’s the problem!” I slammed my hand against the dash. “She opened her bills, notices, even the damn dental postcard, but not her invitation to the Game.”
“She was upset,” Henry reminded me. “Exhausted. She didn’t have the bandwidth for anything personal.”
“She had bandwidth to get into an unlocked vehicle without checking for threats—”
“Ben.”
“—and bandwidth to look through overdue invoices—”
“Benjamin.”
“—but not enough to give sixty seconds to an envelope with her name hand written on it?”
“You sound like my old drill instructor when he used to chew out the new recruits for making stupid mistakes.”
“Good,” I snapped. “Maybe she needs to be chewed out. Maybe she needs someone to point out just how dangerous that shit is. She walks around like nothing bad can get to her, but the world doesn’t work like that. Not for women like her. Not for women who—”
“Who what?” Henry pressed.
I swallowed hard.
“…who I can’t afford to lose.”
Silence hummed between us, but it was warm this time… heavy and knowing. Henry broke it first.
“You won’t lose her, Benjamin.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Yes,” he said quietly, “I do.”
“Why?”
“Because you’ve been watching her for four years, and I know you better than you know yourself. You won’t let anything bad happen to her… except you.”
I exhaled shakily.
“What if she doesn’t open the invitation, Henry? What if she throws it away without ever opening it? I don’t want to marry anyone but her, even temporarily, but I refuse to lose my fucking inheritance to my conniving bitch of a stepmother.”
“Then,” Henry said, with the patience of a man who’d dragged me through hell and back, “you put the contract in her mailbox tonight, and she opens that.”
“And if she doesn’t?” I asked again, voice cracking like a fault line.
“If she doesn’t,” Henry said, slower and steadier, “you regroup. You adapt. You adjust your strategy.”
“And if nothing works?” I whispered.
Henry didn’t hesitate.
“Then you pivot and fight harder.”
I closed my eyes. Inhaled. Exhaled.
“Right,” I murmured. “I know.”
Chrissy stepped out of the hospice doors, head down, moving fast… too fast and too damn distracted. I stared at her through the rain-blurred windshield as she hustled to her car, hugging her coat around herself like armor she didn’t even realize was too thin.
“Jesus,” I said, eyes locked on her. “She’s literally trying to get herself killed, I swear.”
“What now?” Henry sighed.
“She left her car unlocked again,” I snarled. “Walked right up to it without checking under, without checking in, without checking behind her. She didn’t even look around, just climbed in her car like a goddamn gazelle daring a lion to eat it.”
Henry exhaled a long, unimpressed breath.
“Stop bitching and make sure she gets home safe.”
“She’s careless,” I snapped.
“She’s exhausted,” Henry countered. “And you’re in love. Get your shit together and handle it.”
“I am handling it.”
“No, you’re fussing about it,” he deadpanned. “Get moving, son.”
“Henry—”
Click.
He hung up on me.
I stared at my phone like it had personally betrayed me.
“Unbelievable.”
I rolled my eyes and tossed the phone onto the truck’s bench seat with a disgusted grunt.
Chrissy pulled out of the parking lot, taillights glowing in the misty dark. I started my engine, merged behind her, and let the adrenaline of being so close, yet so damn far away, smooth into something cold and razor-sharp.
She took a left onto Highway 98 without even signaling. Of course she did. She was preoccupied and playing Russian roulette with her safety… again.
I stayed several cars back, invisible in the stream of headlights.
She cut right onto County Road 64, that long two-lane ribbon that carved all the way through from Daphne to Loxley and beyond, with plenty of dark stretches. It could easily be a predator’s paradise. My hands tightened on the wheel at the thought of anyone but me laying a hand on her.
She didn’t notice a damn thing.
Halfway across Baldwin County, she finally reached 59 and turned right toward Stonewood… toward home, or what passed for it.
Ten minutes later, her apartment complex came into view.
It was three stories of old red brick, dim exterior lights, and too many blind corners.
She pulled into her usual spot, still paying no attention whatsoever to her surroundings.
Again, she left her car unlocked and shuffled into the building without lifting her head from where she was gazing down at her phone.
I gritted my teeth almost hard enough to crack them and kept driving, circling around the back of her building. I parked in the farthest, darkest corner of the lot, exactly where a real threat would park.
I had a perfect view into her dining area through the open blinds. Of course she hadn’t closed them. Of course, she didn’t think for a second that anyone might watch her.
Chrissy didn’t even bother to flick on the light at first. No, she just dropped her purse on the table and rubbed her temples like the day had taken a piece out of her that she might never get back. She moved slowly, shoulders caved in under invisible weight.
My chest tightened, anger folding into something worse… something helpless and possessive.
I hated that feeling… that raw, animal panic that lived under my ribs.
The accident had taken my face and my body and carved them into something unrecognizable.
It had stolen three years from me and left me to wake up to a father who’d died under circumstances that everyone called tragic, but no one dared question too closely.
The world had shifted under my feet, but it hadn’t taken away the part of me that wanted someone to belong to me, and vice versa.
Chrissy made that want unbearable. She was the one thing I couldn’t reason away, the one soft place I’d ever been tempted to land.
Watching her unravel under the weight of everyone else’s needs made me furious. Watching her walk blindly into danger made me murderous, but watching her suffer alone? That made me feel… doomed.
She deserved safety, comfort, and luxury. She deserved someone who wouldn’t let the world chew her up and spit her out.
She got me instead, and I was going to do everything in my power to spoil her rotten… if she’d just open her godforsaken invitation, agree to play the Game, sign the contract, and pass all my tests like I hoped and prayed she would.
I stared at her through the open blinds and drummed my fingers against my thigh, my impatience ratcheting up with every wasted second that ticked by.
“Come on, sweetness… just open the fucking invitation already.”