Chapter 22
T he next morning, I should have gone home.
After everything—the night, the glass, the sex that left me hollowed and full at once—I should have gone back to The Nesting Place. I should have washed bottles, stocked lanolin, answered emails, and proven to myself that I still knew how to keep my hands on the ground.
My phone buzzed. Stephen. I almost let it go to voicemail, but guilt and muscle memory had me swiping before I thought twice.
“Sim,” he said, his voice rough around the edges.
“You sound awful.”
“I’m fine,” he said too quickly. “Probably a bug. You know how it goes.”
I frowned. Stephen didn’t get bugs. Not like other people. He was the kind who could work double shifts in the July heat, live on protein bars and Gatorade, and still show up for Sunday dinner without missing a beat. If he admitted to feeling off, it meant something had already been gnawing at him.
“You seemed off the other night, too. At the fountain.” I pressed my forehead to the cool glass of the window, watching the marsh blur by. “And you’re thin. What’s wrong, really?”
He gave a short laugh that didn’t sound like him. “Just run-down. Happens when you burn the candle at both ends.” A pause, then softer, “You know how it is—you don’t slow, your body finds a way to make you.”
The words sat heavy. I wanted to push, but the distance between us—the phone, the space, the fact that we were both holding back for different reasons—made me let it go. For now.
“Nothing worth worrying about,” he said, and I could picture him rubbing his jaw the way he did when he didn’t want to be read. “I’m more worried about you.”
“Stephen—”
“I’m serious,” he cut in. “Atticus is … he’s my friend, yeah.
But I know the world he walks in, Sim. The way people look at him, the way they clear space like it’s instinct.
That doesn’t happen because a man’s good at poker.
It happens because he’s dangerous. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it. ”
The words landed. I looked at Atticus’s hands—one braced on the back of the sofa, the other loose at his side—steady as stone. My stomach did its familiar flip, fear and want tangled so tight I couldn’t tell them apart.
“You don’t have to tell me what you’re doing,” Stephen went on, softer now. “I just need to know you’re not blind to it.”
“I’m not,” I said. It came out thinner than I wanted.
Silence stretched for a beat. Then: “Okay. I’ll call later.”
“Steph—” But the line went dead.
I shoved my phone into my pocket, chest tight.
Between Stephen, Mom, Alana, and every woman who might call at two in the morning about a contraction, the list of people watching for me stretched longer than I wanted to admit.
They’d all notice I was slipping. They’d all wonder why I hadn’t been as available as usual, why my texts were shorter, why I looked lit from some flame I hadn’t named yet.
We took the elevator down into a lobby rinsed with quiet and daylight. The valet had the car waiting, sun winking on the hood, the air still cool enough to pretend Charleston was gentle.
Atticus’s hand found the small of my back for one beat, and then I was sliding into the clean, dim interior, the door closing soft as a secret.
By the time our seat belts clicked, morning was already peeling the city open—church bells somewhere, delivery trucks shouldering past, tourists in fresh sneakers.
A few turns later, the postcard edges blurred: marsh grass gave way to rusted chain-link, cranes hunched against a sky the color of metal.
The air shifted with it, trading salt for diesel.
I wanted to ask where we were going. I wanted to demand it. But the truth was, I already knew I would follow.
“Where?” I managed finally, trying for casual and missing.
He didn’t glance over. His hand rested steady on the wheel, other hand on the gearshift like he was built to hold things in place. “A check.”
“A check for what?”
The corner of his mouth moved, not quite humor. “Compliance.”
The word rang with weight. It wasn’t paperwork compliance. It wasn’t nurses signing forms. It was something more serious.
I swallowed. My body went hot and cold at the same time.
The road narrowed. We passed stretches of scrub grass and billboards sun-faded into nonsense. He turned into a lot graveled with oyster shells, the sound sharp under the tires. Ahead, a warehouse squatted by the river, its bricks patched like bad dentistry, windows clouded, roof ridged with rust.
He killed the engine. The silence after the hum of the car felt deliberate.
“Stay close,” he said.
The way he said it made something low in me tighten. Not request. Not suggestion. A fact.
“I wasn’t planning to wander,” I muttered, but my pulse tripped, anyway.
He shoved the warehouse door open. The hinges groaned like something waking. Inside, the air changed: cooler, denser, laced with oil and a metallic tang that made the back of my tongue taste like pennies.
Six men looked up from clipboards, crates, forklifts.
Every single one of them straightened when they saw him.
“Boss,” one said, dipping his chin.
Atticus nodded once. Already moving. He didn’t raise his voice. He didn’t need to. The room bent to him.
I followed, every nerve buzzing. I told myself I was an observer, that I could stand in a corner with my tote and watch. But my body knew I was in a place where the rules didn’t belong to me.
The warehouse stretched deeper than I’d expected. Containers lined the walls, their steel sides tagged with chalk codes. Pallets wrapped in plastic gleamed under hanging lights. Forklift tracks cut grooves into the dust. It could have been ordinary. If you squinted.
“Why here?” I whispered.
“To remind someone,” he said. “Of what matters.”
A man stepped out from behind a crate. Tall, wiry, shirt soaked dark with sweat. His eyes flicked to me, lingered, then back to Atticus. That single look made my stomach drop.
Atticus’s palm landed on my hip before the breath finished leaving my chest—no flourish, just weight, like he was setting a nameplate on something that already belonged to him.
His body angled and put half of himself between me and the stare.
The temperature of his face didn’t change.
His eyes did. They went from winter to black ice.
“Eyes on me,” he said, not loud, and the man’s chin snapped back like it was on a pulley. I felt the warning vibrate through Atticus’s hand before I heard it in his voice. He didn’t squeeze. He didn’t need to.
“You said tomorrow,” the man said.
Atticus didn’t stop walking. He slid his hand from my hip to the small of my back—a guide and a promise—and stepped past the rusted pallet jack like he owned the air. “I said today.”
“It’s not ready.”
The room stilled. Even the forklift idled quiet.
“What’s complicated,” Atticus said finally, “is you mistaking my patience for permission.”
The man’s throat bobbed. His hands flexed at his sides. “I need more time.”
Atticus tilted his head, slow. “No.”
That one syllable cracked the air.
I wanted to step forward, to touch his arm, to pull him back into something resembling normal. But my feet stayed rooted. My pulse hammered at my throat.
This wasn’t my world.
“Atticus—” I whispered.
He cut me the briefest glance. Not warning. Not dismissal. A tether: Stay back. Let me do this .
Then he moved.
It wasn’t loud. It wasn’t messy. One second he was in front of me, the next the man was pinned against a container, Atticus’s hand braced at his throat.
Not crushing, not choking, but near enough.
Enough to make air an effort. Enough to remind everyone watching that air could be taken away, if he chose.
“You owe,” Atticus said. His voice was low, for the man, but every set of ears strained toward it. “You deliver. Or you disappear.”
The man made a choking protest. Atticus leaned in, steady. “I don’t care about your reasons. I care about your word. You gave it. You keep it.”
He let go suddenly. The man staggered, coughing, face blotched red.
“Tomorrow,” he rasped. “It’ll be ready tomorrow. I swear.”
Atticus’s eyes stayed fixed, cold. He looked past the man to another worker, a shorter one who’d gone pale. “Make sure it is.”
“Yes, boss.”
The warehouse shifted back into motion, as if on a signal. Men picked up clipboards. Someone restarted the forklift. Everyone avoided looking at me.
Atticus turned, already walking. His expression hadn’t changed. He might as well have been adjusting furniture.
“Let’s go,” he said.
I followed on unsteady legs. The gravel outside sounded too loud under my shoes, each crunch a broadcast of my nerves.
In the car, I sat stiff, hands clutched in my lap. The warehouse door loomed in the mirror. The man’s cough echoed in my ears.
Atticus drove in silence. Calm, steady, like he’d just balanced a ledger instead of threatening a man’s life.
Finally, I found my voice. “What was that?”
“A reminder.”
“That was a threat.”
He didn’t look over. “Yes.”
“You put your hand on his throat.”
“Yes.”
“You could have—” My voice cracked. “You could have killed him.”
“I didn’t.”
I turned fully toward him. His jaw was set, steady, the same storm calm that had both seduced me and terrified me. “Do you do that often?”
“When I need to.”
“And who decides when it’s needed?”
“I do.”
The simplicity of it made my chest hurt.
I pressed my palms to my thighs, heat prickling under my skin. Horror sat in me, jagged. But right beside it, traitorous, was heat of another kind. My body couldn’t tell the difference between fear and desire. My pulse roared either way.
Wow.
“You brought me there,” I said.
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“So you’d see. I don’t hide from you.”
It should have comforted me. It didn’t. Honesty was heavier than lies. Hiding would have been easier.
“I don’t know if I can live in that world,” I whispered.
“You don’t have to. You only have to live with me in it.”
The road opened up by the water, marsh grass bending in the wind, gulls crying like warnings. My chest was tight. But my hands had stopped shaking.
His hand left the gearshift, settled warm on my knee.
I should have pulled away. I didn’t.
That scene followed me.
I couldn’t shake the image: his hand on a man’s throat, the easy way the entire room had bent around him. Like gravity recognized him as its boss. Like violence was a language and everyone else in the room had grown up fluent.
I hadn’t.
I’d grown up with porch swings and hymns, with a mother who believed in pie as apology and forgiveness as maintenance. I’d built my life on babies’ cries and women’s laughter and the kind of strength that was soft on the outside.
And here I was, sitting beside a man who made grown men swallow their tongues.
What did that mean?
The question gnawed at me, even as my body leaned toward his heat, even as my pulse steadied when his hand stayed heavy on my knee.
I thought of Stephen’s warning.
I thought of my mother, who would spot the cleaver tattoo at his neck in a second during daylight and call it what it was: scary.
And I thought of myself, pressed to the glass, begging for what only his hands had taught me to want.
Was I reckless? Yes. Was I terrified? Absolutely. Was I alive in a way I hadn’t been in years? God, help me, yes.
The tug-of-war inside me burned my palms raw.