Chapter 6 Elias
ELIAS
The silence in the Vault presses down on us, heavier than the reinforced steel door sealing us inside.
I count the seconds between Mia’s breaths. One, two, three, four. Inhale. One, two, three, four. Exhale. A flawless, grounding rhythm.
She sleeps on the makeshift cot I set up in the corner, drowned in my spare flannel shirt. The thick fabric swallows her completely, but I can still smell her—grapefruit, rain, and the musk of our sex clinging to the wool. She’s naked underneath my colors, her skin still marked by my teeth.
My chaotic, pink-loving auditor. Mine.
Back braced against the cold metal of a filing cabinet, I watch her from the floor.
The emergency lights remain off. Overhead, the main power emits a low vibration that usually settles my mind.
Tonight, the hum grates against my nerves.
The only sound anchoring me to reality is the soft draw of air through her parted lips.
Destruction coats the room. Papers scattered across the concrete floor like snow, burying my carefully organized system. Ledgers lay kicked aside. Invoices lie crumpled near the legs of the steel table where we…
My jaw locks. Memory of her crying out, of her short nails digging into my shoulders, incinerates the oxygen in my lungs. Smudges of heat still smear across the metal surface of that table.
My hands flex with the urge to clean up. A familiar itch crawls under my skin to straighten the papers, to file the invoices by date and vendor. Order equals safety. Counted variables equate to absolute control.
I remain planted on the floor. Erasing the evidence of what happened holds no appeal. I want to leave the destruction exactly where it landed. This chaos belongs to me.
Mia stirs, her fingers twitching against the rough wool of the blanket.
The glowing dial on my tactical watch reads 2100 hours. The siege above ended two hours ago. Logan buzzed down to give the all-clear, but I ordered him to wait under the guise of finalizing the audit. A blatant lie.
The audit concluded hours ago. The ghost ledger is in place, feeding the Costa algorithm a steady diet of garbage data designed to lead them straight into a federal trap. We won. I’m still not unsealing that heavy door.
Mia shifts again, her eyelashes fluttering open. She blinks against the dim lighting before her gaze lands squarely on me. No widened eyes or shrinking posture. A sleepy, soft smile curves her lips, and the force of it caves in my chest.
"You're watching me again," she whispers, her tone raspy from screaming my name.
"I'm counting," I grit out, the words dragging like gravel over my vocal cords as I track the steady thrum of her life.
"Eight thousand, four hundred and twelve."
She rubs sleep from her eyes, looking soft and wrecked in my shirt. "Breaths?"
"Your pulse. I’m tracking every beat of your heart against mine, mapping the rhythm of the pussy that just took every drop of my seed."
Her hands still on the blanket. "You can hear my pulse from there?"
"I can hear everything in this room. The ventilation fan has a squeak every forty-five rotations. The server hums at sixty cycles per second. And the thrum in your chest... it stuttered when you woke up."
She stares at me. Most people would run, calling me a freak or a machine. The Silencer.
Mia simply slides her legs off the cot and pads across the cold concrete floor toward me. Settling down between my spread legs, she leans her back directly against my chest. Absolute trust.
"That's a lot of counting, Elias."
"It's how I know the world is still spinning." I wrap my arms around her, burying my face in the crook of her neck. The scent of grapefruit mixes with the dried sweat and musk rising off her skin. "If I stop tracking, the variables get out of control."
Small hands come to rest over my forearms, her fingertips mapping the raised tissue of my scars. "Tell me."
"Tell you what?"
"Why the numbers matter so much. And don't give me the Treasurer speech about fiscal responsibility." Turning her head, she looks up at me with clear, demanding eyes. "I saw the other book. The black one."
Every muscle in my body locks down.
The black ledger usually stays hidden under the cot. She must have found the worn binding while I washed up in the bathroom earlier.
"You weren't supposed to see that."
"This doesn't read like club business," she says softly. "It reads like survival. 'Steps to the door: 12. Coffee beans in the grinder: 450 approx. Days since the fire: 6,432.'"
The exact entries roll off her tongue from memory.
Acid climbs my throat, thick and bitter. This ledger doesn't track assets. It catalogs a broken mind trying to glue reality back together.
"Chaos kills," I grit out, the syllables coating my tongue in ash. "If you don't track the variables, you miss the outliers. The outliers burn your house down."
Shifting in my arms, she turns until she straddles my lap. Warm hands frame my jaw, forcing my gaze up to meet hers. "Tell me about the fire."
I’ve never told anyone. Logan and Shane know the history—everyone in the family understands the Gunnars carry tragedy in our blood—but they lack the gruesome details. They don't know why I became the man who sits in a Vault counting pennies.
"I was sixteen." The words drag out of my chest, heavy and jagged. "My parents. My little sister, Sarah. We lived in the cabin on the north ridge. Old construction with faulty wiring."
Mia’s thumbs drag across my cheekbones, anchoring me to the present.
"I woke up to the smell of burning wood.
But I moved too slow. I wasted thirty seconds trying to find my glasses, and another thirty trying to figure out which door was safe.
" My voice splinters. "By the time I reached Sarah’s room.
.. the brass handle was too hot. It melted the flesh right off my palm. "
Holding up my right hand exposes the old damage. The burn marks are faint now, jagged white lines etching a permanent map of failure across my palm and fingers.
"I couldn't pry the door open. I lost track of the count. Too much heat, smoke, and an overload of variables." I bare the ugliest parts of my soul to her. "They died because I lacked efficiency. Because chaos won."
"Elias." Her voice breaks over the syllables.
"So now I count," I rasp against the skin of her wrist. "I tally the money so the club doesn't starve. I catalog the ammo so my brothers never run dry. I track the seconds so I know exactly how much time remains to fix a problem before it detonates into a disaster."
Leaning forward, she presses her forehead firmly against mine. "And me? Why do you count me?"
"Because you're the most massive variable I've ever encountered." My hands slide down the curve of her spine to grip her hips. "You walked in here with your pink cardigan and neon highlighters, wrecking my system in five minutes. You're unpredictable and entirely messy."
I crash my mouth against hers, a punishing, brief possession.
"I need to know you're still here. Every second. If I count you, I keep you."
She doesn't pull away. I'd rather she scream at me than look at me with soft, gut-wrenching sympathy. Thankfully, her gaze holds zero pity. She looks at me like a complex equation she just solved.
"You're not cold," she murmurs. "Everyone calls you the Ice King or the Machine. But you aren't." A gentle finger traces the rigid line of my jaw. "You're merely careful. You love with such violent force that you built a fortress around it just to keep it contained."
A rusted lock inside my chest finally gives way. The snap offers a brutal, long-awaited release. A steel tension cable pulled taut for six years suddenly drops slack.
She completely understands.
Gripping her waist, I shift her off my lap and stand upright. She watches me navigate toward the heavy workbench in the far corner of the Vault. This station acts as my sanctuary within the sanctuary. Most people assume I merely fix guns or roll coins in this corner.
The bottom drawer screeches slightly as I unlock it. Inside rests a small block of stainless steel. Industrial grade and utterly permanent.
Snatching up the metal, I carry it back to where she sits.
"What is this?" she asks, accepting the heavy cube.
"It's 316L stainless steel," I rattle off automatically. "Marine grade and molybdenum-alloyed. Highly resistant to corrosion and extreme pressure."
One pale eyebrow arches upward. "Okay, Bill Nye. Why are you handing me a paperweight?"
"It's far from a paperweight." I reclaim the block, setting it on the desk. Pulling out my tools—calipers, bastard files, and a small jeweler's saw borrowed from Blake's forge—I arrange them in a perfect row. "It's a ring."
A sharp inhale visibly lifts her chest.
"Or it will be," I mutter to the concrete floor. "I started carving it six months ago. Just tinkering. I wanted to forge something indestructible. A band that would outlast fragile bone."
My fingers lift a rough, half-shaped band of steel from the tray. Dull, jagged edges still require intense filing. The current state is ugly, but the permanent potential sings through the alloy.
"I had no idea who it was meant for," I confess, running my thumb over the burrs.
"The dimensions simply had to be mathematically perfect. The internal radius. The millimeter thickness." My gaze drops to her left hand. "I measured your ring finger while you were passed out yesterday, tracing the delicate bone with my calipers. Size six. Circumference 51.9 millimeters. I needed the exact data to ensure the steel I’m forging for you fits so perfectly you’ll never be able to slide it off. You’re being fitted for a permanent cage, Mia. "
She stares blankly at the jagged piece of metal. "You measured my finger while I was unconscious."
"Affirmative."
"That crosses the line into incredibly creepy, Elias."
"Efficient," I shoot back.