Chapter 9 #2
Her lips part. “So… you came back with nothing.”
I smile, slow, without humor. “Do you enjoy saying that?”
“A little,” she admits.
Honesty but with bite. Interesting.
My gaze drags over her face, down her throat, back to her mouth. “You’re flushed.”
Her eyes narrow. “No, I’m not.”
“Liar,” I murmur.
That gets me another flicker of heat in those ice-blue eyes.
I step in, two slow paces, and she goes still, like an animal trying not to show it’s cornered.
I don’t touch her yet. I let her feel the difference in size.
Let her notice how close I am. Let her body react before her brain decides how she’s supposed to react.
“Have you eaten?” I ask.
Her brows snap together in utter disbelief. “Excuse me?”
“Breakfast,” I say. “Did you eat it, or did you just glare at it to prove a point?”
That gets me the smallest twitch of her mouth. Defensive, fast. “I ate.”
“Good girl,” I say softly.
Her breath hitches, but her eyes freeze over immediately, a glare pinched in place by sheer force alone. It makes my cock twitch. “Stop fucking saying that,” she seethes.
“No,” I say. “I don’t think I will.”
Her jaw tightens.
Her mouth is ridiculous up close. Full, stubbornly set, and bruised. I have an awful urge to drag my thumb along the split and feel the warmth there. See if she’ll let me. See if she’ll bite me for it.
Control, Caelum. I shift my weight, tilt my head, study her. “You look tired.”
“I didn’t sleep,” she says with a scoff.
“I can see that,” I reply with an eye roll.
“You don’t look tired,” she says, taking in my stance.
“I didn’t sleep either,” I tell her. “Difference is, I’m used to it.”
Something flickers behind her eyes. Not pity. God no. She doesn’t pity me. She doesn’t like me enough to pity me. It’s closer to… recognition.
“Do you get nightmares too, Your Majesty?” she asks, lacing the title with sugar and venom both.
“Yes,” I say simply.
Her mouth opens. She blinks. She wasn’t expecting me to give her that. Good. I want her a step off-center.
“What,” she whispers, “you’re just going to admit that?”
“Why wouldn’t I?” I ask.
“Because you’re—” She gestures at me. All of me. The lines of my shoulders. The way I’m standing like I own the air in this room. “This. You’re not supposed to admit weakness.”
“This isn’t weakness,” I say. “It’s maintenance.”
Her brow creases. “What the hell does that mean?”
“It means,” I say, “that if you don’t bleed, pressure bursts you open in places you can’t sew back up.”
She stares at me. That slow, suspicious stare of hers. Like she thinks every answer I give her is a hand grenade wrapped in silk. After a second, she says, voice quieter, “What do you see?”
I blink once. Interesting choice.
There it is. The small thing. The crack. She didn’t mean to ask me that. That slipped. That was for herself, not me. I lean in, drop my voice. “What do I see when?”
“In your nightmares,” she mutters, like she regrets saying it already.
The air shifts between us, thickening with every word. I could lie. I probably should. That would be smarter. Easier, less complicated. Instead, for reasons I will later interrogate with something sharp and unkind, I give her the truth. “Blood,” I say.
She bites her bottom lip, then winces when she remembers the split. I try to ignore it, fail miserably. “Men I couldn’t pull out fast enough,” I continue, voice low. “Ships that should have made it to port, bodies that didn’t. Owen’s file. Yours.”
Her breath stutters. “Mine?”
“Video,” I murmur. “You on that warehouse feed. Knees on concrete. Hands on a corpse. Looking at that camera like you were daring whoever was on the other end to come get you.”
Color floods her face in a fast, hot rush. Shame and rage and humiliation all tangled up. “You— you watch those?”
“Yes,” I say. “Many times.”
“Why?” Her voice is thin now. Brittle. “So you can jerk off to it, what, watching me next to a dead man—”
“No,” I cut in, controlled. Calm but enough sting that she listens. “So I could see if you were a liar.”
She stops, holding her breath. Body taut. Waiting. “And?” she whispers, voice barely there.
“And you weren’t,” I say.
Her hands flex where she’s folding her arms across her body. Her eyes go bright for a second, and she looks away, jaw clenched like she’s swallowing something that hurts on the way down.
There it is. Not victory. Or even satisfaction. It’s relief. Sharp, startled, desperate relief.
She didn’t know she needed me to say that out loud until I did.
My disobedience is still human. Whether she likes to admit it or not.
I step in the last inch. Her back hits the window frame. Not hard. Just enough that she feels the limit behind her.
I reach up. Slow and easy, giving her time to stop me if she doesn’t want this.
Her breath turns shallow again, but she doesn’t move. She’s staring at me like something she can’t categorize yet. Like she knows she should be afraid and can’t quite get her body to remember how to do it.
I take a strand of her hair — copper-red, tangled, soft — and brush it back from her face.
My knuckles graze her cheekbone. She trembles. It’s small, but it’s there. A tiny shiver, starting at her jaw and running down her throat. Her pulse jumps under skin. Her lips part. “Don’t,” she whispers.
“Don’t what?” I say quietly.
“Don’t be… gentle.” Her voice breaks on that word like it betrays her.
Something low in me tightens, slow and precise. Gentle.
She said it like it’s a threat.
I let the strand of hair fall behind her ear and keep my hand there, cupping the side of her face without pressure. My thumb rests just under her cheekbone. Her skin is warm. Soft. Desperately human. Her eyes flick up to mine, searching.
“What did he tell you?” I ask softly. “Before he died.”
Her breath hitches like I shoved a knife between her ribs.
Fuck.
I feel her body go rigid. Her jaw locks. Tears — fast, immediate — glass over her eyes like I flipped a switch. They don’t fall. She doesn’t let them.
I hate that. I hate it way more than I should.
“Don’t,” she whispers again, rawer now. “Don’t make me talk about Owen with you.”
I hold her face in my palm and let my voice go low and even. “I’m trying to give you something.”
Her laugh is small and savage. “You’re trying to get something.”
“Both,” I say. “Why can’t it be both?”
Her mouth twists in disgust. For a long, quiet beat, she doesn’t speak. Then, so soft I almost don’t hear it, she says, “He told me to run.”
My hand tightens a fraction on her jaw. Her eyes stay on mine. Wide, blown, wet, furious.
“He called me,” she whispers, voice shaking now like she’s holding herself together by fingernails.
“He never called when he was on a run. Never. But he called that night. He sounded— he sounded wrong. Like… breathless yes, but terrified. And he said, ‘Em, you have to go. You have to go now. Pack a bag, go to ground, don’t talk to anyone, don’t tell anyone, don’t trust anyone in a mask. ’”
She swallows thickly. “And I laughed,” she chokes out. “I laughed at him. I told him to stop being dramatic. And then he—then he hung up. And the next time I saw him was on a slab.”
The room is very, very still. My jaw is tight enough to ache. My thumb is pressing harder into her cheek than I meant it to.
He told her to run. He told her not to trust anyone in a mask. And she stayed.
She stayed, and she mourned, and she painted us on brick and hunted our sigils and walked herself straight into my hands because she refused to listen.
She’s been angry at herself this whole damn time. Not just us. Herself.
That knowledge hits something in me I do not like. Something that feels uncomfortably like sympathy.
Dangerous.
“Ember,” I say quietly. Her eyes flicker — shock that I used her name like that. Like it belongs to me now. Like I’m allowed. I lower my voice until it’s almost a rasp. “Look at me.”
“I am looking at you,” she whispers.
“No,” I murmur. “You’re looking at the mask I’m not wearing.”
That lands. She swallows, and the tears finally spill. Two of them, clean paths down her cheeks. She doesn’t sob. She doesn’t shake. She just… leaks. Silent.
I swipe one tear with my thumb. She inhales sharply, like the action surprised her. Her mouth parts. She leans — barely, instinctively, a fraction of an inch — into the touch like she didn’t mean to, like her body decided for her.
Heat flares low in my spine and spikes like hunger. I could kiss her.
I could.
Right now, I could take her jaw in my hand, tilt her face up, and taste that split lower lip. I could swallow that soft broken sound she’s holding in her chest. I could put my mouth on her and end the last of her resistance with one slow, careful, honest kiss.
And she’d let me. She’d tell herself she wasn’t. She’d call me a monster while she opened under me, just to keep her pride intact. But she’d let me.
I can feel it in the way she’s breathing.
I don’t. Not because I shouldn’t. Because if I start, I won’t stop.
And I can’t afford to lose control of this particular fire yet.
Not when I still don’t know who Owen was really working for. Not when I don’t know who in this city just made the Syndicate hold their tongues. Not when I don’t know if I brought a weapon into my house or a fuse.
So I take one slow, measured breath. Then I lift my hand from her face. Her expression breaks in real time — shock, anger, humiliation, need — and then slams shut. The rage comes back fast, snapping up like armor. She scrubs her own cheek with the heel of her hand, vicious.
“Get out,” she whispers, voice jagged and somewhat broken. “Get the fuck out of my room.”
“My room,” I correct softly. Her eyes blaze. I let myself smile, just a little. “Rest. Eat again later. Don’t make Wraith drag you.”
“I hate you,” she spits.
“Yes,” I murmur. “You keep saying that.”
Her jaw clenches, teeth grating together. I turn toward the door. Her voice cuts after me, small and shaking and furious. “Caelum—”
I stop. The sound of my name in her mouth lands low in my gut like impact. Slowly, I look back at her over my shoulder. Her chin is high. Her eyes are still wet. Her hands are fists at her sides because if she doesn’t clench them, I think she’ll reach for me and she knows it.
“If you find out who set him up,” she says, each word deliberate, scraped raw, “you tell me first. Not your men. Me.”
Power hits the air between us like electricity. Something in me — something old, something territorial, something that does not answer to logic or strategy — likes that more than it should. “Of course,” I say quietly.
Her eyes widen, like she didn’t expect me to agree. She tries to cover it with a scowl. “And don’t call me your disobedience.”
“My disobedience,” I respond automatically, knowing exactly what the words do to her, letting my eyes drag down her body, slow, hungry, unapologetic. “Rest.”
Her breath hitches for the final time, before fire ignites behind her eyes. Then I open the door and step out before I do something I can’t walk back.
I don’t lock it behind me. I could, but I don’t. And I tell myself that’s strategy. Not softness. Not care. Strategy.
It’s a lie.
But I let myself believe it until I hit the stairs.