11. Lily
— ? —
Lily
I wake to the heat of him along my spine.
His arm is heavy across my waist, his breath warm against the back of my neck, and for a long moment I just... stay. Let myself feel the solid reality of him. The way his body curves around mine like we were designed to fit together.
Morning light filters through the cheap hotel curtains, painting stripes across the tangled sheets. I should get up. Check my phone. Face whatever chaos Victoria unleashed overnight.
Instead, I press back against him and feel him stir, in every sense of the word.
His hand flexes against my stomach in his sleep, fingers splaying wide, pulling me closer on instinct. And pressed against my lower back, unmistakable evidence that his body knows I’m here even before his mind catches up.
Heat pools low in my belly.
We just spent half the night - I think, and then his hand slides lower, and I stop thinking.
“Mmm.” His voice is rough with sleep, vibrating against my shoulder. “You’re thinking too loud.”
“Sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry. Just stop.” His lips find the curve of my neck, and my eyes flutter closed. “We have five minutes before reality crashes in. I want to spend them not thinking.”
“Five minutes isn’t very long.”
“Then we’d better be efficient.”
His fingers find exactly where I need them - he knows now, learned me thoroughly last night, and the familiarity of his touch is somehow more devastating than the newness was.
He knows the rhythm I like. Knows to curl his fingers just so.
Knows that I gasp when he presses there and moan when he rubs there and shatter when he does both at once.
The orgasm rolls through me slow and sweet, nothing like last night’s desperate intensity. This is morning-lazy, sun-warm, the kind of pleasure that feels like a promise.
“Good morning,” he murmurs against my hair when I come down.
“Good morning yourself.”
I turn in his arms, reaching between us to wrap my hand around him. He’s hard and hot and already leaking, and the sound he makes when I stroke him is gratifying in a primal way.
“Lily-”
“Shh.” I push him onto his back, swinging a leg over his hips. “Let me.”
I sink down onto him slowly, savoring the stretch, watching his face. His jaw is clenched, his hands gripping my hips hard enough to bruise, his eyes blazing with need.
“You feel-” He can’t finish the sentence. Just shakes his head, overwhelmed.
I move.
This is different from last night - I’m in control now, setting the pace, taking what I want. Edward never let me be on top. Said it wasn’t ladylike. Said a lot of things that were really just about control.
Lucas looks at me like I’m a goddess and he’s lucky to worship at my altar.
“You’re beautiful,” he grits out. “So fucking beautiful-”
“Don’t stop watching me.”
“Couldn’t if I tried.”
I ride him until we both fall apart, my hands braced on his chest, his name on my lips like a song I’m just learning.
Afterward, tangled together in the cheap hotel sheets, I trace the tattoo on his ribs.
“I could get used to this,” I murmur.
“Then get used to it.” He catches my hand, presses a kiss to my palm. “Because I have no intention of letting you go.”
His phone lights up on the nightstand.
Mine too.
Buzzing, ringing, vibrating.
Reality crashes in.
Elena’s text is followed by a photo: the hotel we’re in, the room number, a timestamp. Someone followed us.
“She’s bluffing.” Lucas’s voice is uncertain even as he says it. “We’re both single adults-”
“It’s not about truth. It’s about optics.
” I’m already out of bed, pulling on clothes.
“Edward’s brother sleeping with the woman he supposedly wronged?
It feeds their narrative that we planned this together.
That I was never a victim, just a scheming gold digger who seduced you to get access to the Burton family. ”
“Then we get ahead of it. Again.”
“How many times can we get ahead?” The frustration bleeds through. “Every time we move, they counter. I’m exhausted.”
Lucas catches my hand. Stops my frantic packing.
“Then let me fight for you. Just for today.”
“What are you going to do?”
His expression hardens into something cold. Something that reminds me he grew up in the same house of snakes as Edward.
“I’m going to remind Elena that she has just as much to lose.”
***
He meets Elena at a rooftop bar, a place where she can’t cause a scene without destroying her own image.
I watch from a café across the street, close enough to see their faces, far enough that Elena won’t spot me.
I need to see this with my own eyes.
Lucas slides a folder across the table. Even from here I can see Elena’s face go white, then red, then white again. She reaches for the folder, flips through the contents, her pregnant body tensing like she’s been struck.
Fifteen minutes later, Lucas comes back down.
“What did you show her?”
“Photos.” He takes my hand, leading me away from the café. “Edward at a hotel bar three weeks ago, with a woman who isn’t Elena and isn’t me. A standing reservation under a name that isn’t his. The same pattern, already running, already lined up for whoever comes after her.”
He pauses.
“She thinks she’s the endgame. She’s just the current chapter. If she stays, she ends up exactly where you were, only with three kids to lose instead of her dignity.”
“She didn’t believe you.”
“She didn’t want to.” He pulls me into a doorway, out of sight, and the narrow space forces our bodies together, his chest against mine, his thigh sliding between my legs.
A week ago this man was the brother I wasn’t allowed to look at twice. The name I shoved out of my own head every time it surfaced. The wrong want, the dangerous one, the one that proved Victoria right about what kind of woman I really was.
Knowing it’s allowed now should have killed the thrill. It hasn’t. Some stubborn, guilty part of me still flinches at the wrongness of wanting Edward’s brother this badly, and the flinch is half of what makes my pulse climb.
“But I planted the seed,” he says, apparently unaware that my brain has short-circuited. “She’s not going to release anything. Not yet. She needs time to verify what I showed her.”
His hand finds my hip. We’re allowed this now. I keep waiting to stop believing it’s a sin.
“We should go somewhere,” I manage. “Plan our next move.”
“We should.” His thumb traces a circle on my hip bone, feather-light through my clothes. “In a minute.”
“Lucas-”
“I know.” He leans his forehead against mine. “I know we have a war to fight. I know there are a thousand things we should be doing right now. But I just need-” He exhales. “I need one minute where I’m not thinking about any of it. Where it’s just you and me.”
I soften against him. “One minute.”
“One minute.”
He kisses me, soft and slow and achingly tender. Nothing like last night’s desperation - this is a promise. A declaration.
When he pulls back, his eyes are bright.
“Okay.” He takes a breath, squaring his shoulders. “Now we can go save the world.”
“Drama queen.”
“You love it.”
I do. God help me, I really do.
***
We’re barely ten minutes out when I see it.
A black SUV pulls alongside us on the highway. Tinted windows. No plates.
“Lucas.” My voice goes tight. “We’re being followed.”
He doesn’t answer. Just takes the next exit at sixty miles an hour, tires screaming, my body slamming against the door as he weaves through side streets until the SUV disappears.
When we finally stop, both of us breathing hard, he turns to me with wild eyes.
“Are you okay?”
“Define okay.”
He laughs, desperate and relieved, and pulls me across the console into a kiss that tastes like adrenaline and terror and want.
***
“You feel sorry for her,” I say. It isn’t a question. It’s written all over him.
“She believed the man she loved. Had his children. She’s about to find out it was all built on quicksand.” He glances at me. “Sound like anyone you know?”
The comparison lands like a slap, because he’s right. Elena and I are the same woman, eighteen months apart. I hated her for being the obstacle. She hated me for the same thing. And Edward sat back and let us do his work for him.
“I hope she makes a better choice than I did,” I say.
“She will. You’re about to give her the chance you never got.”
That afternoon, I visit my grandmother.
Lucas wants to come with me, but this feels like something I need to do alone. We stand in the hotel doorway, neither of us quite ready to separate.
“Call me if anything happens,” he says.
“I will.”
“I mean it. Anything. If you feel unsafe, if Victoria shows up, if-”
I shut him up by kissing him. His hands come up to grip my waist, pulling me close, and I let myself sink into it for just a moment. The warmth of him. The solidity. The knowledge that when I come back, he’ll be here.
“I’ll be fine,” I say against his mouth.
“I know you will.” He doesn’t let go. “I just... I spent three years not being able to protect you. I’m still getting used to actually being allowed to try.”
Something twists in my chest.
“You protected me more than you know,” I tell him. “Just by being the one person who saw the truth.”
His arms tighten around me. For a long moment, we just stand there, breathing together.
Then I force myself to step back.
“I have to go. My grandmother’s waiting.”
“Go.” He releases me reluctantly. “I’ll be here.”
I make it to the elevator before I look back. He’s still standing in the doorway, watching me, and the expression on his face makes my heart stutter.
Later, I promise myself. When this is over, we’ll have all the time in the world.
I just have to make sure we survive long enough to get there.
The hospital room is quieter today. The machines beep steadily. Eleanor Maxwell is weaker - the doctors say weeks now, maybe days - but her eyes are still sharp when they find my face.
“I have something for you.” Her voice is barely a whisper. “The drawer. By the window.”
I cross to the drawer she indicates. Inside, beneath folded handkerchiefs and old photographs, is a flash drive.
“My husband kept meticulous records. Of everything.” She manages a razor-thin smile. “Including his dealings with the Burton family.”
“What kind of dealings?”
“The kind that would destroy them if made public. Bribery. Cover-ups. Worse.” Her smile sharpens. “Use it wisely. And use it soon. I want to see them fall before I go.”
I clutch the flash drive like a grenade.
“Grandmother-”
“Don’t waste time on sentimentality.” Her voice hardens. “I am dying. There’s nothing to be done about that. But before I go, I want to see the family that tortured my granddaughter brought to their knees.”
I look at her - this fierce, frail woman who spent twenty years searching for me. Who fought her own battles in her own time. Whose final wish is justice.
“Yes,” I say. “I will.”
As I leave the hospital, my phone rings.
Edward’s voice: “We need to talk. Alone. There’s something you should know before you destroy my family completely.”
I should hang up. I should let Mrs. Reid handle it.
“One hour. The Riverside Pavilion. Come alone.”
I’m already walking toward the street.