Chapter Forty-Seven
Isla
The lounger was soft, the sun was hot, and the humidity was a perfect blanket.
But my mind had become the least safe place to be.
Lying beside the small rooftop pool, my bikini still wet from my third swim of the day in the overly warm, sun-heated water, I’d started to crawl around in my own skin.
Every minute that the cell phone next to me didn’t ring or alert with a new text was like another slipped rung on a ladder descending into hell.
I was trapped in a well of emotions.
There was no bottom, no purchase, and the bright sunlight wasn’t touching me no matter how hard I reached for it.
I didn’t know this feeling.
This… yearning.
It tasted like desperation, felt like oxygen deprivation, and made my limbs prickle with pins and needles. What should’ve been a gorgeous day poolside with an incredible view was now isolation, and I was prisoner to my thoughts.
Why hadn’t he texted?
What was he doing?
Why had I agreed to this forty-eight-hour travesty?
Why wasn’t I leaving?
Simple.
Because he was him, and I was me. And last night had both wrecked me and put me together in a way I’d never known was possible.
My body hummed, and gooseflesh raced across my heated skin at the mere memory of Nix’s rough handling last night.
Shaking my head to clear my salacious thoughts, I picked up a bottle of water I’d found in the outdoor fridge up here, and a shadow fell over me.
Only because I was my father’s daughter and my brother’s sister, I didn’t jump. But I did jerk my head up when he spoke.
“Let’s go, Isla.”
Wolf. Almost a full day later, standing over my lounger in the same clothes he’d been in the last time I saw him, wearing an expression that anyone else would think was impenetrable. It wasn’t.
My brother was mad. Nuclear mad.
I took a sip of my water, then recapped the bottle. “How’d you get up here?” Tauk was bigger than my brother, and whatever he had been before he’d turned into a chef, it wasn’t something benign. More like murderous.
“Fire stairwell.” Wolf scanned the rooftop.
Of course. “I didn’t hear you.” Not the emergency door opening that was only a few yards away. Not his steps. Not even his breathing after all the flights he’d taken to get up here.
“You weren’t supposed to.” He scanned the elevator and stairwell exit. “Come on.”
“No.”
His sharp gaze cut to me. “You texted.”
“That was last night.” This was now. Post Nix fucks like a damn beast. Post I’ve lost my mind because I don’t care that I’m going stir-crazy, I’m a prisoner, and I have apparently traded self-respect for my agency.
Having been the second authoritarian in my life but the one who’d stuck around the longest, my brother wielded his power. “This isn’t open for discussion, Isla.”
Suddenly, everything Nix had asked me about my brother, every overbearing and upper-handed thing Wolf had ever done, was staring me in the face, but none of it felt truly protective.
I wasn’t even sure it felt like love. Not how I loved, and not the way I loved Wolf—without condition or question, just ingrained love that was threaded into my being because he was my brother.
We were each other’s family. I always felt the presence of him, and I’d held on to the knowledge that he’d always be my brother in the worst moments of my life because it’d been my North Star.
But all the times he’d shown up in my life since I’d become an adult, since he’d been a SEAL, they now felt different.
Staring up at him, I tried to see the brother I used to know.
“Two nights ago, when you went for your run, I stayed up waiting for you. I watched the ocean and the view from that suite you reserved for hours. I also watched the stars. I saw Orion’s Belt.
Do you remember teaching me about constellations?
” I was young, and he’d still been my brother back then.
“Orion was the first constellation you taught me about. You said if I could see the stars, then I would forever know which way was up. But I always wondered why you taught me about that particular constellation first.” I waited a second, giving him the opportunity to tell me why.
He didn’t.
I made a connection I’d missed all these years. “Orion is a hunter.”
“You’re not safe here,” he warned.
“You mean I’m not safe with Nix Erikson.”
Wolf lowered his voice. “He’s a hunted man, Isla.”
“By you?” I didn’t give my brother the chance to reply. “Is that why you erased our digital footprint at the hotel? Because you’re the hunter?”
His chest rose and fell with an angry breath, but his expression stayed as locked as it’d always been when I wasn’t doing what he wanted me to do. “We’re not arguing. You sent a distress text. We’re leaving now.”
I stood.
Then I stood up to my brother. “The text was a mistake. I’m not leaving. But you need to.”
“Isla—”
“You’re right. This isn’t open for discussion.
You’re not going to harm Nix in any way, and I’m making a choice.
For better or worse, for now, for this minute.
” Then I used words on him that weren’t fair—not after everything he’d done for me, what he still did, what we’d been through, what I’d been through, but they were no less true. “My life, my choice, Wolf.”
The elevator dinged.
Wolf moved so fast, he was through the stairwell door before Tauk stepped onto the rooftop oasis.
Scanning the terrace same as Wolf had, Tauk took in the pool and surrounding area before leveling me with a suspicious look. “Heard voices. Came to check.”
“It’s a busy hotel. Sound carries.” Picking up my towel, I wrapped it around myself as I dared a glance toward the stairwell door right as it soundlessly, slowly shut all the way. “I’ve had enough sun. Do you still want help prepping dinner?” I grabbed my journal.
Tauk eyed it. “You write in that today?”
I sighed. “It’s not for me to write in.” Not really. But after last night, today, maybe I should be writing down all the insanity in my head.
Unknowingly validating my thoughts, Tauk looked at me like I was certifiable. “You leave ten grand cash downstairs, but carry a journal you don’t even write in with you?”
Begrudgingly, I explained. “I ask other people to write in it. One thought or their single best piece of advice, and I ask them to sign it. Then I have both a piece of humanity and a memory of my travels.”
The giant beast of a chef’s gaze dropped to the journal, then he looked back at me and raised an eyebrow.
I couldn’t help it. I laughed. “You want to write in my journal?”
“You said you wanted the best advice.”
Jesus. “That I did. But try to shore up your confidence a little before you give it.” All attitude, I handed him my journal.
Taking it, he slid the pen out of the elastic band, flipped through the pages until he found an empty one, then he quickly wrote two short lines in large block letters before signing his signature in half cursive, half print.
Closing the journal before returning the pen to its slot, he smirked as he handed it back.
“You know I’ll have to flip around to find where you wrote in it.
” That was one of the most interesting things about the journal.
More often than not, people didn’t choose to write on the next blank page.
They would flip around. And more people than you’d think would write on the back of already filled pages.
“Wouldn’t be good advice if it was easy to find.”
Shaking my head, refusing to look for his entry in front of him, I walked to the elevator and pushed the call button. The doors immediately slid open, and I stepped inside.
Tauk scanned the terrace again.
Then he followed me onto the lift.