Chapter Forty-Three
TOREN
He sits down.
I don’t know why that shocks me the most but it does. The fact he actually listened to me is something he has never done before.
I wish I could fight against the pull I feel toward him, against the reaction my body has whenever he is near.
The moment that door opened, I knew it was him.
The way my heart skipped a beat, the hairs on the back of my neck stood up and a flare of heat surged through me.
He has a hold over me. I wish I could break it.
Three weeks and I’m still not strong enough to hold eye contact with him for longer than mere seconds.
Him just being here in this place I have claimed as my own is fucking torturous.
This was my new beginning! This was the place I was going to build a life for me and our baby, without the horrors of my past, without my last name meaning anything and without him.
“Do you hate me?” His quietly asked question pulls me from my thoughts.
I look up at him and take in the harsh lines of his face, the shadows he loves so much don’t seem as dark and all encompassing.
He’s the utmost dangerous man in this coffee shop and none of these people have any idea how truly lethal he is.
But I know. He’s devastating to look at, his gray eyes see through the walls I’ve been carefully building these past weeks.
I hate that he can force me to feel when I don't want to.
“There is a fine line between love and hate, just like how salt and sugar look the same,” I say.
“That right?”
“You can’t have one without the other,” I fire back.
“So, do you hate me or love me, Tink?” I suck in a sharp breath. I force myself to cling to the memories of him hurting me and what he said about our baby. If I don’t, I’ll crumble and give in to him like I always did.
“Don’t,” I hiss. His eyes twitch and I know it’s hard for him not to bite my head off right now. “You don’t get to come here and blow this new life I am building apart because you think you’re ready—“
“I’ll blow the fucking world apart if it means getting to you!” The conviction in his tone is clear, he means every word. “Do you really think there is anywhere you could go where I won’t find you?” I know it’s a rhetorical question but I answer anyway.
“I had hoped Colorado was that place but, I guess I was wrong,” I snap.
His eyes narrow ever so slightly and his jaw locks.
It’s taking everything in him to keep his anger at bay, but the darkness he brought to life inside me wants to taunt him, push him until he breaks.
“If you expected me to fall to my knees and beg you to take me away from this place, then you’re wrong, I have nothing left back in Somerset. ”
“What about Stormsend?” he hedges.
“There’s nothing there for me either.”
“Wrong.”
“I left for—“
“Me.”
I jerk in my seat. “What?”
“You have me! That’s what you have in Stormsend.”
I shake my head. “I’ve never had you, Xaden.” Pain laces each of my words. “I had pieces of you but never the version I truly wanted.”
He turns rigid in his seat. I can see the cogs in his mind working overtime.
I’m waiting for him to finally drop this act and storm out of here like he’s always done.
Xaden may be brutal at being the Don and eliminating his enemies, but when it comes to talking…
he sucks! He’s a vault you can’t crack. For someone like him, actions speak volumes but not for me, I need to hear the words from his mouth just once.
“What version is that, Tink?” His tone is cold and angry. Good. This is the version of Xaden I’m used to dealing with. “You think I’m the type of guy to buy you flowers and fucking cuddle on the couch on a rainy day?” I fight not to flinch.
I fell in love with him the way he is. Do I wish he would show me and our baby a softer side of him? Yes!
I’ve seen that side and I’m content with him reserving that side of himself for me when we are in private. That's the version of Xaden only I get to see.
I hold his gaze, unflinching, and let him see the deep-rooted hurt and anger.
“No, asshole,” I grit out. His eyes darken but I push on before he can chastise me for my insult.
“I want the version of you that actually shows an ounce of care. The version of you that you let slip when we’re alone and you think I’m not looking.
I want the version of you where you actually let me in and allow the world to see I fucking mean something to you.
That’s what I want. We can work on you being cuddly later.
” The snarky part slips out before I can stop it.
The silence that follows is worse than anything he could say back.
Xaden doesn't fill it. He never fills silence, he just occupies it, sits inside it like it belongs to him, and waits for you to crack first. I have cracked first every single time for months.
I have handed him every leverage point he has ever used against me and I did it willingly, convinced that if I just gave him enough of myself he would eventually stop treating it like a weapon.
I'm not doing it again. I press my lips together and hold his gaze and wait. Not cracking costs me something I can feel in my back teeth.
“You finished?” he asks.
The audacity of him.
“Excuse me?”
“Your list.” He leans back in the chair, arms folding across his chest, and looks at me with the particular brand of infuriating calm he deploys when he wants me to know he isn't rattled. “Of everything you want from me. You finished?”
Heat floods my face. “My list—”
“The version of me that lets you in. The version that lets the world see you mean something to me.” He ticks them off without breaking eye contact. “Anything else?”
My jaw tightens. He is unbearable. He is the single most infuriating person I have ever had the misfortune of falling in love with and I want to tip my coffee into his lap.
“Don't do that,” I snap. “Don't make it sound like I'm being unreasonable—"
“I didn't say you were.”
“You implied—"
“Toren.” He says my name, not Tink, and that stops me cold.
He only uses my full name when there's no performance in it, and the absence of the nickname lands differently than I expect it to.
“I didn't sleep last night. I couldn’t. I came straight here knowing this is where you would be.” A muscle works in his jaw. “I'm not here to argue with you.”
I think about that. Xaden behind the wheel in the dark, mile after mile of nothing, and he didn't have an address, didn't have a phone number, didn't have anything except the knowledge that I study between nine and ten, that I pick corners, that I always forget to drink my coffee when I'm reading.
He drove to this city and he found me in a coffee shop because he knew me well enough to know where I'd be.
He catalogued me. He learned me, all the small unremarkable things that add up to a person, even when the plan was to destroy me.
I hate that it matters. I hate that the not sleeping, the driving and the fact that he walked through that door without a single piece of information except how I think are doing exactly what he must know they're doing, chipping away at the wall I've spent three weeks building without him.
“That's not an answer,” I say.
“No,” he agrees. “It's not.”
He leans forward and the shift in him is sudden enough that I stop myself from moving back.
Not because I'm afraid. Because when Xaden closes the distance between us my body still does that thing, that stupid, traitorous thing it has done since the beginning.
The thing I've never been able to train out of it no matter how many times he's given me reason to.
“I'm not going to stand up in front of a room and make a declaration.” His voice drops, low enough now that it's only for me. “That's not who I am and you know it. You're not asking me to be someone I'm not, you just said so yourself.”
“That's not—"
“But I'm here.” He cuts through it quietly, just certain.
“I drove through the night to a state I've never been to, to a coffee shop I found because I know how you think.
I know you pick corners. I know you forget to drink your coffee when you're reading. I know you study between nine and ten.” His eyes don't leave mine.
“I know you, Toren. I came anyway. What more do you want me to say?”
What more does he—what more—
“The words.” My voice comes out harder than I intend.
“I want the actual words, Xaden, not all of this.
Not you showing up and expecting me to read between the lines for the rest of my life because that's the version of intimacy you're comfortable with. I need to hear it. Once. Just once, from your mouth.”
Something flickers in his eyes.
Then he reaches into the neckline of his hoodie and I go completely still because I know what lives there.
I gave it back to him the night I told him about Em, placed it in his palm and watched his whole world tilt on its axis.
He has worn it every day since I've seen it.
The small flash of gold at his collar when he moves.
I told myself it meant nothing. I lied to myself constantly about Xaden Devlin and this is just one more item on that long, exhausting list.
He pulls the pendant free.
The gold heart. Whorls of vines around the outside, a single rose in the center. Em's. The one he bought his sister on her birthday and that somehow found its way around my neck and kept me sane through the worst year of my life.
He sets it on the table. Then he reaches into his jacket, produces a small black box and sets that beside it. Two things. Side by side. Em's pendant that I carried for him and the box that I don't know the contents of yet, but already understand the weight of.
I stare at them both.
Then I stare at him.
“The box,” he says. His voice is rough. “Open it.”
“What's in it?”
“Open it, Toren.”
We stare at each other and the air between us has history in it, all the things we've said and done and survived and all the things that still sit unsaid between us, like furniture in a dark room that you keep walking into.
I open the box. My hands aren't entirely steady. I lift the lid and I just… I just stop.
Gold.
Whorls of vines around the outside, a single rose in the center.
The same.
Not the same. New. Clean. No history in it yet, no years of wear, no weight of borrowed grief. Made from scratch. Put in a box. Driven across state lines.
Made for me.
“Xaden.” His name comes out broken in the middle and I hate that, I hate that three weeks of distance and all of that careful reconstruction comes apart from just a box on a coffee shop table.
“You gave it back,” he says. His voice is stripped completely down. “You were right to. Em's is Em's.” He holds my gaze. “But you shouldn't be walking around without one.” A pause that costs him. “This one's yours. Only yours. Made to be.”
I press my lips together hard. I will not cry in this coffee shop.
I absolutely am going to cry in this coffee shop and I already hate myself for it and I hate him for knowing, for knowing that I would recognize it, that it would mean something, that the shape of that rose in the center would undo three weeks of distance in under thirty seconds.
“This isn't the words,” I manage. Barely. “You know this isn't—"
“I just gave you my heart, Tink.”
The coffee shop goes quiet. Not actually quiet, cups and low music and strangers with uncomplicated lives are present, but between us there is a silence that is entirely different from every silence we've lived in before. He holds my gaze. Steady. Terrifyingly steady.
“Don't break it.”
The tear that falls I don't catch in time. I swipe it away immediately, almost angrily, and he watches me do it and says nothing and doesn't look away, just lets it be real. That undoes me more completely than anything else could.
“That's your declaration,” I say, when I can trust my voice. “That's it.”
“It's not a declaration.” His voice is dry but underneath it is something warm. “It's a warning.”
God help me.
I look down at the pendant. I look at Em's pendant beside it. Then I pick up the new one and clasp it at the back of my neck. The gold settles warm against my sternum.
I stand up and pick up my textbook and my bag. I reach across the table and pick up Em's pendant too, close my fingers around it, then hold it out to him. He watches my face as he takes it and tucks it back inside his hoodie, back home against his chest where it belongs.
“Come on then,” I say.
He looks up at me. “Where?”
“You didn’t sleep. You're not sleeping in your car.” I hold his gaze.
“You're going to see where I live. You're going to see what I've been building.
And then we're going to talk, properly, like two people who are about to have a baby together and need to figure out what that actually looks like.” I raise an eyebrow.
“Unless you'd rather sit in this coffee shop until they ask us to leave.”
He looks at me for a long moment. Something moves across his face that I don't quite catch before he stands, all six foot something of him rising from a chair that always looked slightly too small for him anyway, and he picks up his jacket and says nothing.
He just follows me out.