Chapter Forty-Five
TOREN
The silence isn't heavy with tension like it once was.
I sit on the sofa with my mug pressed between my hands and watch him attempt to build our baby's crib.
It's well after dark and this man who can dismantle an empire, who has made grown men weep and beg, who runs one of the most feared criminal organizations in four states, completely and utterly defeated by flat pack furniture and a single sheet of instructions.
I roll my lips over my teeth to keep from smiling.
For the sixth time in twenty minutes he drags a hand through his hair in frustration, the instructions crumpled slightly in his other fist from where he's been gripping them too hard.
I offered to help earlier. The look he sent me in response was so withering I raised both hands in surrender and retreated to the sofa without another word.
I don't actually mind.
I could watch this forever.
Not the crib building specifically, though there is a particular and entirely private joy in watching Xaden Devlin meet something he cannot intimidate into submission.
I mean this. The domesticity of it. The ordinariness.
Him in my living room, in the dark, with his hood down and his sleeves pushed up and a furrow between his brows that has nothing to do with threat assessment or territorial strategy, but everything to do with whether part C connects to part D before or after the base panel.
I take him in quietly, the way I do when he's not looking.
I know what the world sees when it looks at him.
Cold. Cruel. A man who was born in darkness and never found a reason to leave it.
And some of that is true, I won't pretend it isn't, I won't sand down the edges of what he is to make him easier to hold.
But that's not all of it. It's not even most of it, if you know where to look.
Xaden isn't a monster. He's a man who had his heart broken so completely and so young that he built the monster as a replacement, something that couldn't feel the way he felt, couldn't lose the way he lost, couldn't be brought to its knees by grief the way the boy underneath was brought to his.
He lost his anchor. He lost his voice of reason.
He lost three people in one night and the version of himself that existed before that night went with them, and everything that came after was just him trying to survive the wreckage.
He's been drowning for years.
And he clawed his way out of it, not gracefully, not cleanly, not in ways that anyone watching could call anything other than what they were but he clawed his way out.
And he's here. In my living room. Building a crib badly and refusing help with a ferocity that makes me want to kiss him and throw something at him in equal measure.
Tears blur my vision before I'm ready for them.
The love that moves through me in that moment is so overwhelming it's almost physical, a wave that hits without warning and pulls at everything. I set my mug down before my hands shake enough to spill it.
I cross the small space without making a conscious decision to.
He looks up at me with a frown. “Tink—”
“Shut up.” I lower myself onto his lap. He drops the instructions immediately, grips my waist and stares up at me with those gray eyes that are doing that thing they do, reading me, cataloguing me, running through every possible interpretation of what I'm doing and why.
His brows are pulled together and I can see the war happening behind his eyes.
Every instinct he has built over a lifetime of self-preservation is telling him to create distance.
To put space between himself and something that has the capacity to hurt him.
I reach up and cup his face between both hands.
I lean forward and rest my forehead against his.
The tension moves through him like a current finding ground. I feel it in the set of his jaw, in the rigidity of his shoulders and then, slowly, it eases. And then he does something so entirely unlike him that it steals the breath from my lungs.
He wraps his arms around me and pulls me close.
He's hugging me.
Not the controlled, strategic touch he usually permits himself. Not the deliberate, purposeful contact of a man who has decided that physical proximity serves a specific function. He's holding me the way someone holds something they were afraid they were never going to get back.
We sit like that for a long time.
No walls between us. No barriers or masks or the careful managed distance he has always kept in place like a second skin.
He's letting me look at him, actually look, past everything he shows the world and what I find there is something I don't have a name for.
The fear is there. The terror of it, raw and present and entirely undefended.
The grief underneath that. The years of it, accumulated and dense, sitting in his eyes like weather that has never found anywhere to break.
He's not hiding any of it.
I don't have the right words. I know better than to make promises I can't guarantee, he wouldn't believe them anyway, and he shouldn't, because the only promises worth making are the ones made with actions across time and not with words in a warm room on a good night.
He's terrified of losing me the way he lost Emery, Neave, Miles, the particular terror of someone who has learned from experience that loving something is the fastest way to have it taken.
He's terrified of being a father because the only blueprint he has for what that looks like is a man he has spent years trying not to become.
“You're not your father,” I whisper against his face, my thumbs moving softly against his jaw.
He releases a breath that shudders at the edges, the smallest fracture in the control, barely perceptible, devastating.
“This baby will be loved.” I say it without a single shred of uncertainty because I have never been more certain of anything.
“We'll get things wrong. We'll make mistakes. But what matters is that we learn from them together.”
His eyes search mine.
The vulnerability I find in them, in those gray eyes that have looked at me like a threat and a variable and an inconvenience and an obsession flays something open in my chest. He looks young at the moment.
Not in any way that diminishes him, but in the way that grief makes people young, strips back everything acquired and leaves only the original wound.
“I don't know how to do any of this, Tink.” The words come out quietly, and I understand what it costs him to say them out loud. To admit, in plain language, to another living person, that there is something he cannot simply force into submission.
I feel the smile before I can stop it. “I don't either.” His eyes narrow slightly. “I've never had a boyfriend—”
The growl that comes from deep in his chest sends butterflies scattering through me.
“Calm down.” I bite back the smile. “If it helps, I had fully planned to raise this baby alongside ten cats because you put me off to the male species entirely.”
The arms around me tighten. He shifts forward until his lips ghost over mine, barely touching, just the suggestion of it and the heat of it moves through me like something lit.
“Good.” His voice is low. Dark in the way that has always bypassed every rational thought I possess and gone straight somewhere else.
“I'll ruin you for anyone else. You'll never be anyone else's anything.” A pause.
“I don't share. Never have.” Another pause…
shorter, harder, rougher at the edges. “Sharing you with this baby is going to be a challenge.”
I swallow audibly.
“Just—” He stops. Something shifts in his jaw. The words that come next are quiet and stripped of everything he usually wraps around the things that matter. “Don't walk away. Don't break what I gave you.” His eyes find mine and hold them. “Don't let me destroy us.”
Words fail me completely.
So I press my lips to his instead and I put everything I have into it.
Every promise I can't say, every vow I'm not ready to make out loud but mean in every cell of my body.
This kiss is my answer to everything he just said.
I will fight for him. I will go to war for him, against him, beside him.
He says I'm his—and he's right, I am—but Xaden Devlin needs to come to terms with the fact that the ownership runs both ways.
He is mine.
He grips the back of my head, fingers tangling in my hair, and deepens the kiss with a thoroughness that makes thinking feel optional.
His tongue moves against mine and I surrender control without a fight outside this room.
I will argue with him until one of us runs out of breath and I will never follow an order without questioning it first. In here I give him everything willingly.
Happily. Because this is the one place where giving him control has never once felt like losing it.
He tastes like something I've been craving for three weeks and didn't let myself name.
He manages to stand without breaking the kiss, arms still around me, completely unbothered by the logistical challenge of this and moves toward the bedroom with the certainty of a man who knows exactly where he's going.
Inside I expect the familiar, him tossing me onto the bed with the efficiency of someone who has decided what happens next and is moving toward it. Instead he sits on the edge of the mattress with me still in his lap. Unhurried. Still.
My hands find the hem of his hoodie and pull it over his head. He lets me.
“Lose the shirt, Devlin.” My voice comes out lower than I intend.
Something ghosts at the corner of his mouth, not quite a smile, never quite a smile, but the shadow of one that is more valuable for its rarity.
He reaches back and pulls the shirt off in one motion and I am once again confronted with the fact that the universe was profoundly unfair when it made him.
I reach out and trace the koi fish in the center of his chest.