Chapter 35 #2
The pause holds for one beat, two, before she pulls us back to the surface. "So your brother, who thinks you do security consulting, watched you clear a hotel room with a concealed weapon and a partner who moved like he'd done it before."
"He asked who I was." The words come out flat, but the ache underneath them is the specific kind that only family can produce. "Who ARE you? Standing in the doorway of the Windsor Court penthouse with his lip still bleeding."
"What did you tell him?"
"Nothing useful." I scrub my hand over my jaw.
"LeBlanc men are apparently terrible at explaining themselves.
It might be genetic, since our grandfather covered up a murder and our father died before he could send a letter, and now I'm sittin' in an underground medical facility lying to my brother about why people are hitting him. "
The corner of her mouth moves. Not a smile. Something darker and more honest than a smile, the kind of recognition that lives between two people who both grew up in families where love and deception share a zip code. "At least yours hit back. Mine just writes checks."
I almost laugh. The sound gets halfway up my throat before the door opens without a knock, and Kade fills the frame, shoulders blocking the hallway light behind him.
"Asher's running overwatch on the interrogation site." Operational, pitched for delivery and departure. "Damian's tracking the two who had her."
Kade's eyes move to Evie, hold for exactly one second, then back to me. "Debrief at oh-nine-hundred. She rests until she's cleared."
He leaves. The door closes behind him with a soft click that carries anyway.
I watch Evie's face. She doesn't ask what "tracking" means in Damian's vocabulary. She's listened to him on coms before, on more than one channel. She knows.
But her expression shifts anyway. Not horror. A slower thing, settling into the lines around her mouth and staying.
"People who barely know me," she says quietly. "Asher. Damian. They're out there right now because of what happened to me, and my father's version of protection was making sure I smiled at the right donors."
Transactional. Every act of love she's ever received came with a receipt.
"Senator's daughter." She breathes out through her nose, and the dark humor surfaces, pulled from deep water.
"Sitting in an underground medical facility while an assassin hunts down the men who kidnapped me over wire transfers I processed for my father's trafficking network.
" A pause. "If I wrote this in my sketch-journal, no one would believe it. "
Pressure locks into place behind my ribs. Not jealousy, not threat. Kade deployed two of the most dangerous men I've ever worked with to find the people who touched her, and the hunger that moves through me isn't territorial. It's fed.
"You should sleep," I tell her, because if I say what I'm actually thinking, it won't be appropriate for a medical setting.
The room settles. For the first time since I carried her off that road, I stop fighting it and let it hold me in the chair.
Her eyes are half-closed. The monitor tracks her heart at sixty beats per minute, the slow descent toward sleep that her body has been negotiating for the last hour, and the right thing to do is let it happen.
The next neuro check isn't for another ninety minutes.
The IV drip is running clean. There's nothing clinical left to do in this room, which means there's nothing left between me and the silence except the things I've been using medicine to avoid.
"The word 'stay.'" Her voice is barely above a whisper, rough and slow, and she doesn't open her eyes when she says it. "Do you know it still works?"
My pulse doesn't change. The rest of me does.
Heat moves through my abdomen, low and immediate, and my cock responds to the sentence before my brain finishes processing it, because she just named the thing I built inside her body without her permission and the words carried no anger, no accusation, just the quiet factual weight of a woman describing something that belongs to her now whether she chose it or not.
She's in a hospital bed. She has a concussion and seven stitches and a fractured ankle, and you're getting hard because she said the word you trained her to respond to.
"I know." Two words. All I can manage without the shame eating the rest.
She breathes out through her nose, a sound that might be a laugh if she had more energy. "Not tonight."
Her breathing changes within a minute, the transition from consciousness to genuine sleep so gradual that I couldn't mark the exact moment it happened.
One breath she was here, and the next she was somewhere my hands and my words and my carefully engineered triggers can't follow, and the monitor confirms what her body already told me.
Fifty-six beats per minute. Slow, deep, real.
I lean forward in the chair and pull the thermal blanket back up where it's slipped from her shoulders, tucking the edge beneath her chin.
Odette used to tuck the quilt around me when I was small and the house was dark and the world outside the window was too big to think about.
My thumb brushes the curve of her collarbone where the blanket meets skin, and I hold it there for one beat, two, feeling the warmth radiating up through the ugly gray fabric.
My hands are steady.