Chapter 37 Madeline
Madeline
“I’m not getting up,” The words came out flatter than I intended. My fingers tightened on the edge of the lounger to stop shaking.
He lifted a brow. “That so.”
“I’m busy.”
“Lying on a chair on a beach.”
“Exactly.” My sunglasses slipped lower. I pushed them back up like they were armour. “I have a very full schedule. Sunshine. People. I plan to be in public all day.”
“You planning your witness list?” He planted his feet wider in the sand, blocking more light. As if he knew I hadn’t applied sunscreen. “Think crowds are going to save you, angel?”
“This isn’t about saving me. I just think if we’re going to debrief the end of… whatever we were, maybe we do it another day. After I stop feeling like my chest is full of glass.”
“We’re not debriefing the end of anything.”
“That’s what couples do.” A humourless laugh scraped out of me. “Post-mortems.”
“We’re not dead. We’re not even bleeding. You’re scared and exhausted and hiding. That’s not the same thing.”
“I told you last night. It’s over.”
He shook his head once. “You said words on a call from another man’s house. I don’t accept them.”
“This is not a negotiation, Vince.”
“Everything is a negotiation. We are not over. One of us isn’t changing that, and it’s not me.”
Anger surfaced under the exhaustion. “You can’t just veto a breakup.”
“You don’t get to burn us down because you’re terrified of a future that hasn’t happened yet.”
“I know exactly how this ends. I get near you again, I fall deeper, and one day you decide you can’t balance me with the city. You flip that fuse or switch or whatever you want to call it, and I’m left… wrecked. I can’t keep gambling like that.”
His jaw flexed. “Come with me.”
“I’m not going anywhere.”
“We get out of this fishbowl, we go somewhere I can actually think without counting how many eyes are on your bare skin. We talk. You yell. I listen. You don’t end us half-buried in rental sand under an umbrella that probably has DePout’s crest on it.”
My throat burned. “Already ended it.”
“I didn’t hear a vote.”
“This isn’t a board decision.”
“It is when it affects both of us.” His voice softened, not by much. “You matter too much to be dismissed on a bad night.”
“Don’t do this. Don’t make it harder.”
“Do what? Tell you the truth?” He huffed out a breath. “You are the only girlfriend I’ve ever had. The only sub. I didn’t have a rotation before you. I had work. Blood. Chokeholds. Cigarettes. That was it. Then you rewrote everything.”
He said it like he was reporting crime statistics.
“You trusted me with your virginity,”
Heat flashed across my cheeks. “Don’t—”
“You let me stay inside you for a full day,” he went on. “You let me lock my body to yours and walk you through every hour. You held me when you needed to pee. You let me talk you through something that scared the shit out of you because you trusted me. Do you have any idea what that did to me?”
My eyes dropped to the overthrow. I played with the thread for a moment.
“I think about it every time you close your eyes and lean back against me. I want another day where I don’t leave your body once. Where we eat and nap and breathe with me inside you. I am desperate for it. That isn’t something I feel for someone I can walk away from.”
I didn’t say anything.
“You’re the love of my life. Please come with me. Talk to me.” he suddenly looked nervous.
I stayed on the lounger a beat too long.
He watched every stutter of my breath, like he could see the argument playing out under my skin.
“Madeline.” His voice lost some of the steel. “Come here, angel.”
When I didn’t move, he reached down, fingers sliding around my wrist.
“I’ll walk away if you tell me you don’t love me,” he murmured. Thumb stroking the inside of my wrist. “Say the words clean. No qualifiers. No ‘but.’”
My mouth stayed shut.
“That’s what I thought.” His thumb kept moving, slow stroke over my pulse. “Up, baby.”
I let him pull me.
Sand was hot under my feet when I stood. He didn’t let go of my wrist. Not even when he bent to grab my cover-up from the chair.
He shook the sheer fabric out, then wrapped it around my shoulders, fingers lingering at my collarbone. The gesture felt too gentle for the man who’d raided a penthouse last night.
“Malice has eyes,” he said quietly. “But not as many as Villain. My car’s up on the private access ramp. We’re going to walk, you’re going to pretend I’m just another Crow cousin, and then we’re going somewhere no one but us steps into without permission.”
“Another Crow cousin,” I echoed. “Right. Because you blend.”
His mouth twitched. “I shut this section of the beach when I heard you were on it.”
My head snapped up. “You what.”
“Staff only. Everyone else got moved down past the rocks.”
I glanced around.
The umbrellas I’d taken for a busy morning suddenly looked very… empty. A couple of distant figures in uniform moved near the edge of the fenced boundary, but the loungers around us were deserted.
“Why,”
“That bikini could start a riot, baby.” His gaze flicked down, unapologetically possessive. “A riot led by me. Those nipples are mine.”
I rolled my eyes behind my sunglasses. “You’re ridiculous.”
“I’m a Crow,” he corrected. “Ridiculous is standard.”
He started walking, still holding my wrist, steering me toward the private exit cut into the fence. Every few steps his thumb stroked along the inside of my arm.
The drive didn’t take long.
Malice blurred past in pale stone and glass. The ocean stayed on our left, blue and glittering, showing off. This city didn’t understand restraint.
He drove one-handed, the other resting over my knee, thumb tracing slow circles on bare skin. Each pass calmed. My body leaned into the touch while my brain took notes on every red flag anyway.
“You own property here.”
“My cousins run this capital, I’d be an idiot not to have somewhere I can crash when we get called up here.”
“Of course Crows run Malice.”
“We run every capital that matters, angel.”
He said it like weather.
The gates to his place sat at the end of a private road that followed the curve of a cliff. Black steel, an understated crest worked into the design. Security scanned as we approached. The gates swung open before he had to stop.
The house spilled down the cliff in glass and slate. Wide balconies, an infinity pool pouring into the view of the ocean. It looked like a dynasty magazine spread: How to Vacation Like You Own the World.
Some part of me, the one raised on Thorne dinner conversations, logged it automatically. Asset. Status marker. Leverage. The rest of me thought, He brought me here. Me.
He killed the engine in a sheltered carport and came around to my side before I could reach for the handle. His fingers slid to my hip as soon as I stepped down, anchoring me to him in a way that made my nervous system breathe even as my brain hissed danger.
Inside, it was cool. The main room was all open space and light. Floor-to-ceiling windows framed the water. Minimal furniture. No clutter. A house that could be closed up and left for months, then opened and made livable in an hour.
He tugged the cover-up off my shoulders and tossed it onto the back of a low couch.
Then he turned back, gaze dragging over me in a way that felt like a touch.
It always did, with him. Like he was inventorying something that belonged to him and checking for damage.
He stepped in close, hands finding my waist. His thumbs stroked over my sides, slow, deliberate. My pulse jumped hard enough I was sure he felt it.
“We’re about to work this out. All of it.”
I glanced around at the glass and ocean. “You dragged me across a city to have a feelings summit in a beach house.”
“You dragged yourself into another man’s bed to break up with me. We all make choices.”
His fingers tightened at my waist.
Then he dropped to his knees.
One second he was looming, all height and ink and presence. The next, he knelt on the cool stone, hands braced at my hips, head tilted back to look at me.
The shift did something violent to me. Men like him didn’t kneel. Crows made other people kneel.
“I swear to you. On my knees, where I belong when I’m asking for mercy. I fucking love you, Madeline.”
The rawness in his voice put a crack straight through me.
“Vince—”
His hands slid lower, thumbs tracing the curve of my hip bones. He leaned in and pressed a kiss to my stomach, right below the line of my bikini top.
“One day, I’m putting a baby Crow in here. Maybe two. Twins run strong in our blood.”
My brain tripped over baby and skidded straight into the wall of how not horrified I was.
“This is so you. I end it, you fly to another capital and immediately threaten to knock me up.”
“That’s Crow, baby.” Another kiss to the same spot. Slower. “We don’t let go. And I’m sure as fuck not letting you go.”
Part of me wanted to scream at him to stop using the future tense like it belonged to us. The other part wanted to ask what the baby’s middle name would be. What is wrong with me when it comes to him.
“You can’t just—”
His teeth grazed my skin, a quick scrape that made my breath hitch. “That’s Daddy’s. All of it.”
He sat back on his heels, hands still anchoring me.
“I should be furious. You’re being a caveman.”
“I’m being honest.” His thumbs stroked slow circles into my hips. “You think I’m not tracking the dynasty pressures? The mergers they’ll try to shove you into? I see all of it. I’m telling you now—none of those men live long enough to make an announcement if they try to take you from me.”
“That’s…”
His hand slid back to my lower stomach. “This ends with you as my wife. Crest across your back. My name inked where the whole world can see who you belong to. Until then, I’m going to fight like hell to keep you free enough to choose me.”
He switched languages mid-sentence, Crow vowels slipping in. The tone changed—warmer, intimate.
“Say it after me.” His fingers tapped gently against my hip. “Tal ven arik.”
I repeated the sounds slowly. “Tal… ven… arik.”