Chapter 36 Marcus
MARCUS
The rain’s lazy today, more mist than storm, curtaining the view from my mosquito-netted porch.
A cup of bitter coffee rests untouched beside me.
My finger keeps the page open in the book I should probably never admit to owning, let alone reading.
It’s a damn historical romance with flowery prose, ink-stained dukes, and pining that would leave Peters teary-eyed for reasons entirely unrelated to literary merit.
I don’t know what possessed me. Maybe I’m just bored.
I toss it aside, then grab my phone from the woven tray and hit Liam’s name. It rings longer than usual. When he finally answers, there’s a sharp crack in the background, then another.
“Hey,” I say. “Are you…under attack?”
“Hang on.” More bangs. A muffled curse. Footsteps. Then a door thuds shut. “Okay. Hi.”
“Where are you?”
“The West Side range.”
“Still keeping the sheriff dream alive?”
“Muscle memory doesn’t maintain itself,” he argues smugly.
“I’m a surgeon,” I say. “And I outshoot you every time we do clays.”
“Temporary flukes,” he says. “Actually, I’m blowing off steam. When you’ve just put a couple hundred million on the line, it helps.”
“Bashir Group? Did you close it?”
“Yeah, it’s done,” he says. “Now, where the hell are you?”
“Well, the idea of disappearing is so nobody knows.”
Liam snorts. “Is she with you?”
My brow pulls. “What?”
“Well, Peters wasn’t as good as she claimed at making you vanish,” he says. “Your face is all over the newspaper.”
I drag a hand through my hair and lean back, the chair creaking beneath me.
“Yeah, that wasn’t Peters’ fault. I drove from Cusco to Urubamba, taking the locals’ route, and stopped at a village for a break.
Bad luck. A journalist noticed me. My passenger happened to be a woman who looked like a walking scandal, so of course the bastard took a photo. ”
“Your hand was on her thigh, Marcus.”
I shrug even though he can’t see it. “She had a very photogenic thigh.”
“And you let him get away with it?”
“I’d have made my case,” I say mildly, “if he hadn’t been on the back of a motorbike with a local and then vanished. I try to avoid being beaten to death by an entire village.”
Liam sighs. “Good. That simplifies things. The Bronx demolition’s cleared. Asbestos issue sorted. Insurance coughed up more than expected.”
“That’s something.” I should know. With the Hunt brothers, risk usually ends up negotiating. “Thanks for handling it.”
“You’re welcome.” He’s quiet for a second, then adds, “You know, she was looking for you. Iris.”
I don’t answer. For a second, I’m not sure I remember how. Just hearing her name, hearing that she was looking for me, stirs something I hadn’t realized was still in place.
The rain drums harder now, and a tree frog chirps somewhere behind the bungalow.
“She had an auction a few weeks ago,” he says. “Sabine went. Iris asked her about you. Then she came by my clinic with the same question.”
All that effort?
“What did she want?” I ask.
“She wanted to apologize,” he says. “I don’t know the details. Only that she said she’d hurt you. I assume one of those things was accusing you of interfering with her career.”
I exhale.
“And for the record,” Liam adds quickly, “I told her you didn’t.”
“Mm,” I say.
“Mm?”
I’m not ready to untangle what any of this means. But something else surfaces. “The auction,” I say. “How did it go?”
He huffs a short laugh. “It went wild. Everything was sold in under ten minutes. And to her credit, she’s been careful with the money. She donated ten thousand to Skyward.”
“She did?”
“Yeah, and I’d be surprised if that was the only place it went.”
That makes me smile unexpectedly. I wish I’d been one of the buyers. “So who ended up with the paintings?”
“Zamora,” he says. “Half a million for one. Then he bought half the collection.”
A slow fire rises in me.
“And he wasn’t subtle,” Liam adds.
“Javier Zamora,” I repeat. “Since when is he into erotic art?”
“Maybe since he laid eyes on the artist.”
I push up from the chair and walk to the edge of the porch, my jaw tight. The jungle breathes around me, teeming with life I have no interest in right now.
Zamora, of all people. That polished prince of old money. Iris probably thinks he’s her type—dark, handsome, everything a fairytale promises, no mask required.
But that doesn’t change anything.
“I don’t want anything to do with Iris Vaughn,” I say.
“You don’t believe that yet,” he answers plainly.
Do I miss the Game? Hell yes. It lived in my veins for so long that you don’t just shed it like something disposable.
Do I miss Midnight? Undeniably. The spike of awareness when I knew she’d received the invitation. The anticipation of what she was going to wear and what she was going to do. The promise of touching her. Of being with her.
But more than any of that, I miss believing I had a chance. The idea that a woman I admired, revered, and wanted might choose me in return. And stay.
Still, I haven’t forgotten that she almost died because of me. What she said will hurt for a long time, but it will fade. And in the end, it leaves just one certainty. She was never for me.
I’ll carry the damage of that, whether I want to or not.
Liam clears his throat. “Marcus…”
“She never wanted me,” I override. “She wanted the mask. The part of me I built so carefully that it stopped being a performance.”
“She looked for you. Not Wolf.”
“No,” I say again. “She looked for the man who touched her without consequences. The one who could disappear after. That’s not Marcus Lockwood.”
“She wanted to say sorry, and she meant it. Ask Sabine if you don’t believe me,” he insists, like that should tip the scales.
For one brief second, I let myself imagine it. Her face, her voice, the word sorry spoken without deflection.
But it was never a reality. And the fact remains, she doesn’t want me.
“Well, tell her I’m sorry, too.”
“Come on, Marcus. Don’t be such a hardass. She’s nothing like Belladonna.”
“Don’t.”
I head back inside and shut the screen door behind me. The jungle carries on as I tell myself I won’t let a woman shatter me again. Ever.