25. Neri
Chapter 25
Neri
I t’s been four goddamn days.
And I’ve been pacing outside his warehouse like a cracked-out Scooby-Doo villain with a vendetta and a caffeine problem.
This isn’t just spiraling. This is plummeting. Full freefall into the Mariana Trench of “what the fuck is wrong with me.”
I drag my boots across the same damn stretch of pavement again and again, arms flailing like I’m conducting a symphony of breakdowns.
“I dragged him out,” I mutter, fingers twitching like they miss holding a weapon—or maybe just his damn hand. “I got him out of the alley. He was bleeding. I saw it. He was—he was leaking like a bad Tarantino extra—and then I just…”
I stop. Whirl. Grit my teeth.
“I fucking ran.”
My voice goes high. Unhinged. Like I’m about to start arguing with the sidewalk. “Who does that? Who saves someone’s life then bails mid-miracle like haha just kidding? ”
I swipe at my face. Pacing harder. Faster. Boot soles squealing like I’m auditioning for Fast and Furious: Emotional Damage Drift.
“I’ve survived shootouts, lab explosions, and that one time I tried waxing myself while drunk—but this?” I motion toward the black void of his warehouse like it’s personally responsible for my psychosis. “This broke my goddamn brain.”
I jab a finger at the shadows.
“You took that bullet like you were some tortured MCU reject with a martyr complex and a death wish, and I short-circuited. Full blue screen. System error. Hard reset. And when I came to, I was three blocks away, covered in your blood and screaming at a pizza place for not having napkins.”
A bitter laugh claws up my throat.
“I left you,” I whisper. “Bleeding. Behind a goddamn dumpster.”
I slow. Turn toward the warehouse door.
“If I go in there and it’s just silence…”
My throat locks up.
“Are you done screaming at my building,” says a voice behind me, “or are you going to do the final act of your one-woman tragedy first?”
I spin so fast I almost eat pavement.
And there he is.
Wraith.
Leaning against the doorframe. Pale. Bruised. Smirking like the son of a bitch doesn’t realize I thought he was dead.
My jaw drops. I don’t speak. Can’t.
“I will kill you. Slowly. With a spoon. While watching Grey’s Anatomy reruns and sobbing into expired Oreos,” I growl.
And then, just as I’m about to start the next round of spiraling?—
“Are you going to come in, or are you going to talk to yourself out there all night?”
I blink.
“YOU MOTHERFUCKING COCKROACH,” I scream as I storm inside, “YOU ABSOLUTE PIECE OF SHIT, I THOUGHT YOU WERE DEAD.”
I don’t wait for a response. I storm straight past him. Now that I’ve seen his smug, living face, my boots hit the floor like I’m trying to stomp him back into the grave.
Boots slamming into the floor like I’m trying to stomp the earth into submission. Every step’s a tantrum. Every turn’s a threat. I knock a chair sideways with my hip. Shoulder-check a table. Clip the wall like I’m squaring up with drywall and losing on purpose.
My hands don’t know what to do—fists, claws, jazz hands of destruction. I throw up a middle finger at nothing. I flip off my reflection in the glass like it said something snide.
His silence gives nothing away. He just watches me unravel.
I spin on him. “Four days, Wraith. Four. You ghost me for four fucking days after pulling some martyr-level bullshit—and then what? You just open the door like nothing happened? Like you didn’t bleed out and disappear like a dad going out to get fucking milk?”
Still silent.
That’s worse.
I march up and glare at him, get chest-to-chest—or well, more like chest-to-painted-forehead. “Say something. Anything. I dare you.”
Nothing.
I slap him.
Not like hard-hard.
But hard enough to make a point.
He blinks, just once. “Feel better?”
“No,” I snarl. “Not yet.” I jab a finger into his sternum, ignoring the wince. “Don’t ever do that again. Or I will kill you. While wearing a prom dress and screaming Taylor Swift’s Reputation album into a megaphone.”
He finally speaks. “You’ve got issues.”
“You look like shit.”
“You look like you haven’t slept since the Cold War.”
We glare.
I scream. Not a cute scream. A throat-shredding, ceiling-rattling, what-the-fuck-do-I-do-with-all-this-feeling scream. Then I whirl and kick the nearest chair hard enough it skitters across the floor and smacks a cabinet.
He doesn’t flinch. Which pisses me off more.
“Are you kidding me right now? You get shot, vanish, bleed out in some alley like a damn Shakespearean tragedy—and then what? Just haunt your warehouse like a grumpy Roomba until I lose my entire goddamn mind?!”
He opens his mouth.
I cut him off with a finger jabbed in his direction like a weapon. “No. No. Don’t say a word. Don’t even breathe at me unless it’s an apology or a death rattle.”
He shuts his mouth. Smart boy.
“I was gonna burn down a hospital,” I snap, pacing like a caged raccoon Adderall and trauma. “I was halfway to lighting up a morgue. Do you know how many corpses I had to look at? Too many. Do you know how many of them weren’t you?”
“…Hopefully all of them?”
I point at him. “Don’t you start with me. Don’t you dare try to be funny right now, Wraith, I am hanging on by one fingernail and a sprinkle of homicidal glitter.”
He holds up a hand. “Noted.”
He leans against the desk, watching me with that tired, unreadable stare.
“I dragged your body out of that alley like it was a Call of Duty side quest I wasn’t prepped for. I got you safe. You were bleeding everywhere—like Quentin Tarantino directed the exit wound—and I still got you out. And then?”
I spin. Pace. Laugh sharp and high like I might start sobbing or biting.
“I left.”
My voice drops. But not quiet. Just… heavier.
“I left you. I didn’t even check if you were breathing. I just ran. Like a coward in the third act of a zombie flick.”
He finally speaks. Calm. Low. “You saved me.”
“Oh, shut up with your grizzled survivor wisdom, okay?” I fling an arm toward the wall. “You could’ve died, Wraith. Died. Like actually dead. And I’d be out here talking to your ghost like some budget Marvel widow with unresolved trauma and a Katana addiction.”
He sighs through his nose.
I laugh. It’s brittle and sharp. “And what would I have been then, huh? Your backup plan? The psycho who ran? The one no one ever picks because she’s too much, too late, too fucking loud?— ”
I stop myself. Too late.
The silence after tastes like iron.
He’s still watching me.
“You always mattered,” he says quietly.
I look up. Blink once. Twice. My breath stalls in my chest like I forgot how to exhale.
Then I snort. “Okay, that’s dangerously close to a feeling. Are you concussed?”
His mouth quirks. “Probably.”
The adrenaline hits a wall and collapses inside me like a dying star.
I stop pacing. Just stand there, vibrating.
He’s still breathing. Upright. Looking at me like I’m a particularly complicated malware code he hasn’t decided whether to delete or dissect.
I make a noise—could be a scoff, could be the last shreds of sanity leaking out—and drop onto the nearest piece of furniture. It might’ve once been a chair. Hard to tell through the wires and coffee rings.
He doesn’t offer me anything.
So I grab the nearest mug off his desk and sniff it.
Smells like battery acid.
Perfect.
I sip. It’s horrible. I keep sipping.
He stays quiet. Watching.
I glance up, glare half-heartedly. “What? No dramatic monologue about how you faked your death for a good cause?”
He shrugs, slow and deliberate. “Didn’t fake it. Just… didn’t die. ”
“Oh. Well. Congratulations on the bare minimum of survival.”
Silence again.
I collapse back into the chair, mug still clutched in my hands like a talisman against the emotional apocalypse.
He stays quiet.
So I fill the silence. Like I always do.
“You know what really pisses me off?” I say, eyes locked on the card like it’s daring me to snap. “It wasn’t just a bad lead. It was a trap.”
Wraith doesn’t flinch.
“We weren’t supposed to walk out.”
“Exactly,” I snap. “We walked in like we had the upper hand. They were already aiming. Every move we made was useless by the time we made it. No control. No exits. Just a goddamn meat grinder.”
“They wanted a mess,” he says. “Wanted the bodies too mangled to trace. Wanted us off the board.”
“And we’re still here,” I say. “Bleeding. But breathing.”
His brow tics. Still too calm. Like he’s cataloging the damage in that freaky chessmaster brain of his.
I slam the mug down. “But I did get something.”
He raises an eyebrow. Of course he does. Always so fucking silent and judgey, like he’s waiting for me to burst into glitter and bad decisions.
“Don’t look at me like that,” I snap. “I grabbed something. During the fight. Don’t know why. Gut feeling. Chaos instinct. Divine spite.”
I dig into my coat pocket and pull out the stupidest, bougiest business card I’ve ever seen—thick, black, probably printed on dead stockbroker skin. I slap it on his desk like it insulted my mother.
“This was just sitting there. On a table. Like it wanted to be taken. So I took it. Because I’m me. And clearly the universe loves giving me cursed homework.”
Wraith picks it up. Flips it. Doesn’t say a word—but something in his expression tightens, and I know I was right to grab it.
“All that slick packaging, and then the back looks like someone fed a keyboard to a garbage disposal.”
Letters. Numbers. Slashes. Dots.
Wraith glances at the card again. “This wasn’t left behind by accident.”
“I don’t believe in accidents. Nothing says ‘we see you’ like a custom-coded threat in fancy font.” I deadpan. “But maybe someone else got sloppy. Or maybe this was their mistake.”
He hums low, noncommittal. But I know that look. He’s already mentally ripping it apart and cataloguing the insides.
“What do you think?” I ask. “Coordinates? Password? Summoning ritual for rich assholes?”
“Could be a path,” he says. “Could be an encryption key.”
“Could be bait,” I say, eyes still on the card. “But this time, we see it coming.
He finally sets the card down. Careful. Precise.
“It’s deliberate. Structured. But I don’t know what it’s for,” he says.
I lean in, elbows on the desk. “You gonna break it?”
He glances up. Sharp. Steady. “Eventually. ”
He goes back to staring at the card, and I go back to staring at him. I just don’t get it.
The silence should feel like relief. It doesn’t.
It’s pressure. It’s noise I can’t name.
Because he’s just sitting there. Breathing. Still. With a fucking hole in him—but so calm I want to scream.
I watch him stare at the card like it matters more than what almost happened.
Like I didn’t scream. Like I didn’t run.
I dig my fingers into the arms of the chair like it’s the only thing keeping me from launching myself at him.
He glances up—finally—and raises a brow.
That’s it.
“Why the fuck did you do it, Wraith?”
His gaze sharpens. But not with guilt. Not with fear.
He looks at me like I’m a puzzle with pieces missing—and he already knows where they are.
“I saw it coming. So I did something about it,” he says.
That’s it. That’s the whole explanation.
My head jerks—like he slapped me with the words.
I stare at him. He stares back and that fucking bastard shrugs, like it was no big deal.
I’m waiting for the part where I stop wanting to throw something. It doesn’t come.
“You don’t get to say shit like that,” I say, low and shaking with restraint.
“Why not?”
“Because I don’t want it,” I snap. “I don’t want you playing hero. I don’t want your instincts. I don’t want your fucking body between me and a bullet.”
“Too bad. ”
That’s it. That’s the match.
I lunge.
My hands slam into his chest and shove him backward—hard enough to knock him into the steel desk with a grunt of pain.
A wrench clatters to the floor. He catches himself on the edge with a wince.
Fuck his pain.
“You think this makes you better than me?” I snap.
“No.”
“You think I owe you now?”
“No.”
I shove him again anyway.
“Then why the fuck can’t I stop thinking about it?”
My voice breaks, not soft—violent.
“Why can’t I stop seeing your blood every time I close my eyes?”
He says nothing.
Doesn’t move.
Just stands there, giving me space to unravel.
That only makes it worse.
“I hate that you made me watch that,” I hiss with a shove. “I hate that you didn’t ask.”
I shove him again, hard.
“I hate?—”
I cut myself off. Can’t say it.
I shove him into the wall instead, snarling,
“I didn’t ask you to take a bullet for me.”
His voice is low. Rough. Unshaken.
“You didn’t have to.”
I stare at him .
Breathing hard. Jaw locked. Rage barely leashed.
If I say one more word, I’ll break.
So I don’t.
I grab his face and kiss him instead.
It’s not soft. It’s not sweet.
It’s not “thank you.”
It’s rage in the shape of want. Violence disguised as mouths colliding.
My teeth catch his lower lip. My fingers twist in his hair.
He growls into the kiss and drags my hips into his like he’s done being patient.
Like he’s finally giving in to the same fucked-up gravity that’s been ripping us both apart.
“I’m still pissed,” I breathe, mouth brushing his.
“I know.”
“This doesn’t make me yours.”
“Then stop kissing me.”
I don’t.
I bite his shoulder instead.
He hisses, but doesn’t stop me.
His hands grip my waist like he’s anchoring us both—or daring me to go further.
Then they slide under my shirt before I even realize I’ve given him permission.
I claw at his back like I’m trying to peel him open—like I want under his skin or nowhere at all.
He turns us, shoving my back into the wall, mouths locked, teeth clashing.
It’s not graceful. It’s not choreographed.
It’s messy. Brutal. Perfect.
We’re not undressing—we’re stripping obstacles.
Buttons pop. A seam tears. His belt hits the floor, punctuation to our chaos.
He lifts me like I weigh nothing and pins me between him and the wall.
I wrap my legs around his waist, he grunts in pain. I squeeze harder like I’m daring him to drop me.
He doesn’t. And then he’s inside me.
No warning. No tease. Just cock and heat and full-bodied violence.
I suck in a breath like I’ve been hit.
My head thuds back against the wall.
“Fuck,” I hiss.
His rhythm is brutal from the first thrust—deep, punishing, like he’s trying to rearrange what’s left of me. Stretching me to my limits.
I claw at his back. Bite his shoulder.
I want him to hurt.
I want him to feel it every time he moves tomorrow.
His hands are under my ass, spreading me wider, holding me up as he drives into me again. And again.
The sound of it—skin, breath, bodies colliding—it’s disgusting. It’s addictive. And so fucking wet.
“You bleed on me again,” I pant, biting down on his jaw, “and I’ll finish the job.”
“You’re already trying to kill me,” he snarls.
His hips snap harder, the angle vicious, and I moan like I hate him for it.
“Good.”
I clamp down around him, just to make him grunt.
Just to remind him I’m not done either .
He slams into me harder—deep and filthy, driving every inch of him so far into me I swear I see stars.
I throw my head back and scream his name—not like a plea, like a fucking threat.
He buries his face in my neck, breath ragged.
His teeth graze skin. I hope he leaves a mark.
“You want me to stop?” he growls.
“I want you to fucking finish it.”
His rhythm shatters. We’re grinding now. Writhing.
I ride the pain. I chase the edge.
My orgasm rips out of me, and I lock around him, shaking. Snarling. Coming with enough force it almost feels like revenge.
He slams into me again, harder, fucking me through my violent bliss—gritting his teeth as my nails dig into his back like I’m trying to peel him open.
My heels press into his hips, holding him tight, dragging him deeper.
“Fucking—hell,” he growls, breath ragged, forehead slick against mine.
The wall groans under the force of it. My spine’s screaming.
I grab the back of his neck and snarl, “Don’t you dare come standing up.”
His grin is wicked. Blood on his lip. Lust in his eyes.
“You want the floor?” he pants.
“Fuck you.”
He spins, fast—pulls out, catches my thighs, and drops with me.
The landing’s rough. A jolt. My back hits the cold concrete, and he’s already dragging me back onto his cock before I can snark about it.
I gasp, legs falling open, one heel braced against the floor, the other dragging down his spine.
“Better?” he growls.
“Deeper,” I spit.
He gives it to me with a dark chuckle.
Long, hard strokes that slam into me like he’s trying to ruin something, make it permanent.
His hand wraps around my throat again—grip almost too tight. Trying to get me to submit.
I ride the pressure. The pain. The fucking ownership of it.
“Come for me,” he growls, eyes locked on mine.
“Make me.”
He fucks into me like he’s claiming territory, like every thrust is a warning to the universe:
this belongs to me.
My back arches off the floor. His hand stays tight on my throat—not choking, just owning. Just enough to make me wet all over again.
“You like this?” he growls, eyes locked to mine.
“Being fucked like you’re mine?”
“I like making you bleed for it,” I pant. “Harder.”
He gives me exactly what I asked for.
Slams into me hard enough to punch the breath out of my lungs.
The sound of it—slick, filthy, relentless—echoes off the warehouse walls like a crime scene with rhythm.
I rake my nails down his back hard enough to welt.
I feel his muscles seize. His pace starts to stutter.
“Don’t you dare come before me,” I snarl .
“Then come, Neri,” he growls. “Fucking break on me.”
I give him a wicked grin and make him wait for it.
And then I shatter.
My whole body locks up—legs trembling, hands clutching at his shoulders, spine arched into him like I’m trying to crawl inside.
I cry out—loud, raw, fucking wrecked.
And he follows instantly. Buries himself so deep it hurts, hips shuddering, teeth bared in a silent snarl as he spills inside me.
We don’t move.
We don’t breathe—we collapse.
The only sound is our bodies twitching against each other, hearts racing like we’re still fighting.
Somewhere between the wall and the floor, we finally run out of rage.
Clothes half-off. Skin flushed. Hearts still slamming against bone.
His bandage is stained, fresh blood seeping through.
I’m breathing like I ran miles through fire.
He looks like he enjoyed it.
My forehead presses to his.
The air between us tastes like copper and ruin.
“This doesn’t change anything,” I whisper, voice shredded from too much shouting and too much want.
He smirks—bruised, breathless, and just as fucked as I am.
“Sure,” he says. “Keep telling yourself that.”
I hate that he sees me.
I hate that I let him.