Chapter Eleven #2
She swallowed hard. “Okay. I’m so agreeable right now it’s alarming. In fact, I would like it noted for the record that I am being wildly cooperative.”
Apparently, he was in full protector mode because he didn’t even crack a smile as he unlocked her door and pushed it open.
Nothing looked or sounded off. But the moment she stepped inside, the air felt wrong, as if someone had cracked a window and let the shadows crawl inside.
Kayne’s hand shot out in a silent order to stop.
She obeyed automatically, breath stilted as he moved ahead, clearing each room with quiet, lethal precision.
Muscles shifted beneath his shirt in a way she had absolutely no business noticing, given the circumstances. Her brain noticed anyway. Traitor.
Then she heard it. A soft, wet crunch. Her stomach bottomed out.
“Chloe.” His voice changed, darkening into the verbal equivalent of do not cross this line. “Don’t come in here.”
Which was, historically speaking, a terrible thing to say to her. She stepped forward anyway.
The moment she crossed the threshold, her breath left her in a thin, shaky gasp. Her apartment wasn’t just trashed. It had been violated. With intent. Creativity. A truly upsetting attention to detail.
Pictures on her wall of her mom, Leo, and her early workout milestones had been rearranged into a precise, eerie grid, like a museum exhibit curated by a psychopath.
Her throw pillows were ripped open, stuffing arranged in neat, unsettling mounds.
Her yoga mat lay unrolled, sliced down the center in a perfect line.
And her hand weights were stacked into a long, narrow rectangle. A shape. A coffin.
“Oh,” she said faintly. “Cool. I love a theme.”
“Chloe,” Kayne said far too gently. That tone never meant anything good. It usually stood for brace yourself.
She pushed past him before her self-preservation could catch up and froze in the doorway to her sunroom.
Her pothos. The huge, thriving, ride-or-die beloved plant she’d nurtured from a sad clearance-rack rescue lay massacred across the floor. Soil everywhere. Leaves shredded. Stems hacked. The pretty aquamarine ceramic pot smashed into glittering shards.
Then, very calmly, she whispered, “Okay. That’s it. That’s where I draw the line.”
Kayne crouched beside the wreckage, jaw ticking. “This was deliberate.”
“Someone murdered my plant,” she said, hollow. “I don’t even murder plants. I Google how not to.”
A tremor climbed her spine, sharp and icy. It’s just a plant, she tried to tell herself.
Except it wasn’t.
It was her safety and home. And someone had destroyed it to hurt her, and maybe to prove they could.
When her hands started to shake, Kayne stood and placed his palms gently on her shoulders.
“Look at me, Chloe.”
She did. His green eyes were all focus and certainty, the kind you could hang onto when everything else was sliding.
“We’re not staying here.”
“Kayne, this is my home.”
“Not. Staying.”
The finality in his voice made her knees wobble again, but this time it wasn’t fear that did it. It was what she heard underneath the command and fury. Past the calculated calm. It was fear. For her.
“Okay,” she whispered. “I would also like to leave the murder apartment.”
“Pack what you can grab in two minutes. We’re moving to the safe house.”
“A safe house,” she repeated. “Of course. Naturally. Just another item on today’s to-do list.”
“A woman who works in my office secured it. It has a private gate, keypad entry, reinforced windows, full surveillance.”
“You already decided.”
“I did the minute someone tried to run you over.” His gaze flicked back to the ruined plant. “This just confirms it.”
He wasn’t wrong. And the longer she stared at the destruction, the heavier reality settled in her gut. Someone had been inside her home. Close enough to touch her things and to hurt her if they’d wanted.
Her breath stuttered.
Kayne’s thumb brushed her cheek in an unexpectedly tender gesture. “Two minutes, cher. Then we’re gone.”
She moved on autopilot, throwing clothes, toiletries, and her laptop into a bag. Every zipper sounded too loud. Kayne never left her side, hovering as if he expected danger to leap from behind her dresser. He did avert his eyes when she reached into her lingerie drawer.
“Appreciated,” she muttered. “Nothing ruins a crime scene faster than lace.”
Where was this dark humor coming from? And her attempts clearly weren’t landing, because he didn’t crack a smile once.
When they stepped back outside, she paused for one last look at the apartment she’d loved. The home she’d built. It felt smaller now. Violated.
Kayne closed the door. “I’ll get new locks installed, but you aren’t sleeping here again till I say it’s safe.”
She wanted to argue and pretend she wasn’t shaken. But the truth was, a small, bruised little part of her melted at his protectiveness, even as dread gnawed at her.
“I’m moving soon anyway,” she said
“Oh?” He glanced over. “Where?”
The sixty-four-thousand-dollar question. “That is yet to be decided.”
The drive to the safe house took ten long, quiet minutes. Kayne checked the mirrors while Chloe fought the tight sting building behind her eyes.
When he turned down a tree-lined drive, a tall iron gate appeared, sleek and solid with a keypad glowing beside it.
Kayne punched in a code, and it beeped in a comforting, high-tech way.
The gate slid open, and the world became suddenly calmer.
Danger would have to work really hard to access the place.
Kayne reached across the console and wrapped his hand around hers.
“Breathe, Chloe. You’re safe now.”
She did. Finally.
But she didn’t let go of his hand, not even when the gate slicked closed behind them and locked the rest of the world out.
#
Kayne watched the heavy iron slide shut with a finality he appreciated. Good. One less thing that could get to her tonight. The safe house sat tucked beneath old trees, private, quiet, and armed to the teeth thanks to BeBe’s paranoid brilliance. Still, his pulse refused to fully settle.
Chloe was shaken.
She tried to hide it, chin lifted, bracing for impact, but he’d felt the tremor in her hand the entire drive over. Felt the way she filled silence with corny jokes or went eerily still the moment the gate clanged shut behind them.
The stillness bothered him more.
He wanted to hunt down whoever had broken into her apartment and return the favor. What kind of psychopath thought destroying a plant counted as intimidation? A plant. Of all the twisted, sadistic options available, they’d gone with horticultural terrorism.
Inside, Chloe wandered the living room as if she were conducting a personal safety inspection she absolutely had not trained for.
Kayne tracked her movements, noting the way her fingers brushed her bottom lip before she dropped her hand too fast. He wondered if she thought that if she didn’t acknowledge the fear, it might take the hint and leave. If only.
“I’m going to, um, look around,” she said, waving vaguely toward the hallway. “Casually. Like a person who isn’t expecting monsters to jump out and scare the bejesus out of them.”
“Stay where I can see you,” he said gently.
She shot him a look that was half irritation, half pride, half fear, which frankly seemed like too many halves, but she stayed in view.
Good girl.
Kayne forced himself to step into the kitchen before he hovered too hard and made her even more self-conscious.
He flipped on the overhead lights, expecting bare shelves and a sad box of crackers.
Instead, BeBe had stocked it, planning for an apocalypse and a dinner party.
He found his favorite Cajun spices, two kinds of rice, eggs, shrimp, and vegetables crisp and bright in the bin.
“Damn, woman,” he murmured under his breath. “You think of everythin’, don’t you?”
BeBe Hale was confined to a wheelchair after a bicycle accident, and she was literally and figuratively Hell on Wheels, the patron saint of preparedness. He’d thank her later, possibly with baked goods. Or maybe a snow globe of the Gateway Arch for her extensive collection.
His stomach growled, reminding him he hadn’t eaten since morning. Chloe probably hadn’t either, not anything substantial. She ran on protein, optimism, and spite when necessary.
He glanced toward the living room. She’d folded herself into the corner of the couch, knees tucked up and clutching a throw pillow as if it had sworn an oath to protect her. She’d turned the television to a rerun of a once-popular comedy show.
She wasn’t crying. He’d discovered that Chloe rarely cried, but her eyes were too shiny, too alert. She didn’t need space. She needed comfort. And possibly carbs.
Kayne turned back to the kitchen and rolled up his sleeves. Cooking he could do. It was proof the world hadn’t fully gone off the rails yet.
He found a heavy and perfectly seasoned cast-iron skillet and set it on the burner. Oil. Celery. Onion. Bell pepper. When the holy trinity hit the heat, the kitchen filled with the smell of Louisiana—his mawmaw’s house, late evenings, warmth, order. Normalcy.
A memory of his mawmaw using her iron skillet rose up uninvited, sharp as the crack it had made when she’d swung it.
He’d been maybe twelve, all elbows and hunger, half-asleep on the sofa when the screen door rattled and some local drug-addicted idiot tried his luck, thinking her place was an easy mark.
Mawmaw hadn’t screamed or hesitated. She’d come out of that kitchen barefoot and fearless, skillet in hand as if it had been forged for war instead of cornbread, and dropped him with one clean, righteous blow.
Then she’d stood over the groaning boy, phone already in her other hand, and told him calm as Sunday supper that if he ever came back, she wouldn’t stop at one swing.
The cops had taken him away. Mawmaw had wiped the skillet, set it back on the stove, and gone right on cooking as if she hadn’t just defended her home with cast iron and pure will.
Kayne smiled faintly at the burner now. That was the thing about her. She’d taught him early that some tools were for comfort and some for survival, but the smart ones learned how to be both.
Damn, he missed her.
He thawed the shrimp under cold water, dusted them with cayenne, paprika, and thyme. Each steady chop eased the pressure inside him. He wasn’t helpless. He could protect Chloe. Feed her. Keep her safe tonight, even if it meant standing guard at her bedroom door.
Footsteps crept behind him.
Chloe hovered in the doorway with her arms folded, casual only in theory. Her eyes drifted to the skillet. “You’re cooking?”
He shot her a look over his shoulder. “Unless you suddenly developed a secret passion for sautéin’ onions, yeah.”
A flicker of a smile appeared. “I didn’t even know we had food.”
“BeBe stocked it.” He flipped the shrimp into the sizzling vegetables. “Figured you haven’t eaten.”
“I’m fine,” she said automatically, then paused when his eyebrow rose. “Okay, I might be operating at a caloric deficit.”
Kayne snorted softly. “That’s what I thought.”
She drifted closer, drawn by the smell. He noticed her shoulders drop a fraction. Hopefully, her nervous system had finally unclenched one notch.
“What is that?” she asked.
“Shrimp Creole. Simple version. Don’t get excited, cher. We ain’t got the ingredients for the fancy one.”
“I’m already excited.” She lifted onto her toes to peek into the skillet. “This smells incredible.”
A ripple of satisfaction washed over him. It was ridiculous how good it felt to see her light up over something he could give her that didn’t involve danger.
“You gonna sit,” he told her, nodding to the barstool, “or you gonna hover until I burn something?”
She slid onto the stool. “I don’t hover.”
“Chloe,” he said dryly. “You hover as if it’s your side hustle.”
Her laugh slipped out, and it was exactly what he needed to hear.
Once the rice fluffed and the shrimp were perfect, he plated the food and set it in front of her. She stared at it as if he’d placed a miracle on the counter.
“Kayne, this looks amazing.”
“Eat.” His voice came out in a rough rumble. “You’ve had a hell of a day.”
She forked a bite, blew on it, and tasted it. Her eyes went wide.
“Oh, my God.”
He leaned back against the counter, arms crossed. “Good?”
“Good? This is unfair. You can’t be an outstanding bodyguard and a splendid cook. It’s too much competence. It should be illegal.”
He chuckled, a low rumble. “You want me to stop?”
“No.” She shoved in another bite. “I will file a formal complaint if you do.”
As she ate, the tension eased from her shoulders, color crept back into her face, and her breathing slowed.
She was still scared—he could feel it—but she wasn’t drowning anymore. He’d take that. Tonight, he’d take anything that helped her breathe.
And as Chloe went back for another bite, Kayne made a silent vow. He would find whoever had stepped into her home, touched her things, and decided to scare her.
God help them when he did.