Chapter 29 #2
"No. Don't," she says, voice low and edged with her own fatigue. "You don't get to make it worse."
I blink and try to drag some air through lungs that feel three sizes too small. "I'm not—"
She holds up a finger, the universal sign for shut the fuck up.
"You are. For weeks I watched you fall for a woman with no common sense and a heart like a rescue dog, and now you're going to ruin it by showing up at her door looking like you just crawled out of a meat grinder? Just because you need to see her?"
I bristle despite myself. "She needs—"
"She needs to sleep. Eat. Realize her dad isn't dead. Maybe process the fact that she was kidnapped, and you were the reason." The words aren't cruel, but they land like blows. "You want to be the man she runs to, or the trigger for her next panic attack?"
I open my mouth, trying to find a comeback, but nothing comes. Marisol softens exactly one percent, reading my silence as surrender.
"Good," she says. "Because if you'd tried to go over there before I finished this lecture, I'd have called Isa and asked her to tase you in the hallway. And I'm not sure Isa would have set it lower than 'roast pig.'"
I can't help it: I almost smile. "You're the meanest nurse I've ever had."
"And you're the worst patient." She pours more water, shoves it into my hand. "Drink that. Now sleep."
I'm gone in ninety seconds, my body finally releasing after holding too long. Through the fade, I hear Marisol settling on the floor beside me. The soft tap of texts being sent. Then nothing but darkness and dreams of vanilla and bruises I couldn't prevent.
I wake to afternoon light through the high windows. Marisol's in the chair across from me, coffee in hand, shadows under her eyes. She hasn't left. Water waits on the desk.
"You look like death warmed over," she says, but there's affection under the sharpness.
"Feel worse."
She sets down her coffee, leans forward. "You've been out for six hours."
I shake my head, trying to clear it.
"Daphne."
"She's still ok."
"She told me to stay away."
Marisol's golden hair falls loose as she shakes her head. "She told you to stay away after her father almost died. After trauma. After shock, you dense beautiful idiot."
I try to summon a voice, to cut through the exhaustion and hunger and adrenaline shakes, to say the one thing all my battered synapses can agree on: I have to see Daphne.
Now. I have to bury my face in her hair and hold her so tight nobody could ever pry her loose.
I have to see her eyes and know, even for two seconds, that she's more than just alive, that she still wants me the way I want her.
That she still exists in the world, and I'm allowed to touch her.
I try to tell Marisol all this, but my tongue and throat are mutinying, words lining up and tripping over themselves before I get a single syllable out.
I want to tell her I'm not going to waste a second, that as soon as I can walk again without using two walls as crutches, I'm going to Daphne's cottage and pounding on the door until she opens it, and I don't care if all of La Sirena is watching.
"Little Shark…"
"Don't Little Shark me." She stands, hands on hips. "She's family now. Yours, which makes her ours. And we don't leave family wondering if we're coming back." Her expression softens slightly. "You killed for her. Now go live for her."
I stand, the blanket falling. My body still aches but the hollowness is worse. The absence of her, the wrongness of being here while she's there. I nod once at Marisol, the brotherhood acknowledgment that needs no words.
She nods back. "Shower. Eat what Sera left. Then go get your girl."
By three o'clock I'm clean, fed, pulling out of the loading dock in my truck.
Not the Suburban but my personal vehicle.
The dossier fired at twelve-thirty, the switch re-armed for this Tuesday, one week after the deadline the cottage assault stole from us.
It's already been live for two and a half hours, nine years of evidence finally public, and I wasn't here to see it land.
I-95 stretches north toward Pristine, toward the cottage where she waits.
Every mile closes the distance between us, and my body knows it.
My cock stirs at just the thought of seeing her, of having her close enough to touch again.
The memory of her hand burns fresh. Not just the contact but the exact pressure, the way her fingers splayed across my thigh, four points of heat through denim and her thumb pressing harder than the rest.
My cock goes fully hard at the memory. I shift in the seat, adjusting myself, but it only makes it worse. That touch was deliberate. Chosen. A woman claiming what she wanted despite everything that had happened.
The speedometer creeps higher without permission. Seventy-five. Eighty. My foot pressing the accelerator like my body's trying to close the distance faster than physics allows. I force myself to ease off. Getting pulled over now would cost me minutes I can't spare. Minutes away from her.
My thigh throbs with phantom heat, and I press my palm against the spot, trying to hold the memory in my skin.