Callie
My body still feels like it’s buzzing, like he short-circuited every nerve and left them raw and sparking. The room smells like sweat and sex and something dangerous that feels suspiciously like belonging.
My mind keeps replaying everything. The fear, the heat, the way my body trembled so hard I thought I might break apart in his hands. But underneath all of that is a quieter truth I don’t want to admit: he made me feel safe. Safe from… nothingness. Safe from being invisible.
Since grandma became sick, I’ve been holding myself together alone, terrified to need anyone because people leave, people die, people forget.
But when he touched me, I felt something crack open, something that whispered you don’t have to carry this alone.
And that terrifies me far more than the moment he pressed a gun against my skin.
But as the rush fades, reality forces its way back in, hard.
The clock on the bedside table reads six-fifty-five am and I quickly push myself up on shaking elbows, the sheet slipping down my chest. He’s still beside me, his breathing slow and even, muscles lax in a rare moment of vulnerability.
He looks almost human like this. Not the man who killed someone last night. Not the monster everyone else fears.
A man I want too much.
I ache in the best possible way and have been so thoroughly fucked I’m not even sure I’m in the same dimension I started in. But whichever reality this is, I want to make it work.
“I need to go,” I whisper into the dimness. He doesn’t move. I try again. “Dariy. I need to get back home. I have to change and head out to see my grandma.”
That gets his attention.
“She wakes up disoriented some mornings…” I add, looking around the room, before remembering he tore the clothes from me in the living room last night.
His eyes open. Still heat-dark, but sharpening. Focusing. Possession coalescing behind them like storm clouds reforming.
“That’s not happening right now. Were you seriously planning to go straight from your shift this morning?”
My heart punches up into my throat. “Yes, I have to see her. She’ll wake up soon, and she’ll panic if I’m not there. Plus, I need to do damage control with my manager. She has no idea where I disappeared to last night, mid shift. I can’t lose this job. It’s the only thing keeping me afloat.”
“You’re not afloat Callie, and your grandmother is being cared for,” he says, the words clipped. “Better than before.”
“What do you mean?” I ask as I begin to climb out of his bed. His arm is around me in an instant, pulling me back into bed against the hard plane of him.
“She is being transferred today to a better facility,” he offers, his hand finding my nipple and rolling it between his thumb and index finger.
“What?” I almost shriek, ignoring the thrill of what he is doing to me. “You can’t just move her.” I push his hands away and sit up again, cursing the way my body has responded to him so readily, so needily. “Where is she? She needs me.”
I hear the tension in his voice. “You need air, food, sleep. You need space to be yourself, to allow yourself to want things. And you’re getting all of that here.”
I bluster, my mind whirling too fast for me to pick out the words I need. “It’s not your decision to make,” I finally manage, my voice cracking on the edges, anger and panic blurring. “You made the choice not to kill me, that doesn’t mean you get to take my life from me in other ways.”
His expression shifts to something cold and immovable.
“You walked into my world, Callie. You don’t get to walk back out. Besides—” he stretches beneath the sheet, every long, rigid line of him making me want things I’ve never entertained before. “You were the one begging me to fuck you.”
I yank myself away from him and shove the sheet aside, standing on legs that still tremble from what we did. “You can’t hold me here like a prisoner. My job, my things, my grandmother’s facility will call me when she wakes up. If I don’t pick up—”
“They’ll call me,” he interrupts.
My entire body goes still. “What do you mean, they’ll call you?”
“I told you already,” he says simply. “A better place. Better care. More eyes on her.” He rises from the bed, every inch of him once again the Bratva Fixer. Composed, calculating, terrifyingly sure of himself. “She is safe. You are safe. As soon as she is settled, I’ll take you there myself.”
My head spins. “You actually moved her? Without asking me?”
“You’ll see her today,” he says again, sitting up and scrubbing his hands over his face. “But you will not go anywhere alone. Ever again.”
My breath catches, trapped between fury and confusion and a fear I can’t name. “What do you mean I can’t go anywhere alone?”
He doesn’t answer, just looks at me like I already know the truth, and then it clicks.
“You don’t trust me not to run. Not to tell someone what I saw.
” The thought hits me like a slap. “After everything we did…” A gurgle of hysterical laughter pops from me.
“Oh my God, I’m so stupid,” I mutter, mostly to myself, as I snatch open his wardrobe and steal another pair of sweatpants and another T-shirt.
Embarrassment flares in my chest and I can feel the blush creep hot over my face.
“You’re not leaving this penthouse, Callie. They will call once she is settled and ready to receive visitors. Then we will take you to your place to get what you need, and then head there.
I push my hands through my tangled hair.
“I had to sell my car to help pay for that place, I have no way of reaching her if you put her in literally any other care facility in Las Vegas.” I try to take a breath, to calm down, but panic has me firmly in its grip.
I stride through to the bathroom and splash my face with cold water several times before looking at my reflection and finding he is standing behind me, naked and statuesque as he leans against the door frame.
I turn to face him. “Why are you doing this to me?” I ask, not even wanting an answer, because the damage is done.
“If you’re not going to trust me, you should have just killed me.
” The words tear from me with a desperation I have never felt.
Not even then grandma got her diagnosis.
I always felt like if I just kept moving, kept working, kept trying, everything would turn out okay.
I never thought I’ find myself in a situation like this one.
My heart, which was beating wildly for this man just hours ago, now feels like it’s shutting down under the sadness of how lonely I actually am. A grandmother who raised me, slowly forgetting me. A man who made me feel like I was the only thing that mattered, not trusting me.
My life doesn’t make any kind of sense anymore.
At some point during this moment of clarity, he has stepped into the bathroom, and his hands are either side of my face.
He brushes a strand of hair from my cheek, his touch gentler than his voice.
“Eat because you need sustenance. Shower because you shouldn’t visit your grandmother smelling like you were up all night fucking me.
And as soon as they call, I’ll take you to her.
That’s all you need to focus on right now. ”
The promise lands like a weight in my chest, relieving and suffocating all at once.
Because that doesn’t change the fact that nothing has really changed between us. We’re still strangers in a situation neither of us asked for. Sex didn’t change that, and I was stupid to think it would.