Chapter 24
Twenty-Four
Piper
A fter I was showered and changed—with Knox leaning against the sink in the bathroom watching, never taking his eyes off me, as promised—we left the ‘safe house.’
Lukyan and Elizabeth were long gone, unsurprisingly since he and Knox had exchanged death threats. It was also good that they left so they hadn’t heard our loud lovemaking—if it could be called that. But I felt sad that I couldn’t express my gratitude to them both.
I was also hungry for more of their story, to understand how Elizabeth came to be the way she was, how they made it work.
It felt incredibly juvenile to be wanting to talk to two hitmen—hit … people?—about the secrets to a long-lasting relationship, but with the real world rapidly approaching, I was desperate to figure out a way to make Knox and I work. And by rapidly approaching, I was being quite literal. We were driving back to Manhattan.
I’d marinated on that the entire drive back to the city. The villain was dead—one of them, at least—so I assumed I was otherwise safe. If not, Knox wouldn’t have agreed to take me back home.
Regardless, our story wasn’t over.
We weren’t riding off into the proverbial sunset; we were driving toward real life—which I’d longed for at the beginning of my captivity, but now I just yearned for Knox to drive us back to our cabin in the mountains. Reality be damned.
But we couldn’t hold off the world forever. The truth of that was searing and somehow more terrifying than the mob boss I’d just killed. And I was sure that deed would come to haunt me eventually.
The ringing of a phone ripped me out of my daze.
My phone.
I glanced at where the ringing was coming from, the center console. I hadn’t even noticed it.
Knox must’ve gotten it for me at some point. It had been taken an age ago, when he’d apprehended me during my run. I’d assumed he’d destroyed it. Yet there it was.
Though I wanted to know the details of when and how, the name flashing on the screen silenced my questions. My eyes were on Knox as I answered.
“Daisy!” I half yelled, delirious with worry. “Please tell me you’re okay.” She had been in the back of my mind the whole time, but I’d been convinced she was safe. For my own sanity more than anything else.
“ Me ?” she yelled. No halfway about it. I winced and held the phone farther from my ear. “I’m not the one who was apparently embroiled in a plot to assassinate and overthrow an entire regime .” I could still hear her crystal-clear from that distance, as could Knox.
His hand twitched on the steering wheel.
I wouldn’t have said that I considered Stone’s enterprise to be a regime, but it seemed ill advised to interrupt Daisy. And even hysterical, my sister’s voice was music to my ears.
“I know you take the older sister role very seriously, but this is too far, even for you,” she continued, still shouting. “Couldn’t you let go of the reins for just a moment, and let Knox save the day?” Her tone had lowered, but it still delivered a sting. “I’m sure he was absolutely itching to. I bet you playing hero chafed his horns.”
I didn’t miss the underlying disdain my sister had for Knox, even still.
“Not my style, Daisy,” I told her. “And what if he needed to be saved too? The hero costume is so much more flattering on women.”
I didn’t look at him when I said that. I assumed it was an unwise thing to say, endangering his masculinity or something.
Knox’s hand went to my chin, turning it so I faced him. He didn’t say anything, just cupped my face, watching me for a dangerous amount of time before his gaze returned to the road.
I guessed he wasn’t angry.
My mind whirled with all that went unsaid in that gaze. He didn’t appear to feel emasculated or irritated. He looked … proud. Reverent.
“Him? Needing saving?” Daisy snorted. “Yeah, right.”
“Where are you?” I demanded, cutting off the conversation. She did not need to know the finer details of just how much Knox needed saving, nor was that the right time to try to win her over and put her on Team Knox. I figured that would take a while, if he stuck around.
A stab of panic hit my midsection at the thought of him being anywhere but there. With me.
“San Francisco,” Daisy answered, taking the change of subject in stride. “Well, Napa. We’ve got a little villa here.” I didn’t miss the warmth in her tone, the bashfulness.
“ We ?” I clarified. “As in you and Joey?” I’d known they were together, but the hitch in her voice told me that they were also together.
I got the job of seducing and killing the mafia don, and she honeymooned—for lack of a better word—in wine country with the mafia man who started all of this. Exactly how it should’ve been. This was the pinnacle of me protecting Daisy from the horrors of life, the full consequences of thoughtless actions. It wasn’t exactly healthy of me, but I didn’t give a shit. I’d preserve my sister’s hopeful na?veté for the rest of my life if I could.
“Yes, yes. I don’t want to hear it,” she whined, obviously expecting some kind of lecture about Joey. I wasn’t going to give one, since I didn’t really have a leg to stand on when it came to talking about choosing appropriate partners. It didn’t mean I liked Joey, though. “He did save our lives, after all.”
I pinched the bridge of my nose. It didn’t serve me to point out that he was the one who put our lives in danger in the first place. Without Joey, never would’ve been pulled into this world. If my sister had never met Joey, I never would’ve met Knox. Unthinkable. Somehow, I owed my life as I knew it to one of my sister’s lovers.
Fate was a funny thing.
“You’re coming back to the city?” I asked, yearning to see my sister. Despite the complicated situation that would arise with her in Knox being in the same vicinity again. I would never be able to forget his hands on her neck.
“Eventually,” Daisy said, guilt soaking her tone. “As long as you’re safe,” she added quickly, obviously feeling strange about taking a vacation when she knew I’d been through some serious shit.
Sure, the thought of being able to see my sister again, to download all that I’d been through on someone familiar, was tempting. But I’d never tell her the full truth of it anyway. My sister was all sunshine, no clouds. I’d added a whole bunch of clouds to my persona in the past weeks. I didn’t want to change the way she saw me.
I looked at Knox, my eyes catching on the ridges of his face, the glorious profile he cut. “I’m safe,” I whispered. And I truly was. Knox was danger personified. Death personified. Everything I’d always protected myself from. Nevertheless, I felt safe.
“Good. We’ve got a lot to catch up on, huh?” Unsurprisingly, Daisy’s good nature persevered as she failed to catch all the layers to my response.
My eyes refused to look from Knox, worried about the shape of our future. “That we do.”
“But we made it,” Daisy’s voice filtered through the phone, triumph in it.
“We made it,” I agreed. Another victory for the Matthews women.
“Grandma would be proud.”
My eyes squeezed shut. Sometimes my sister could be obtuse, and other times, she could be perceptive to an uncanny degree.
“She really would,” I choked out, thinking of my hard yet soft grandmother. Complicated, strong, fierce and kind. A woman of multitudes.
We lingered in the silence of our grief and love for a handful of seconds before a squeal punctured the quiet.
“Joey,” Daisy laughed. “Don’t, I’m talking to—”
The call cut off, in true Daisy fashion. I smiled at the screen, shaking my head and feeling endlessly grateful that some things hadn’t changed.
I put the phone down between me and Knox.
His hand instantly threaded with mine.
I didn’t ask exactly where we were going. I didn’t need to. It didn’t matter. Though I had a guess—and though I’d yearned to go home—trepidation filled me at the prospect of those walls, whether I’d ever fit between them again.
My hand fits in Knox’s.
I’d figure out the rest.
Knox was cooking in my kitchen.
In my apartment.
Within twenty-four hours of killing the head of a criminal organization. It was the early hours now. I hadn’t bothered to pick up my phone again. It had once been a lifeline to the world, one I’d been unhealthily glued to. Being without it for so long had made it lose its appeal. Why in the heck would I want to mindlessly scroll right then?
Knox had asked what I’d eaten, after he’d traipsed through my apartment like an anthropologist walking through the home of a foreign tribe.
He didn’t touch anything, just stared at the pictures in frames. Some art I collected from antique stores and flea markets, anything with woods or fairies or a little bit magical. Crystals were placed around various surfaces, same with candles. Photos of me with friends and of me with Daisy. I didn’t look too closely at those. I was a different person in them.
The one frame he did pick up was my most treasured. Two small, beaming girls with dirt on their faces, clinging to a long-haired woman in an apron, with the backdrop of the Appalachian woods.
The last photo we had taken with my grandmother.
Knox stared at it for an impossibly long time before setting it back down with the utmost gentleness.
He was a slash of black in my colorful space. So large in it. I worried if I blinked too much, he’d disappear.
There was no food in my fridge, since I’d been gone for a month, but he’d found things in the pantry to cook. Pasta, olive oil, some fancy tinned fish I’d paid way too much for and hadn’t known what to do with.
“Do you want children?” he asked as he set various ingredients out. I’d leaned on my kitchen table, watching him.
I pondered the question which had been hurled out of left field. Of all the things I’d thought he might ask me, that was not one of them.
“I can’t have children, remember?” I replied carefully, though I was pretty sure he remembered. He held on to the most minute details, saving them up, storing them somewhere important. That’s how intense his feelings were for me. It felt immensely world changing to have someone want to know you that deeply. Study you that deeply.
“Yes, but do you want them?” he probed. “Traditional pregnancy is not the only way to be a mother.”
I watched his face for a sign of where his mind was going, but he wore a mask so solid, even I couldn’t find a tell. And I’d made it my business to study this man very deeply.
I tapped my finger against my thigh. “No, it’s not the only journey to be a mother.”
I’d thought about being a mom many times over the years, more since my thirtieth birthday come and gone. Then my thirty-first, and so on. I might not have had a biological clock, but I felt the window of time closing in on me. If I did choose to be a mother, the process was infinitely more complicated for me—especially doing it alone. It would take a long time to even get a child, by then I’d be older, and society demonized older mothers almost more than those who didn’t have children at all.
“The process is long and expensive…” I said instead of voicing the conclusion I’d come to long ago, what I’d always known in my heart of hearts.
“Money is no object, and I could get you a baby within a month, if that’s what you wanted.” His posture was rigid, eyes full of ice.
I stared at him. “You don’t joke, and now is a super weird time to start.”
He didn’t answer me, which I assumed was his menacing way of saying he was not joking.
“You could ‘get’ me a baby?” I air quoted. “You’re in the business of trafficking infants?” Previously, I had been certain that there was nothing Knox could do that would affect my feelings toward him, taint them. But children were a hard line. I’d been sure that he wouldn’t touch them, wouldn’t harm them.
He shook his head, and I sagged with relief, knowing he caught the gesture. “I know powerful people, and I have money. I’m owed a lot of favors.” He filled up a pot with water. “You think the billionaires of this world wait for anything? They jump the line for healthcare, organ transplants, drugs not available to the general public and children—if they want them.”
Okay, he was serious. Deadly serious. And deadly rich if he was talking about having the kind of money required to procure a baby through murky ‘legitimate’ means.
I hadn’t thought about Knox’s financial situation. It hadn’t really been top of the list when we first met. Or any time after. Sure, he wore very nice suits, everything about him was expensive and sophisticated, but I’d never equated that with what it might’ve meant in the real world.
We’d lived in a suspended sort of reality, never giving myself the luxury of thinking about us in the real world. I was suddenly clutched with panic as to what that would look like.
How that would work.
We’d made it through the entire Italian mob trying to get us and a boatload of childhood trauma just to have the mundanity of life destroy us? Surely not. That was too tragic for even a tragic love story.
I forced myself back into the present, with Knox, where he was waiting not so patiently for my response. His energy had gone even tenser, eyes clouding over with a sharpness I knew he used as a defense.
“No,” I whispered. “No, I do not want to be a mother.” I drew in a long breath after releasing the words that were so shameful and frowned upon even in our post-feminist society—if such a concept ever truly existed.
Who was a woman who didn’t want children? There must’ve been something wrong with her. She must’ve been cold, selfish, damaged. Or simply not smart enough to know her own mind.
The few women I had told this secret to early on in my twenties had rolled their eyes, patted my arm patronizingly and assured me I’d change my mind. As if my own mind wasn’t mine. Since then, I hadn’t spoken of my plans not to have them, had tightly smiled whenever people raised the subject.
My eyes fixed on Knox. “Even before the cancer, I knew that’s not what I wanted. I’m sure it has a whole bunch to do with the trauma I grew up with, my own mommy issues, but whatever the crux of it is, that’s not what I want. Not who I want to be. I want to be the eccentric aunt to Daisy’s brood.”
I thought good naturedly about my sister who, thankfully, was safe and to her eternal knowledge that she’d be the mother to break generational curses and heal generational wounds. If there was anyone who could do it, it was her.
“I love my job,” I continued. “I get to be around the best of children and fill that void inside of me that nature created. And I also get to be around the worst of them, to remind me that I don’t have the tools to navigate that on a full-time, never-ending basis.”
I waited. For him to assure me I’d change my mind or to reject me for being horrifyingly unfeminine and wrong for not wanting to be a mother. Even if he was sure about not wanting children. Men had a funny way of doing things. They wanted women with a backbone, but they wanted to be able to bend it. Didn’t want children but wanted their partner to have that nurturing instinct. Without it, she was damaged.
Though I thought better of Knox, knew better of Knox, the concrete admission sent a thread of fear through me.
“Good,” was all Knox said.
Then he turned around to make dinner.
“Good?” I stepped forward, unable to let sleeping dogs lie. I had to pick and pull, see if there were any loose threads that I could tug on, that would unravel us.
He nodded, tipping pasta into boiling water before reaching for a tin of fish.
I put my hand on his wrist. “There needs to be more context as to the question and the response. Do you want children?”
He looked at me blankly for a moment then let out a bark of cold laughter. “No,” he said soberly. “Absolutely not.” His face screamed of shame I wished I could scoop right out of him.
“I’m not … capable,” he stared down at the boiling water. “I’m barely capable of loving you in a way that won’t destroy you wholly.” I watched his knuckles whiten as he gripped the tin he was holding.
It didn’t surprise me, his stance on children. I’d have been knocked over by a feather had he said he wanted a family. But I felt relieved, nonetheless. Not relieved about the trauma he endured that made him believe he was not worthy to be a father, but that we would not be separated over such conflicting needs.
“What would you have done,” I asked, stroking his hand. “If I had said yes, that I wanted a baby?”
“I would’ve gotten you a baby,” he replied without pause.
I swallowed at the answer, the devotion with which he spoke. As if I just had to request anything in the world and he’d procure it for me, human beings included. “And where would you be in this equation?”
His gaze shuttered. “Close,” he murmured. “Close enough to watch you both, to keep you safe. Ensure that your lives are long and happy. But you’d never lay eyes on me again.”
My body revolted against the promise in his tone, his certainty.
“You’d l-leave m-me?” I pulled my hand back. Or attempted to, at least.
“I’d never leave you.” He snatched hold of my wrist again. “I’d give you everything you deserved and ensure you kept it.”
I looked over his shoulder as I digested this. “What if I met another man?” It was unfair, cruel to us both to keep the hypothetical going, but I was a woman. I couldn’t help but live in the imagined future.
Knox tightened his hold on me.
“If I met another man?” I pressed, even though he was radiating deadly fury. Even though my wrist was beginning to protest with a pain I was becoming used to
Knox’s eyes darted up to me, the can clattering against the counter. He backed me against the fridge.
I gasped at the impact against my back as he caged me in. I was never complacent with him, my body never becoming accustomed to his nearness, his need. Every time was like the first time.
Knox hovered inches from me, hips pressing into mine with sublime pressure. “If you met another man, I’d imagine his death every moment of my life. But I wouldn’t kill him as long as he made you happy.” His eyes made a slow tour up and down my body. His gaze told me he was hungry, needful, but irate too. “Now are we done with this fucking insane conversation?”
I pursed my lips, nodding, knowing when to back down.
“Good.” He pushed off the fridge and resumed cooking as if the most intense conversation I’d ever had hadn’t even happened.
We’d eaten in complete silence, not speaking since the conversation about children. Knox was still stewing. I was a little angry at myself. I couldn’t help but push him, strain the limits of this dynamic between us, trying to find the edges.
There was no edge.
No end.
I was scared I had hurt him, ruined something sacred between us, until the second we finished the meal when h sent all the plates clattering from the dining room table then fucked me on it. The man had never-ending stamina, as did I, despite my injuries and the general trauma of the past week. If anything, it made me more desperate for the escape he offered. The safety of our coupling, drowning out everything that wasn’t connected to our bodies.
Still, we hadn’t spoken, not afterward, not as we cleaned up or as he carried me to the bedroom, tugging my naked body so I laid on his chest, arms locking around me just a little too tight. Just how I liked it.
“Will we survive this?” I asked in the darkness.
Gone was the quiet the woods offered. Sirens sounded in the distance, street noise filtered in, grating against my ears.
Knox’s arms might’ve tightened around me had they not already been as tight as humanly possible.
“The real world,” I continued. “Will we survive it?”
Some of the tension in my body slackened with relief of asking the question that I’d been torturing myself with.
“Yes.”
I waited for more of an explanation, even though I knew Knox well enough to know he wasn’t one to offer more when he didn’t feel the need to.
“Yes?” I echoed. “That’s it?”
Knox shifted me so I was straddling him, the movement sending a gasp from my mouth as my tender, aching body ground against him where he was rapidly hardening against me.
His hand curled around the back of my neck, then he yanked me down so our foreheads pressed together.
“Yes, Petal. That is it. We, us, will survive whatever comes because there is no other option.”
The way he said this was so concrete, so certain, it had the power to wipe all of my doubts away.
For a time, at least.
For once, Knox fell asleep before me. I heard it in the cadence of his breath, the very slight loosening of his grip. He still held me as if he were convinced I’d melt from his fingers.
Though I was exhausted in a way I’d never been in my life, I was unable to sleep. I wasn’t haunted by taking another life—a subject Knox hadn’t broached, interestingly. Sure, my actions rattled in my brain, promising to make a mark at some point, but as of yet, it failed to land.
Instead of lifeless eyes and spurting blood, I thought of Knox.
I thought about the choices I’d made that led me there.
In love. With a dangerous man. The one kind I’d sworn I’d stay away from ever since I was old enough to comprehend my father’s role in our destruction.
But if there was anything I’d learned from the past month, from what I’d observed with Lukyan and Elizabeth, it was that there were two kinds of dangerous men. There were the ones who ensured women didn’t walk home alone in the dark, who we were cautious with when rejecting them, who believed women were just objects to be owned. Then there were the dangerous men who considered us their treasure. Not theirs to own but theirs to protect. The dangerous men who would never hurt us but would protect us from a world designed to break us. The men who would commit the most heinous crimes, cover themselves with blood and gore, to keep us clean. And who would teach us to become weapons in our own right when we wanted to fight too. Men who weren’t afraid of strength in their women. Who fed it like kindling to flame.
As these thoughts raced through my mind, I understood how my mother had fallen for my father. Stayed with him. Because she was looking for the latter type of man. All that violent energy… She’d hoped that he’d expend it outward to keep her safe, not inward to keep her tortured, captive.
Despite Knox’s hold on my body, I felt anything but captive. I was freer than I’d ever been in my life.
And on that thought, I fell into a deep sleep.