Chapter 24
Twenty-Four
LAYLA
Koa met us at the door.
Not his usual dignified tail wag and polite check-in.
He pushed straight into my legs the moment I crossed the threshold, whining low in his throat, his whole body pressed against me in the way he only did when something had registered as wrong.
I dropped my hand to his head, and he shoved his nose into my palm and held it there.
“I know,” I said. “I know. I’m okay.”
He didn’t believe me. He had better instincts than that.
Jace closed the door behind us and stood for a moment, not crowding me, but letting me know he was present. I set my bag on the table and stepped out of the heels and tried to find the floor under my feet. It seemed less solid than usual.
“I’m sorry I blew the dinner.” I’d said it in the truck, but I was compelled to repeat myself. As if saying it enough times would minimize what had happened.
“You didn’t blow anything.”
“I put a man’s face into a table in the middle of a restaurant.
” Without a thought. Without hesitation.
Muscle memory took over before conscious thought could intervene.
And I knew under the same circumstances, I’d probably do it again.
Because it was one of the things I’d trained for over endless hours and years.
“He put his hands on you without your consent.” Jace’s voice was even, unhurried. “I don’t see anything inappropriate in what you did. The scene he caused by grabbing you in the first place is on him.”
“Jace.”
“I mean it.” He moved to the kitchen, not making a thing of it, and I heard him opening cabinets. “Do you want a drink?”
“I don’t drink.” Because I didn’t do things that loosened my control, my awareness. Not when staying sharp was the only thing that had kept me alive this long. Apparently, I’d done a good enough job at dinner that he hadn’t noticed the level of wine in my glass never lowered.
Whatever Jace thought of that, he kept it to himself. Instead, after a beat, he suggested, “Tea?”
I stared at him. This man. He was already checking the cabinet above the kettle, matter-of-fact about it, like making tea for a woman in a semi-formal dress who’d had a dissociative episode in an upscale restaurant was entirely within the normal parameters of his evening.
“Yeah,” I said. “Tea would be good.”
I sat on the sofa, and Koa climbed half into my lap with the complete disregard for his own size that he employed in crisis situations.
I let him. I put both arms around his neck and pressed my face into the thick ruff of his fur and stayed there while the kettle heated and Jace moved around the small kitchen with the quiet efficiency of someone who was giving me space without leaving me alone in it.
It was a strange thing, watching a man like him do something as ordinary as making tea.
He’d found the mugs and the tea bags, and he stood with his back to me while the water came to temperature, his suit jacket draped over the back of a kitchen chair, his shoulders easy, entirely unbothered by the silence.
I watched him and thought about the restaurant and the weight of the man’s hand where it had landed on my shoulder.
How my body had responded before my brain had any say in the matter at all.
I hadn’t lost it like that in years. Not since the early days, when every unexpected touch was a trigger and I was still learning what my own nervous system had become.
I’d worked so hard to get past it. To build the reflexes into something controlled, something purposeful, something I chose rather than something that chose me.
Being here had undone some of that work. I’d known it would. I’d come anyway.
Jace brought the mug over and sat on the sofa beside me, not close enough to crowd, and held it out. I nudged Koa over and took it. The warmth soaking through the ceramic helped.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
“I just attacked a man in a restaurant.” I wrapped both hands around the mug. “What do you think?”
“I think you reacted to being grabbed from behind without warning. That’s not an overreaction.
That’s a nervous system doing its job.” He leaned forward, forearms on his knees, and looked at me with the quiet directness he brought to everything.
“You’re rattled because it surprised you.
Because you’ve managed to hold it together for a long time, and tonight it broke through anyway. ”
I looked at him. “How do you do that?”
“Do what?”
“Say the exact right thing.”
The corner of his mouth lifted slightly.
“I’ve had a lot of practice reading people who don’t want to be read.
” He reached out, unhurried, and covered my hand where it was wrapped around the mug.
One finger traced a slow, deliberate line along the back of it, moving over the raised edge of one of the scars like he was learning the topography of something that mattered. “Layla.”
I stilled.
“These aren’t from a car accident, are they?”
The question landed quietly, without weight or theater.
No accusation in it, no performance of discovery, no careful arrangement of his expression into something that signaled how sensitive he was being.
Only a fact, offered gently into the space between us, with room enough to confirm or deny or say nothing at all.
I stared at him. Wondered how much else he’d already assembled in that methodical mind of his. How long he’d been sitting with it, patient as he was with everything, filing pieces away and waiting for the right moment.
“They’re defensive wounds,” he said. “From a knife.” He kept his voice low and even, kept tracing that slow line along my knuckles like the motion itself was meant to steady me.
“And the training you have—that’s not merely a father teaching his kids to be careful, to be aware.
Not many women develop that level of skill without being military, or professional fighters, or—” He paused for a beat.
“Without having survived something that made them feel completely powerless and decide, down in their bones, that they would never feel that way again.”
“You’re way too perceptive.” My voice came out far rougher than I’d intended, scraped down to something unfinished and raw.
“I’m military intelligence. Hazard of the job.
” He looked at me steadily, and there was nothing clinical in it, nothing that reduced me to a case or a puzzle he was working through.
Just him, fully present, seeing me with the same quiet directness he brought to everything.
“I’ve spent twelve years hunting down the men who do that to people.
I know what it leaves behind.” His thumb moved once, slowly, across my knuckles.
“You don’t owe me your story. Not any of it.
Not yet. Not ever, if you don’t feel ready.
But I need you to hear something first.”
I waited, holding the mug, holding still.
“You are a fucking badass.” He said it simply, cleanly, like a fact he was reading off a page that had always been there.
“Whatever you went through, it didn’t break you.
It turned you into something harder and sharper, and stronger than you were before.
Something forged.” Those blue eyes held mine without flinching, without softening into something that wanted credit for its own kindness.
“And I want you to know that I see that. All of it. The scars and the reflexes and the way you fight and the way you’re sitting here right now holding yourself together.
And it’s not something I feel sorry for.
It’s one of the most remarkable things I’ve ever been close to. ”
This man.
He saw more of me than I’d shown anyone, maybe ever, without me handing any of it to him deliberately.
And he didn’t look at me the way people looked at survivors when they thought they understood—with that specific softness that was really pity wearing a kind face.
The gentleness that reached for you but saw you as fragile.
He looked at me the way he’d looked at me on the mats, across the distance of the gym floor with sweat on both of us and our breaths coming hard.
Recognition. Respect. And something warmer underneath both of those things, something that didn’t ask anything of me in return.
He didn’t see broken. He saw what the breaking had made. The tempered steel I’d become.
I set the mug down on the coffee table with both hands, carefully, like I needed the small ritual of it to steady myself.
I turned toward him, reaching up to take his face in both hands, slowly, telegraphing every inch of the movement, giving him all the time in the world to see what was coming and decide what he wanted to do about it. And then I kissed him.
Not the way we’d kissed before. Nothing like the hunger of the hallway, or the slow, deliberate language of the shower with steam rising around us and neither of us pretending anymore.
Not even like that gentle, domestic sort of kiss over coffee in the pale light of dawn.
This was something else entirely. Something quieter and deeper and harder to name.
Gratitude. Relief. Or the almost unbearable intimacy of being truly known by another person and finding yourself not diminished by it, but simply seen.
My hands cradled his jaw and soaking in the warmth of his skin against my palms, the faint rasp of stubble, the way he breathed in slowly and stayed perfectly still.
Receiving what I was offering without reaching for anything beyond it.
Not pressing, not angling, not redirecting it into something that served him better.
Just letting me lead. Letting me set the terms and the tempo, and the shape of the whole thing.
That, too, was a gift. After a night of my body reacting without my consent, nerves firing on someone else’s timetable, the choice of this—every millimeter deliberate, every beat entirely mine—settled into something low and solid in my chest, like ballast finally returning to a ship that had been listing too long.
I eased back eventually and rested my forehead against his, and neither of us spoke for a moment.
Koa had moved to his bed in the corner at some point. The cottage was quiet around us, just the sound of the wind off the water buffeting the windows and the distant muffled hum of the village going about its evening.
“Stay,” I said.
His hands had found my waist at some point, light and warm. His thumb stroked along my ribs. “Okay.”