Chapter 5
five
. . .
Elias
I call in a favor with the chief of nursing.
One phone call, casual, over coffee. “The Sweet girl shows real promise in thoracic. I’d like her scheduled on my service more consistently.
The continuity would be good for her training.
” A lie wrapped in professional concern.
What I’m really doing is rearranging the chessboard so that Mia is never more than fifty feet from me at any given time.
It works. Her schedule shifts. She’s on my service four days a week now, trailing behind me during rounds, taking vitals on my post-ops, assisting in my procedures.
Close enough that I can smell her shampoo—that faint vanilla thing she uses—through the antiseptic hospital air.
Close enough that when I turn to dictate notes, she’s there, her head bent over a chart, the curve of her neck exposed, and I have to clench my jaw to keep from pressing my mouth to that vulnerable stretch of skin.
The residents notice. Of course they notice. They’re doctors. They’re trained to observe.
One of them—Keller, third-year, decent hands, too friendly—stands too close to Mia during morning report. Leans over her shoulder to point something out on a chart, his chest nearly brushing her back. I watch from across the nurses’ station, and something cold and territorial uncoils in my gut.
“Keller.” My voice cuts through the chatter. Everyone goes quiet. “The Henderson post-op needs a neuro check. Now.”
He straightens, confused. “But Dr. Thorne, I just?—”
“Now.”
He goes. Fast. The other residents exchange glances. They’ve seen this before—Dr. Thorne’s infamous iciness—but there’s something different about it now. Something sharper. More specific.
Mia catches my eye across the room. Her cheeks are pink. She knows exactly what that was.
It happens again with a med student who offers to walk her to her car after a late shift.
I intercept in the parking garage, materializing beside her like some possessive ghost, and the med student nearly trips over his own feet backing away.
“I’ve got it from here,” I say, and it’s not a suggestion.
In the elevator, Mia presses herself against my side, her hand finding mine in the dark between floors. “You’re being obvious,” she whispers.
“Good.” I squeeze her fingers. “Let them be obvious about staying the fuck away from you.”
At night, in the penthouse, I claim her with a ferocity that borders on desperation.
Every night. Sometimes twice. I bend her over the bed, grip her hips, and drive into her with long, deep strokes that have her crying out into the pillows.
I pull her into my lap on the sofa and fuck her slow, watching her face as she comes, my hand wrapped around her throat just firmly enough to feel her pulse hammering against my palm.
“Going to fill you up,” I growl against her ear, my hips snapping, my cock swelling inside her. “Going to pump you so full of come it takes. Going to watch your belly round with my baby, Mia. My good girl. My perfect little one.”
The breeding talk pours out of me unchecked.
It’s not performative. It’s primal. The truth of what I want—her swollen with my child, my ring on her finger, my name replacing hers on hospital badges and mortgage documents and every other piece of paper that defines a life.
I tell her these things while I’m buried inside her, and she clenches around me and comes with a sob that sounds like surrender.
Afterward, I hold her. Tuck her against my chest, stroke her hair, press kisses to her forehead.
The domestic rhythm of it—cooking together, falling asleep tangled, waking to her warm and soft in my arms—becomes its own kind of addiction.
For a while, I let myself believe it’s sustainable.
That I can have this—have her—without costing her the future she’s earned.
The illusion shatters on a Tuesday night, three weeks into our new schedule.
We’re in bed. The city lights cast soft patterns across the ceiling. Mia is curled against my side, her head on my chest, her fingers tracing idle patterns on my sternum. She’s been quiet all evening. Thoughtful. The kind of quiet that precedes something heavy.
“I’m scared,” she says finally. Her voice is small. Raw. “Not of you. Of…everything else.”
I go still. My hand, which was stroking her hair, pauses mid-caress.
“If this blows up—if someone finds out, if there’s a rumor, if HR gets involved—I lose everything, Elias.
My career. My license, maybe. Six years of nursing school and all those loans, and for what?
Because I couldn’t keep my hands off my attending?
” She swallows. I feel the movement against my ribs.
“And I’d lose you too. The only man who’s ever looked at me and seen… me. Not a student. Not a body. Me.”
The words land like physical blows. Each one finds a vulnerable spot and digs in.
“I worked so hard,” she continues, and there’s a tremor in her voice now. “You know how hard I worked. You watched me. You saw the late nights, the studying, the way I pushed myself. And now I’m risking it all for—” She stops. Doesn’t finish the sentence.
For you. The unspoken words hang in the air between us.
I sit up. The sheets pool around my waist. The bedside lamp casts half my face in shadow, and I’m grateful for it—grateful she can’t see the full extent of what’s happening behind my eyes.
Because for the first time since I caught her in that break room, since I carried her to my office and tore down every barrier between us, I am genuinely, comprehensively afraid.
Not of losing her. Though Christ, the thought of it is enough to make my chest constrict.
I’m afraid of being the reason she loses everything else.
My hands are shaking. Actual, visible tremors running through fingers that have held beating hearts steady.
I look down at them, at these instruments I’ve built a career around, and I think: these hands could destroy her.
These hands, which have touched her with such reverence, such hunger, could cost her every dream she’s ever had.
The cold, brilliant surgeon—the man who has never shown weakness, never admitted fear, never cracked under pressure—feels something fracture behind his sternum.
“Mia.” My voice doesn’t sound like mine. It’s rough. Wrecked. “I would never let that happen. I would burn this hospital to the ground before I let anyone take your career from you.”
It’s the wrong thing to say. Too dramatic. Too possessive. Too much of the same intensity that got us here in the first place.
She sits up too, pulling the sheet around her chest. Her eyes are wide, luminous in the low light. “That’s not—that’s not the point, Elias. The point is that the risk exists. It’s real. And every day we keep doing this, the risk gets bigger.”
I reach for her. Can’t help it. My hand finds her cheek, and she leans into the touch, and the contradiction of it—her fear and her trust, existing in the same woman, directed at the same man—splits me down the middle.
“What do you want me to do?” I ask, and it’s the most honest question I’ve ever asked her. Not what do you need, or what can I give you, but what do you want me to do—the man who loves you, the man who might ruin you—to make this right?
She’s quiet for a long time. Her hand covers mine where it rests against her cheek.
“I don’t know,” she whispers. “I just know I’m scared. And I need you to be scared too. Not for me. With me.”
The request undoes me. Completely. Because she’s right—I haven’t been scared. I’ve been hungry. Obsessive. Possessive. I’ve been rearranging schedules and growling at residents and fucking her every night like a man trying to outrun the consequences.
I haven’t sat with the fear. Haven’t let myself feel the weight of what’s at stake—not just for me, but for her. For the brilliant, dedicated nurse whose future I am holding in my hands as literally as I hold her body.
I pull her against me. Tuck her head under my chin, wrap my arms around her small frame, and hold her like she’s something precious and fragile and mine. My heart is hammering against my ribs. My hands are still shaking.
“I’m scared,” I admit into her hair. The words feel foreign in my mouth.
I haven’t admitted fear to anyone in fifteen years.
“I’m terrified, Mia. Of being the reason you lose everything you’ve worked for.
Of looking at you five years from now and seeing regret where there should be joy.
” I press a kiss to the top of her head.
“But I’m also terrified of losing you. And I don’t know which fear is stronger. ”
She holds me back. Her arms around my waist, her face pressed to my chest, and the trust in that gesture—the absolute, unwavering trust of a woman who has every reason to run—shatters something inside me I didn’t know was still intact.
“Then we figure it out,” she says simply. “Together. Like everything else.”
I hold her tighter. Breathe her in. And for the first time since this began, I let the fear exist. Not as something to outrun or overpower, but as a reality to navigate—together, carefully, with the same precision I bring to everything else.
Except precision has never been my strong suit when it comes to her.
When it comes to Mia, I am all hunger. All possession. All the feral, desperate need of a man who has found the one thing he cannot live without.
And that, perhaps, is the most terrifying thing of all.