James
NINETEEN
Safety isn’t a place. It’s the first person your subconscious searches for in the dark.
A sound drags me from sleep. Not loud enough to wake most, but I’m finely attuned due to years of living in heightened stress. Every muscle tightens. Every sense reaches to decipher what is causing the sound and where it’s coming from. Friend or foe?
Silence settles over the house again, and my brain races, pulling various nefarious reasons for the disturbance, but in all likelihood knowing it’s going to be my one and only guest, Stephanie.
I glance at the glowing clock. 2:17 a.m.
The monitors beside the bed glow steadily, every camera feed exactly as I left it. The perimeter lights remain undisturbed. Motion sensors show nothing outside.
Another creak from the hallway. What if it’s not Stephanie? I slide from the bed without switching on the light and retrieve the pistol strapped beneath the bedside table. My footsteps are silent against the wooden floor as I inch open the door.
The sound comes again. Slow and unhurried.
I round the corner, calculating sight lines, and freeze.
Stephanie stands halfway along the hall.
I lower the gun, and for a second, I simply stare.
She’s wearing my black Oxford I abandoned over the back of a chair earlier today.
I hadn’t even noticed it had disappeared.
The sleeves swallow her hands, and the hem brushes the tops of her thighs, leaving a strip of skin before her legs are covered by thick cream knee-high socks.
Her hair looks as if she fought a pillow and lost.
She looks... comfortable. Rumpled. Devastating.
The thought lands with force. She shouldn’t look comfortable wearing my clothes. She certainly shouldn’t look this… No. Nope. I shut that train of thought down before it gathers speed.
Her eyes are open, but they’re wrong. Unfocused. Looking through the darkness instead of at it.
“Stephanie?”
Nothing. No flinch. No wary glance over her shoulder. No careful count of exits she unconsciously does every time she enters a room. She drifts past me as though I don’t exist. She reaches the polished wooden arch leading back to the living space.
“You forgot to lock the back door again,” she murmurs, the words sleep-soft and not meant for me.
I swipe a hand down my face, and my shoulders droop.
Sleepwalking. Again. Christ. I replace the gun in its hiding place and return to find her brushing her fingers over the marble countertops in my kitchen.
Every instinct tells me to wake her, but logic reminds me not to startle someone whose mind isn’t entirely here.
So I follow, keeping enough distance that she won’t walk into me if she turns, but close enough to catch her if she falls.
She pads around the kitchen and flips the kettle on. Her fingers curl around the handle before she pauses, frowning faintly. “I can never remember where you keep the big mugs. The ones built for caffeine fixes, not pretty photos,” she says, a smile tugging at her mouth.
It’s small. Sleepy. Entirely unguarded. I’ve never seen her smile like that, and this woman smiles a lot.
But this unguarded and unfiltered one steals something from the room and gives something precious back that I don’t think anyone else could replicate.
It makes my house feel warmer than it has any right to at two in the morning, like midnight sunshine.
“I moved them,” I answer.
She nods as though that makes perfect sense. “I know.” She glances toward me. “You always rearrange things.”
Her gaze lingers on my face. For one impossible second, it feels as though she’s peering into me, like she has the power to reach inside my chest and cradle my charred soul as if examining for fissures of light.
She smiles again. “There you are.” My pulse stutters. “You disappeared.”
I don’t answer because I’m not convinced she’s talking to me. She steps closer until only a couple of feet separate us. In daylight, she avoids my space. Under the cover of darkness, she seems unaware of etiquette rules at all.
“I knew you’d come back,” she whispers. Her hand lifts, and I wait for her to pause when she realizes it’s not Prince Charming in front of her but the Big Bad Wolf. Instead, the tips of her fingers brush lightly against my jaw.
The touch lasts a few heartbeats. Gentle. Absent-minded. The kind of touch given without fear. Without calculation.
My heart thunders, and my pulse pounds in my ears.
Her hand falls away as she sighs. “I don’t like sleeping. That’s when they find me.” The warmth leaves the room when her smile disappears, as though someone has blown out a candle. “Hunter keeps saying it wasn’t my fault.” She stares at the floor. “I only wanted them to stop moving.”
A long silence stretches out, and my breath locks itself in my lungs. I’m frozen in place as she shares a part of her soul.
“They said there were six.” Her brow pinches. “If only that were true. Safety is a human concept we dreamed up to help us sleep at night. That’s the reason I don’t sleep. I’m not safe. Not really.”
The words are both confusing and clarifying, and I’m formulating a thousand possible explanations, each more horrifying than the last. An ache echoes beneath my ribs with her belief that safety doesn’t exist. Somewhere along the way, the world convinced her it was temporary, something that could be snatched away without warning, and I don’t know whether I hate the men responsible or the people who allowed her to believe that more.
“Come on,” I mutter, keeping my voice even. “Let’s get you back to bed.”
She nods without hesitation, and for a moment, I think it’s going to be that simple.
She turns away from the kitchen and heads down the corridor with unhurried steps, the oversized shirt brushing against her bare thighs every time she moves.
My gaze catches on the sight before I can drag it elsewhere, and irritation flares, directed at myself.
It’s a shirt. My shirt. The same one that’s hung in my closet for years without incident until tonight when it chose violence.
She walks straight into my open bedroom without hesitation, making me frown. “Stephanie.” No response. “Wrong room, sweetheart.”
She crosses the room as though I haven’t spoken, folds back the covers on the opposite side to where I sleep, climbs into my bed, and curls onto her side before pulling the blankets up beneath her chin with the contented sigh of someone who has finally reached exactly where she intended to be.
I remain rooted in the doorway, wondering whether this is some elaborate punishment for every questionable decision I’ve made. “Stephanie,” I try again, my voice a little harder this time as I move closer to the bed. “You’re in the wrong room.”
She makes a sleepy sound that could generously be described as acknowledgement.
“This is my bed.”
“I know.”
The answer comes so easily, it catches me off guard. “You do?”
“Mmhm.”
I should wake her. No, that’s wrong. You aren’t meant to wake sleepwalkers.
I’ll give her an hour, then move her. I don’t want her to feel mortified in the morning or to spend the rest of my life pretending this never happened because preserving her dignity matters infinitely more than my own discomfort.
She burrows a little deeper into the pillow, the sleeve of my shirt hanging over her hand as she tucks it beneath her cheek. “You smell safe,” she whispers.
Everything inside me stills. I’ve spent most of my adult life making sure people looked at me and saw exactly what they should. Dangerous. Capable. Evil incarnate. A man who could be relied upon to do things decent people wouldn’t dare.
“Safe” was never part of my equation.
Yet here she is, with every defense stripped away by sleep, choosing that word without even knowing she’d spoken it.
The temptation to wake her disappears. Not because I want her in my bed. That would be the worst possible decision either of us could make. But because for the first time since she arrived, she’s sleeping and lacks that frown that suggests she’s preparing to run.
I don’t have it in me to take that away.
Not tonight. I glance at the open door and back at the head of dark curls sprawled across my pillow.
I should sleep in her bed, or maybe on the sofa .
But sleep won’t come tonight. Not with her words turning over and over in my mind.
Every time I close my eyes, I hear them all over again.
You smell safe.
The irony isn’t lost on me.
She’s asleep in my bed because she wandered into the wrong room, and I’m standing here wondering when exactly I stopped seeing her as a problem and started worrying about things that have no business being inside my head.
She would never see me as safe if she knew a fraction of the things I’ve done. She doesn’t know the decisions I’ve made or the lines I’ve crossed. If she did, she wouldn’t borrow my shirts or call me safe. She’d be sleeping with one eye open.
I pull the covers a fraction higher over her shoulder before stepping back. She curls a little tighter around the pillow, and something about the sight settles the argument I’d been having with myself.
Waking her would be for my benefit. Letting her sleep is for hers. The decision makes itself.
I slip from the room, returning a minute later with my laptop tucked beneath one arm and a spare pillow under the other. The shopping website is still open from earlier, and before I can close the window, my eyes snag on the basket.
Thirty-one bottles of nail polish.
I stare at the number. What on earth is she doing with thirty-one bottles of nail polish? Sixteen was the tip of the iceberg. The corner of my mouth threatens to betray me.
Thirty-one.
I counted twice in case I’d accidentally developed an inability to distinguish between nail polish and shampoo or whatever the hell a coconut hair mask is. I cannot be held responsible if she walks around with a hollowed coconut on her head.
The reason nail polish matters to her is lost on me, but excitement filled her face when she hovered over those colors earlier, as though she wasn’t choosing cosmetics at all but reclaiming pieces of herself she’d lost.
With a shake of my head, I dismiss the warning suggesting I reduce the quantity before completing the order. If she wants thirty-one bottles, she’ll have thirty-one bottles. It’s a strange hill to die on. Stranger still that I’m willing to defend it.
The browser disappears as I open a secure search on Stephanie King.
Within a few seconds, the results populate, and a rogue thought occurs to me that I’m crossing a line she hasn’t given me permission to cross.
Then I remember the conversation in the kitchen, the fear stitched through every sentence she’d spoken without realizing she was speaking at all, and I tell myself this isn’t curiosity.
No, it’s due diligence for a woman who needs protecting from both her past and her future.
If I’m going to keep her alive, I need to understand what tried to break her in the first place.
The articles aren’t in circulation, having been quashed under piles of legal tape and the deep pockets of parents with everything to lose.
But nothing is truly deleted in this age.
As the saying goes—in the online world, once it’s uploaded, its footprint is there forever.
I have to dig deep, but I come up with a dozen articles telling the same carefully sanitized story. A promising university student. Six accused men. An ongoing investigation. A traumatized victim.
Victim. The word feels inadequate after watching her stand in my kitchen convinced safety is a fairy tale adults invented to help children sleep.
I dig deeper, moving past the headlines and into less restrained local reports, widening my search for anything linked to the college and its students around that time. I zero in on one article that catches my attention.
Student dies following hospital admission.
It happened two months after the attack. The report attributes the death to a single-vehicle crash caused by the guy driving under the influence.
I read the sentence twice. Then a third time.
Something about it feels... convenient. Too vague.
Too carefully written. The crash wasn’t high-speed, just careless.
A needless loss of a future for a man who had everything to live for.
He had no priors, not for this, anyway. But upon further digging, I realize he should have a record as long as my arm for violence and assault against multiple girls.
I dive beneath the firewalls and pull up his post-mortem report.
The toxicology tracks, and then I find that the coroner changed his report several times over a few days.
In his early report, he notes that the injuries are not typically consistent with a crash at thirty miles per hour. But that got erased.
I search the man’s name instead. Keiran Fisher. The name rings a small alarm bell, but I can’t place why.
A second report appears in a local paper. The emergency room team claimed he arrived at the hospital with catastrophic head injuries that the police refused to discuss.
My attention sharpens as I follow the life of the second accused. One year later, he was dead. The third died a few months after. Their families play it down as terrible, coincidental tragedies.
But there are three names and three obituaries. Three different official explanations that somehow all avoid explaining what actually happened.
I lean back against the side of the bed and let Stephanie’s words replay inside my head. They said there were six. But only three paid.
The answer arrives almost immediately—Hunter. An older brother with military training and every reason in the world to hunt down the men who destroyed his sister.
My gaze drifts toward the bed. If they weren’t already feeding the worms, I would hunt these fuckers down right now.
But why did she say six?
Stephanie sleeps, one hand curled beneath her cheek, completely unaware that somewhere between borrowing my shirt and stealing my bed, she’s handed me another mystery to solve.
I lower the laptop onto the floor before disappearing into the hallway for a blanket. The sofa is twenty steps away. The guest bed even closer. Neither feels like the right place to be tonight. If she sleepwalks again, I want to hear her before she reaches the kitchen.
I spread the blanket across the floor beside the bed, prop the pillow against the wall, and settle back. The floor is unforgiving, and my neck will hate me in the morning. Neither concern survives more than a passing thought.
Because if the nightmares come looking for her again, they’ll have to step over me first.