Chapter 14
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Rafael leaves at six in the morning, which is the only decent thing he's done since he got here.
The sky is pale grey bleeding into rose at the edges where the sun is just starting to push through, that particular early light that makes everything look washed out and temporary.
I'm already on the porch when he comes out, coffee in my hand, watching the tree line the way I've been watching it since last night, when sleep stopped being something my body was interested in.
I hear him before I see him, his boots on the porch steps, his bag hitting the wood.
"Early," I say.
"Long drive." He drops into the chair beside me and stretches his legs out, looking out at the same tree line I've been staring at. "Also I figured if I stayed for breakfast I'd have to watch you two not look at each other for another two hours and I don't have the patience."
I say nothing.
"The guy from yesterday," he says, no preamble, voice low. "I took care of it last night. Figured you had enough going on to handle that too."
I look at him. "You should've told me."
"I'm telling you now. It's handled. Clean." He meets my eyes. "You're welcome."
"Thank you."
He nods once, then leans back and looks out at the same tree line I've been staring at, and the silence between us is the comfortable kind, the kind that fifteen years of friendship builds without you noticing.
"If you do something stupid," he says eventually, still looking at the trees, "without talking to Matteo first — and I mean before anything happens, before you touch her, before you say a word to her — the probability of him killing you goes from maybe to definitely. " He pauses. "You understand me?"
"Rafe—"
"I'm serious." He turns and looks at me directly, no smirk, no amusement, nothing but the weight of what he actually means. "Talk to him first. That's all I'm saying."
The door opens behind us.
Isabella appears in the doorway, hair loose and tangled from sleep, wearing my shirt again over the pajamas Rafael brought, her feet bare on the cold wood of the porch. She looks between us with those sharp eyes that don't miss anything, taking in Rafael's bag, the car keys in his hand.
"Am I interrupting?"
Rafael's expression shifts immediately, the serious look dissolving into something warm and easy. "No, Princess. Come here."
She steps out onto the porch and he stands, and there's a moment where she's small next to him and he looks at her with something almost brotherly, something uncomplicated that I watch with my coffee in my hand and my jaw tight for reasons I don't examine.
"Did you sleep well?"
She makes a sound that could generously be described as affirmative, pressing her lips together, and he laughs.
"That good, huh."
"Rafe." She stops, and something in her voice shifts, going quieter, more careful. "I'm sorry. About yesterday. When you touched my wrist and I—" She shakes her head. "I'm not scared of you. I want you to know that. It's not about you, I just can't always stop the—"
"Hey." He cuts her off, not unkindly, and shakes his head once. "You don't have to explain anything to me. And you absolutely don't have to apologize." He says it simply and completely, no performance in it. "Not for a single second. Understood?"
She looks at him for a moment and then nods, her shoulders dropping slightly with the relief of it.
"Good." He picks up his bag and grins at her, the easy Rafael smirk sliding back into place. "You're in good hands here." He glances at me briefly. "Allegedly."
She laughs, genuine and soft, and walks him to the car while I stay on the porch. I watch Rafael say something to her that makes her shake her head and smile. He gets in the car. The engine turns over and the gravel crunches under the tires and then he's gone, disappearing around the bend.
Just us. Again.
Isabella comes back up the steps and stands beside me, looking out at where the car disappeared, and the morning quiet settles around us.
"Does it bother you?" she asks.
I look at her. "Does what bother me?"
"What you did yesterday. The man." She keeps her eyes forward. "Do you feel anything? Remorse?"
"No," I say.
She nods, like she expected that and was checking whether I'd lie. "Violence scares me. It always has, even growing up in this life." She turns and looks at me directly. "But yours doesn't. Your violence doesn't scare me and I've been trying to figure out why."
Something moves through my chest, quiet and uncomfortable.
"It should," I tell her. "It should terrify you. The fact that it doesn't is a problem."
"Why?"
"Because I don't lose sleep over the things I've done.
I don't feel remorse or guilt. I don't lie awake going over faces.
" I hold her gaze because she deserves the unvarnished version.
"I feel nothing. And a woman who isn't afraid of that is a woman who's going to end up too close to something she can't come back from. "
She's quiet for a moment, the pale morning light catching her face.
"Why did you kill them?" she asks. "Every person you've ever killed. Why?"
I don't answer immediately.
"Because they were a danger," I say finally. "To Matteo. To the people I protect. To—" I stop.
"To people you love," she finishes quietly.
The word sits between us.
I don't confirm it. I don't deny it. I just look at her standing there in my shirt with her bare feet on the cold porch and feel the full weight of how much trouble I'm in.
"That's what scares me," I say, quieter than I mean to. "That you're not afraid of me. It scares me more than anything else."
She holds my gaze for one long moment and then she turns and goes inside.
I stay on the porch another while.
I spend the rest of the morning making myself useful.
The perimeter gets checked twice. Both guns cleaned and reassembled. The sticking latch on the back door gets fixed. The sensor grid gets reviewed. I run through every exit route from the cabin twice more in my head even though I have them memorized well enough to do it in my sleep.
I do all of it methodically and carefully because staying methodical and careful is the only thing between me and the disaster of last night, of her hands fisted in my shirt and her gasp against my shoulder and her body pressed against mine in the amber kitchen light.
I don't go near her.
After last night I cannot go near her without finishing what I started, so I keep my distance and I keep busy and by two in the afternoon I've run out of things to fix.
I sit at the kitchen table with my phone and a cup of coffee and check messages from Matteo. Routine updates. Nothing new from the O'Rourkes. Everything quiet on the outside while the inside of this cabin is anything but.
Upstairs, I can hear Isabella moving around.
Then I can't hear her anymore.
The cabin goes quiet in a way that is somehow louder than the sounds were, a specific charged silence that I don't know what to do with, and I sit there with my coffee and stare at my phone and tell myself not to think about what that silence might mean.
I think about it anyway.
My cock is hard and has been since I woke up this morning and this is not helping.
I push back from the table.
I need to move. I need to do something with my body that isn't sitting in this kitchen thinking about her upstairs in the silence, in the warmth of the room above me, probably lying on my bed with her hair spread out and her skin—
I stop that thought and kill it.
I go outside onto the back deck and do push-ups until my arms give out, then sit-ups until my core burns, then I just sit on the deck with my back against the wall and the cold air on my face and breathe until my pulse comes back to something manageable.
It takes longer than it should.
I go back inside and upstairs to the bathroom, turning the shower on cold, standing under it with my hands braced on the wall and my jaw locked and my body refusing to cooperate.
It doesn't help.
I've been hard since last night. Since the kitchen and her hands in my shirt and the sound she made when my teeth grazed her neck, and three sets of push-ups and a cold shower are apparently no match for four years of wanting someone you can't have.
I wrap my hand around myself and think of her.
I can't stop myself. I've stopped stopping myself.
I think about the towel in the hallway, the way the moonlight caught the curve of her collarbone, the way she looked at me with those hazel eyes like she already knew what I was thinking and wasn't afraid of it.
I think about her hands fisting my shirt in the kitchen, about the small broken gasp she made against my shoulder, about the way she leaned into my palm when I touched her face.
About the dream version of things, the version that doesn't stop. Her on my bed in the dark, her hair spread out, saying my name in the way she never actually says it, open and wanting, no walls, no history, just her.
My jaw tightens and my hand moves faster and the water is cold and none of it matters because she's right there, twenty feet away, existing in my space, wearing my clothes, ruining me completely and thoroughly and without even trying.
I come hard with her name locked behind my teeth, my forehead dropping to the cold tile, my whole body shuddering through it.
Afterward I stand there for a long moment, breathing.
Still wanting her.
That's the part I hadn't accounted for. That it doesn't actually help. That I can take the edge off and she's still there underneath it, still woven into every thought I have, still the thing my whole body orients toward like it's been doing since before I had the sense to fight it.
I turn off the shower.
Dry off. Get dressed.
When I finally go back downstairs, she's there, waiting.
Wrapped in a towel.
Fuck me! I just managed to calm myself.
Just a towel, tucked in at the chest, her hair loose and down, a small bottle of something in her hand and bare feet on the hardwood, and she looks at me from the top of the stairs with an expression I recognize now, the one that means she's already made a decision.
"The Jacuzzi’s heated," she says.
I look at her. At the towel. At her face, where it's significantly safer.
"I know."
"I'm going in." A pause, deliberate. "You could join me. If you wanted."
Every functioning cell in my brain lines up to say no. Matteo's face appears in my head. Rafael's voice. The conversation on the porch this morning and every reason I've been cataloguing for four years.
"Yeah," I say.
She blinks.
Actually blinks, like she's not sure she heard correctly.
"Yeah?"
"Give me five minutes."
She stares at me for one more second, her expression changes so quickly that she couldn’t hide it before she turns and heads back down the hall.
I stand at the bottom of the stairs alone.
Yeah.
What the hell is wrong with me.