Chapter 25
Nadia POV
The radiator hissed against the floorboards, a dry, rhythmic sound that kept time with the winter wind brushing the frosted cedar shingles outside.
Through the tall bedroom windows, the midnight sky was the color of slate and crushed ink.
I lay on my side in the center of the mattress, my ear pressed directly against the bare expanse of Killian’s chest. Beneath my cheek, his heart beat in a slow, heavy cadence—forty-five thumps a minute, steady as an anvil, vibrating through his sternum into my own ribs.
His left arm was looped securely around my waist, his broad, calloused palm resting flat against the small of my back, holding me flush against the radiating furnace of his body.
He had fallen asleep an hour ago, his jaw finally slackening against my dark curls, his breathing deepening into an unhurried rhythm.
I couldn't sleep.
A dull, persistent fatigue hung behind my eyes, heavy and strange, accompanied by a faint flutter of lightheadedness that had lingered in my throat since noon. I had chalked it up to skipping breakfast and spending seven straight hours staring at biomechanical torque matrices in the library annex.
My fingers rested on his ribs, the tips tracing the faint, pale ridges of old contact scars etched into his skin.
Twenty-four hours ago, he had come through the front door of this house looking like a man who had barely survived a riot.
I had felt the savage, violent tremor wracking his shoulders when he hauled me off the rug.
I had heard the raw, bleeding desperation in his voice when he buried his face in my throat and begged me never to leave him.
He had refused to tell me what had happened in the arena underpass, hiding behind that silent, stone wall he used to protect everyone around him.
He was bleeding in the dark to keep the wolves away from my door.
A sharp, tight ache swelled behind my breastbone, making my throat contract on a dry swallow.
I couldn't let him do it alone. If this fortress we were building was going to stand against the storm, I couldn't hide behind my academic armor while he took all the hits. I had to give him the pieces of myself I had spent my entire life burying beneath honors grades and clinical charts.
My fingertips slid upward, tracing the two-inch jagged surgical line across his right collarbone.
Killian stirred.
A low, gravelly sound rumbled deep in his chest. His heavy arm tightened around my waist, his palm pressing with possessive warmth into my hip, hauling me half an inch closer before his eyelashes fluttered open.
* * *
In the blue-gray moonlight, his dark eyes were hooded, cloudy with sleep, but the focus in them locked onto my face in half a second.
"You're awake, Gregory," he rasped.
The gravel in his voice was thick, dragging across broken stone, vibrating against the side of my head.
"I couldn't sleep," I whispered, resting my chin on his chest, looking up into the hard, beautiful angles of his jaw.
Killian shifted, propping his upper body up on his left elbow, the mattress groaning beneath his weight.
His right hand came up, broad and calloused, his palm cupping the side of my face.
His thumb, rough from hockey tape and weight bars, brushed slowly across my cheekbone, catching the warm skin beneath my eye.
"Your head hurting again?" he murmured, studying the shadows beneath my lashes.
"No," I said, my voice barely louder than the clicking radiator.
I hesitated, my throat tightening, the old, shameful panic rising in my esophagus like bile. I dug my fingers into the cotton of the dark navy sheet, willing my voice not to shake.
"Killian," I breathed.
"Talk to me, sweetheart."
The command was soft, unhurried, loaded with a terrifying patience that stripped away my ability to deflect.
"I'm terrified of being ordinary," I whispered, the confession tearing out of my chest, tasting of years of silence.
Killian didn't interrupt. His thumb continued its slow, hypnotic circle on my cheek, his dark eyes unblinking, holding mine in the gloom.
"My dad worked thirty-one years at the Duluth dry docks," I said, the words spilling faster, my lungs burning with the pressure behind my sternum.
"He lost half of his index finger when a gantry cable snapped on an iron barge.
He came home every night smelling of sulfur, burned slag, and grease that was ground so deep into his skin he couldn't wash it out.
When I got into Barrow, he sold his spare welding rig and drained his retirement fund to pay my first semester's tuition. "
A hot, stinging tear slipped from the corner of my eye, tracking down my temple.
Killian’s thumb caught the moisture instantly, smoothing it away with firm, unyielding friction.
"He told me not to come back with a wrench in my hand," I choked out, my fingers knotting into the sheet until my knuckles clicked.
"And every single day since I set foot on this campus, I've felt like an imposter.
I work until my eyes bleed, I memorize every formula, I act like a machine with a clipboard, because I'm terrified that if I'm not brilliant...
if I'm not perfect... then his sacrifice was for nothing.
I'm terrified that without my grades, I'm just a burden.
Disposable. Someone you leave behind when the season ends. "
The room fell into absolute silence.
The wind threw a spray of dry snow against the window glass, but beneath the duvet, the air had turned to pure, suffocating heat.
Killian didn't offer a hollow platitude. He didn't tell me I was being dramatic.
His jaw locked, a muscle ticking in his cheek, his dark eyes flaring with a fierce, terrifying intensity that made my breath catch in my windpipe.
He shifted his weight, rising higher over me, his massive chest blocking out the moonlight until I was enveloped entirely in his shadow. His large hand slid down from my cheek, his fingers curling firmly around the back of my neck, his thumb anchoring beneath my chin.
He applied an upward pressure, gentle but absolute, tilting my face until I had nowhere to look but straight into the black fire of his pupils.
"Look at me, Nadia," he commanded.
The voice was a low, guttural vibration that rumbled from the bottom of his lungs, hard as forged iron.
"Look at me," he repeated, his thumb pressing into the rapid, wild beat of my pulse point. "Good girl. Listen to my voice."
My lips parted on a shallow, trembling gasp, my gaze locked onto his.
"You listen to me, and you remember this every time your head tries to lie to you," Killian rasped, each word deliberate, heavy enough to dent the floorboards.
"You are not an imposter. You are the smartest, most lethal person who has ever walked into that university.
You looked at a six-foot-four enforcer who broke people for a living, and you didn't flinch.
You stood in front of Martin Cole and burned him to the ground with three sentences. "
His hand tightened in my curls, his forehead lowering until it rested hard against mine, his breath washing over my mouth in hot, ragged surges.
"Your old man didn't sacrifice to buy an honors degree, Nadia," he rumbled, his voice shaking with a raw, brutal conviction that shattered the last stone of my defense.
"He did it because you're his daughter, and you're worth every drop of sweat he ever bled.
Just like you're worth every hit I take on that ice. "
A broken sob tore from my throat, my hands reaching up to clutch the thick muscles of his upper arms.
"Killian—"
"You are not disposable," he snarled softly, his lips brushing the wet tracks on my cheeks, drinking in the salt of my tears with fierce reverence. "You are not a burden. You are everything in this house. You are everything in my life. You hear me? Everything."
* * *
The dam inside my chest gave way completely.
The tears came in a hot, silent rush, washing away four years of exhausting perfectionism, four years of carrying the weight of the shipyard on my spine.
Killian didn't let me hide.
He lowered his body over mine, settling his massive two-hundred-and-twenty-eight-pound frame gently between my parted legs, bearing his weight on his forearms so he shielded me without crushing my ribs.
His mouth moved across my face with agonizing slowness, pressing lingering, burning kisses to my eyelids, to the bridge of my nose, to the trembling corner of my jaw.
Every touch was an unhurried, sacred claiming.
"Good girl," he murmured against my throat, his rough stubble grazing the sensitive skin above my collarbone, sending a long, sweet shiver straight down into my pelvis. "Let it go, sweetheart. I've got you."
My hands slid over the broad expanse of his back, my fingernails digging into the dense muscle beneath his shoulder blades. The heat passing between our bodies was overwhelming, a deep, grounding fever that chased the cold from every corner of my mind.
He slid his hands down my arms, his calloused fingers locking through mine, pinning my hands to the pillows beside my head just as he had during the blizzard.
He moved forward.
The contact was deep, slow, and saturated with an unshakeable reverence that stole the breath straight from my lungs.
A ragged, breathy sigh escaped my lips, my hips rising instinctively to meet his cadence, welcoming the heavy, familiar weight of him sinking into my body. The friction was slow-burn fire, an unhurried tide that bound our nervous systems together in rhythmic, heavy pulses.
Killian groaned into my neck, his large frame shuddering with the restraint he was forcing on his own raging hunger.
"Stay with me, Nadia," he rasped, his hips rocking forward in a slow, devastating rhythm that made my toes curl into the sheets. "Feel this. Tell me who you belong to."
"You," I wept softly against his cheek, my legs wrapping around the thick curve of his hips, pulling him deeper, anchoring him to the center of my soul. "I belong to you, Killian."
"Damn right," he rumbled, his mouth capturing mine in a slow, deep kiss that tasted of tears, heat, and absolute surrender.
He loved me through the dark with an unyielding, protective devotion that left no room for doubt, no room for fear, and no room for the ghosts of my past. With every slow, deliberate stroke, he drove the unworthiness from my blood, replacing it with the heavy, unshakeable certainty of his claim.
When the crest finally broke over me, it wasn't a violent storm; it was a long, warm wave of pure release that rippled through my body in trembling, breathless spasms.
Killian buried his face in the crook of my neck, his own release tearing from his chest in a low, broken growl, his arms wrapping like iron bands around my back as he held me through the shuddering aftermath.
He stayed inside me, heavy and warm, his forehead pressed against my throat, our breathing falling into a synchronized, exhausted cadence.
I tangled my fingers into the damp dark hair at his nape, listening to the radiator hiss in the corner, feeling the steady, indestructible rhythm of his heart beating against mine.
The world outside was a battlefield waiting to detonate.
Scouts. Blackmailers. Debts.
None of it mattered in this bed.
I closed my eyes, safe inside the fortress of his arms, knowing that whatever came next, we were forged in the exact same fire.