Chapter 14
chapter
fourteen
It was the gentleness that undid me. Not the violence, not the animal hunger—those I’d expected.
The real danger was in the way he held me now, tucked beneath his duvet, my head cradled against his heartbeat.
His breath stirred the crown of my hair, his hand spread over my rib cage like he was keeping me in one piece.
Nobody warned you about this—how a man could wreck you one minute, then stroke your scalp in the dark until your demons fell silent. How a body could be both a weapon and a shelter, sometimes in the same minute.
The sensation of him was everywhere—the weight of his arms around me, the warmth of his bed, the sated throb between my thighs.
He thumbed at the collar of my T-shirt, an old swim team shirt from Emory.
Tugging lightly, he asked, “Why are you wearing clothes?”
“I can’t sleep naked,” I mumbled into his chest. “It feels…weird.”
Luka huffed out a quick, silent laugh that vibrated through my cheek. “You were naked in front of dozens tonight at the club, but not here in my bed?”
“It’s not that,” I said, knowing how absurd it sounded. “I just…I’ve never been able to sleep without something between me and the sheets.”
He ran his palm down my spine—slow, possessive. “You’re strange.”
“Takes one to know one, cowboy.”
“Cowboy? That’s the second time you’ve called me that.” Luka hooked a leg around me, pinning me under his thigh. “Is it because you like it when I ride you?”
I swatted his chest. He caught my wrist midair and pressed it over his heart, fingers laced through mine.
A faint curve touched his mouth. “Or maybe,” he murmured, his palm flat against my ass, “you need a firm hand to break you.”
“Don’t flatter yourself.” I shifted closer into him. “I don’t break that easily.”
He pulled back, just enough to study my face. “No?” One eyebrow shot up, teasingly skeptical.
“Okay, fine.” I rolled my eyes, heat crawling up my neck. “Maybe a little.”
The quiet that followed charged the air, like right before a lightning strike.
I traced the contour of his collarbone, the smooth stretch of skin over muscle. “But something broke you, didn’t it?” The words tasted dangerous, but my tongue released them anyway. “Luka…what happened to you?”
He didn’t move. I waited, counting his heartbeats hammering under my hand. Rain ticked at the window. Wind warbled the old glass.
“What makes you say that?” he asked. Flat tone. No inflection.
“Because you were ready to let me go tonight,” I said. “You kept giving me a way out. Like you truly expected me to take it.” I pulled back and studied him, shifting my focus from one crystalline blue eye to the other. “Who the fuck hurt you?”
He exhaled, then drew me closer, like he needed to keep me in place for the words to come out. “Who the fuck hasn’t?” He held me so tight I thought his arms would imprint my outline into his chest. “Where I’m from, you learn fast not to trust anyone.”
“And where’s that? You’ve never actually said.”
His jaw shifted against my skull, as if he was weighing the value of honesty against whatever poisons still seeped through his veins.
“You never guessed,” he whispered.
I answered him with silence, letting him come to me in his own time.
Finally, he let out a breath. “Technically, it doesn’t exist anymore. But on the current version of the map…” He trailed off, foreign syllables curling on his tongue. “Croatia.”
“And before?”
He was quiet for a long time, fingers tracing my spine, one bone at a time—like counting beads on a rosary.
“Before,” he said, “it was Yugoslavia. Not that it matters. When a country dies, the map just gets redrawn by people who never bled for it.” His voice stayed even, but an old weariness threaded through it.
“The flags changed. The borders moved. The names on the buildings switched overnight. One morning you woke up Yugoslav, the next you were Croatian, and the next…” He sighed. “No one knew what the hell they were.”
He raked his hand up my back again, slowly. Not sexual. Steadying.
“Do you know what happens to a country when it breaks apart?” he asked.
I shook my head.
“They erase you. Not violently. Bureaucratically.” His mouth brushed my hair.
“Birth certificates disappear. Bank accounts freeze. Property deeds mean nothing. Your father’s name isn’t on any government record anymore, so legally, he never existed.
And you—” He swallowed. “You become whatever the new state decides you are. A statistic. An inconvenience.”
“Did you…” I pressed my lips together. “Did you fight in the war?”
He laughed, but the sound was flat. “I’m not that old.” A pause, the air charged. “My father fought. Died in it. My brother too, later. Landmines don’t give a shit about truces.”
My stomach hollowed out. “God, Luka. How old were you?”
“Twelve.” He said it like he was ordering a drink, the syllable cold and neat. “Old enough to know not to cry about it.”
I wanted to say something, anything, but nothing in my arsenal could touch the wound he’d handed me. “I’m so sorry,” I said anyway, and immediately hated the smallness of it.
He shook his head. “Don’t be. It’s the price of independence, apparently.” The bitterness cut like a blade.
I tried to picture him at twelve—gaunt, half-grown, already learning to calculate rooms, exits, threats. No wonder he controlled everything. It was the only thing he’d ever been able to do.
“What about the rest of your family?” I asked, softer.
“It was only my mother and me left.” The words were blunt, final. “I wanted to work, but she insisted I stay in school. Apparently, she thought I was bright. That I had a future.” He barked a laugh, but there was no mirth in it.
“She must have been proud of you,” I said, and I meant it—not as comfort, but as the only thing left worth saying. My hand, still caught in his, squeezed tight enough to blanch knuckles.
He went quiet, thumb skating my wrist. “Jobs were scarce,” he said finally. “And widows from the wrong side don’t get sympathy.” His lips hovered at my hairline, as if measuring out the next confession by the taste of my skin. “She did what she had to do. Any way she could.”
He waited for me to flinch. I didn’t. There was no shame in Luka’s voice—just the iron calm of someone who’d long ago made peace with the math of survival.
“She kept a roof over us. Food on the table. Paid my tuition in cash. Even saved enough for the papers and train fare out.”
“Where did you go?”
“We didn’t.”
Luka cinched his body tighter around me, like I was drifting and he meant to keep me moored.
“She had a…client. A fixer. Said he could get us out—passports, visas, everything. He took her savings upfront. Every kuna.” His voice hollowed out. “He told her to meet him at the train station.”
A cold certainty filled my chest before he even said it.
“It was a setup,” Luka said. “She never came back. And no one was stupid enough to ask what happened to her.”
I opened my mouth—what I meant to say, I’ll never know—but Luka’s hand found the base of my throat. Not choking, just enough pressure to stop me.
“Don’t,” he said. His eyes went bright and glassy.
I fell silent, my pulse tripping under his palm.
He let go—not with a jerk but a slow, measured flex.
“I learned to take care of myself. Fast.” He rolled onto his back, bringing me with him until my cheek rested over his heart.
“I looked older than I was, so no one questioned it. I learned how to lighten pockets on the trams. Learned even faster that people talk when they think no one is listening. Information is worth more than cash.” A small shrug under my hand. “The rest was easy.”
I wanted to say I understood, but I didn’t—not even close. My suburban traumas were safe by comparison—the kind they made cheesy Lifetime movies about. This loss was a different species altogether.
He exhaled hard through parted lips, the sound low and derisive. “And then I turned eighteen.”
“What happened at eighteen?”
“Mandatory military service.”
“Get caught pickpocketing?”
He shook his head. “I told you, mila. All men in Croatia were required to serve. At least back then.”
“Did you fight?”
Another shake. “No. That was the early 2000s. The war was already over. The country was still limping, but the shooting had stopped. It was mostly drills, border patrols, and cleaning up what was left.” He glided his palm down my back. “But…it’s where I discovered computers.”
I propped my chin on his sternum, watching the slow drag of breath expand and hollow his chest.
His eyes flicked past me, focused somewhere in the past. “We had two options—fix trucks or fix computers. I was shit at mechanics.” He gave a faint huff.
“I ended up repairing network cables, then writing code. When they realized I could get around firewalls, they moved me to counterintelligence—monitoring message boards, scraping email servers, that sort of thing.”
I pictured a teenage Luka hunched over a dying desktop, blue-lit by CRT glow, fingers flying while the barracks slept behind him.
“So you were a government hacker.”
He shrugged. “It was more boredom than espionage. But it got me out of latrine duty.” He traced slow orbits on my lower back. “They kept me in an extra year. After that, I was discharged and came to London for university.” A beat. “I’ve never been back.”
There was a lull—like vibration left in the air after a bell had rung itself out.
Rain pelted the window, the glass trembling with each gust of wind.
I pressed closer, sliding my palm up to the hollow at the base of his throat.
I wasn’t sure what to say that wouldn’t sound like therapy or pity. So I kept it simple.
“Thank you for trusting me with that.”
He didn’t move. Just breathed in—a fill so deep it must have stung.
Then he rolled us, pinning me to the mattress with his body and the full weight of his attention. His hands—usually so sure, so precise—hovered for a moment before settling at my jaw, palms warm and careful against my face.
He looked at me—not through me, not at the idea of me.
At me.
The blue of his eyes—normally glacial, impenetrable—had gone almost liquid with the unguarded exposure of finally being seen.
He bent his head and kissed me. Just a brush at first. Careful. Testing. Lips that had spoken violence and ruin hours before. I felt the hunger, held in abeyance, an undertow beneath the surface. But he didn’t take.
He lingered.
The taste of him—heat, salt, a faint metallic edge—settled into me, cellular.
The kiss was a translation, a language he’d never spoken aloud.
I softened under his hands, letting him give whatever he didn’t know how to say.
When he finally pulled back, he thumbed my cheekbone, eyes fixed on mine, as if bracing for the rebuke. His breath stuttered, and in the gap I felt the force that kept everything locked down, that kept him from saying more.
So I said it for him.
“I’ve got you.”