23. Caleb
TWENTY-THREE
Caleb
I woke to the sound of buzzing cutting through sleep and dragging me up too fast, my head heavy and wrong, my body slow to catch up as awareness came in fractured pieces.
I was draped across Novak, half on top of him, my arm locked around his waist as if I’d been holding onto him in my sleep, and for a second, nothing made sense—why I was here, why he was here, why everything felt too close. I stopped fighting it somewhere along the way.
I don’t remember when.
The alarm kept going, and then Novak moved violently, a full-body reaction as he surged up and twisted, taking me with him, the momentum flipping us so hard the air punched out of my lungs.
His hands closed around my throat, tight and crushing, and I didn’t have time to react before his fingers locked in, the pressure immediate and brutal, cutting off air and thought in the same instant as his weight pinned me down, his face above mine but not seeing me, not recognizing anything in front of him. This wasn’t Novak.
“Stop—”
It came out broken, dragged through a throat that was already closing, my hands coming up on instinct to grab at his wrists, but he didn’t respond, or register the resistance as anything other than more threat.
He was too big and too strong for me to fight off, my hands slipping on his wrists as I tried to force space between us and failed, strength meaning nothing against the full, unrestrained weight of him.
“Please, stop.” My vision sparked at the edges, body shifting from fight to something more desperate as I tried again, voice rough and raw as I forced it out through the pressure.
“Leon—”
That did it.
Something changed in his expression, a fracture in whatever he was seeing, whatever he thought was happening, and I held onto that, forcing the name out again even as my lungs burned.
“Leon, stop.”
His hands released as if he’d been burned.
Air slammed back into my chest, harsh and painful as I sucked in a breath that didn’t feel like enough, my body curling instinctively as the pressure vanished and left everything raw in its wake.
Novak scrambled off the bed, his breathing uneven in a way I had never heard before, eyes wide and not quite focused as he dragged a hand over his face.
I stayed where I was for a second, hand at my throat, lungs dragging air, heart hammering hard enough to make everything else feel distant.
What the hell?
“Don’t move,” he snapped, holding out a hand to stop me.
I pushed myself up at least, coughing once, hand still at my throat as I dragged in another breath that burned all the way down.
“Yeah, that’s not happening,” I rasped, forcing the words out past the raw scrape of his grip, anger rising fast now that I could breathe again.
He froze for a fraction of a second. “It was a dream response,” he said, voice low. “You were in contact range when I came out of it. My body reacted before I had full awareness.”
“That’s one way of putting it,” I shot back, my throat tightening again, this time from anger instead of lack of air. “Another way would be you nearly killed me.”
“I stopped.”
“Are you okay?” I asked, leaning forward despite the warning in his posture, despite the part of my brain that was very aware of how fast he could move.
My heart was still racing, the bruising ache at my throat reminding me how close I’d come to real danger—not from whoever we were hunting, but from the man standing in front of me.
For a moment, we stared at each other; the tension was sharp, all the old survival instincts crackling between us.
I wanted to reach out, but I hesitated, unsure if comfort would go over as comfort right now or as a threat.
Still, I pressed on, letting my voice soften. “It’s all right. You’re here. I’m here.” My own hands shook a little, so I curled them into fists and dragged in a slow breath. The air between us was thick, uncertain.
After a long, uneven silence, I took a step closer, searching his expression for any sign of guilt or regret. There was only raw honesty. “You didn’t mean to,” I said quietly. “I know that.”
He blinked, jaw grinding shut, and for the briefest second, something vulnerable flickered in his eyes.
Not weakness, not fear—just the dizzying impact of almost losing control and nearly hurting me.
I reached out, tentative, and squeezed his forearm, grounding us both. “We’re okay. I’m still here.”
He nodded, once, and seemed to steady himself as if hearing it out loud made it more real.
His jaw tightened. “You interrupted the response.”
I let out a short, disbelieving breath that edged too close to a laugh and didn’t land right. “Great. Good to know the strategy if you go for my throat again.”
“I shouldn’t have stayed close enough that you were within reach.”
That stopped me.
For a second, I stared at him, trying to decide if he’d said that or if I was still half in the dream.
“Are you serious right now?”
“Yes. I said I would never hurt you, but my baseline response on waking from a threat scenario is immediate neutralization of the closest perceived risk,” he continued, eyes on me now, focused, locked in.
“I was asleep,” I said flatly. “On you.”
“I am aware.”
“Then maybe, if we’re doing this thing, you need to adjust your baseline.”
“That is not how conditioning works,” he said, but there was a shift under it now, something less absolute, something that hadn’t been there before. “What I can do is control the environment to reduce the probability of it happening again.”
“By what, not sleeping with me?”
“By not sleeping.”
I stared at him again, trying to figure out if he was joking, and immediately dismissed the idea because Novak didn’t joke, not like that, not ever.
“That’s not a solution.”
“It is the most effective one.”
“It’s a stupid one.”
Silence dropped between us for a second, my pulse still running too fast, both of us locked in the aftermath of something that could have gone very differently.
“You said my name,” he said then, quieter, the focus of it shifting, narrowing in a way that made my stomach tighten for a completely different reason.
“Yeah,” I said, slower now. “Seemed like a good idea at the time.”
“It worked.”
“That doesn’t make it less messed up.”
“No.”
Another beat of silence.
“I would never intentionally hurt you, Caleb,” he added.
“And I’ll always remember that if I wake up with you choking me, that I say Leon and you wake up,” I joked, but my trying to lighten the situation wasn’t sitting well with Novak.
“Okay,” he said, in all seriousness.
I wanted to touch him, reassure him, tell him everything was okay. I couldn’t fight this attraction to him, wanting to care, and I didn’t fight it. Not even then.
“Tell me about the nightmare.”
“Brother Matthias was already dead when she entered,” he said after a while, voice flat, stripped of anything unnecessary, reduced to facts.
“Sister Mary Agnes activated the collars on entry. Full compliance response. Gabriel engaged at close range with a knife. There was a struggle. Sister Mary Agnes severed Patrick’s carotid artery during the exchange.
He bled out in seconds. Gabriel, Raphael, and I were restrained by the collars until the control unit was destroyed.
Then Gabriel attacked me, always wanted to hurt me, and I strangled him unconscious.
I should have finished the job.” He stared at me.
“But I’m glad I didn’t then, because I might have done now. ”
“So, you managed to get away from the convent,” I said with caution.
“No.”
“What happened?”
“Then the military arrived,” Novak said.
“Novak—”
“Right now, shower, then coffee, food.” He rolled out of bed and headed for the bathroom.
I should’ve gotten up and walked away but instead I watched him leave.
Somewhere along the way, I’d stopped fighting whatever this was.
I couldn’t remember when. Only that Novak had shifted from problem to priority, and to someone I couldn’t walk away from.
That should have been a problem. It wasn’t.
Compassion and affection flooded me.
My psychopathic teddy bear had needed help, and I hated he’d been in that kind of pain, and I hadn’t been there to stop it.
Jesus Christ. I dragged a hand over my face, exhaled hard. Did that make my brain broken? Probably. Didn’t change the fact that it was true.
Any sane version of me would take the out he’d handed me, and tell myself this was temporary insanity, but that felt less true every time he revealed another part of himself.
And fuck, I understood what that meant.
This wouldn’t be normal. No balance, no half-in. If I chose him, it was all of it—the control, the obsession, the way he’d fold me into his world until there wasn’t a clean edge between where I ended and he began. I dragged a hand over my face, exhaled hard, and considered that I could still leave.
That was the thing. He’d let me.
Not because he didn’t want me—but because somewhere in that wired, ruthless head of his, my choice mattered enough to factor in.
That should have made it easier, but it didn’t.
Because even knowing exactly what I was stepping into, every sharp edge of it, every way this could go wrong?—
I didn’t want out.
I didn’t want safe . I wanted him.
I should have ended this already.
Instead, I wanted more.
I was falling for him. I could even picture a life with him.
Tell him.
He came out of the shower, and I was so damn tempted to drag him back to bed and explain that somehow, he’d hooked himself into my heart, but I didn’t know how to say it. I sat up and stretched as he dressed, then waited until he faced me so I could carry on this conversation.
A klaxon cut through the room, my phone buzzing hard on the bedside table with a proximity alert that jolted me.
I grabbed for the gun, fingers closing around it even as my balance caught up with me.