CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
RAVEN
There are moments in a man’s life that divide everything into before and after.
I had always imagined mine would arrive at the end of a blade, beneath the weight of another body, or with the deafening crack of a gunshot echoing through some forgotten warehouse while another name was carved into the ledger I carry inside my head.
Instead, it has arrived wrapped in the smallest, whimsical woman I had ever known.
She fits against me as though the space between us had spent years waiting to disappear, her hand still resting against my face so effortless it has unsettled something I had mistaken for permanence.
I had become accustomed to blood. To the smell of it drying beneath my fingernails.
To the quiet acceptance that every room I entered would one day become another memory I wished I could bury.
Violence had never asked before making itself at home inside me.
It had simply arrived on my doorstep, settled beneath my skin and refused to leave.
Yet, standing here, with her lips pressed softly against mine, our breaths slowly surrendering to one another, I discover that even the darkest parts of a man can be brought to their knees and so completely undone by a woman far more than violence ever could.
I can’t survive her. Survive the feel of her lips on mine.
Every instinct I’ve ever turned into a weapon deserts me with breathtaking ease, leaving behind nothing but a man afraid to move for fear this moment will dissolve the second I do.
I’ve imagined this. The thought crashes into me with unfamiliar force, colliding headlong with the reality of her soft lips against mine until every stolen fantasy I’d buried over the last week fractures beneath the weight of this single moment.
This isn’t softer than I’d imagined. It’s deeper.
More consuming. More fucking devastating.
I lose myself so completely in the quiet certainty of her choosing me that I forget every promise I’ve ever made to myself.
Even if this is all she ever gives me. Even if, when this kiss ends, she remembers who I am.
The things she’s seen. The things she assumes I’ve done, and assumes correctly, and decides to run.
I can’t let her run.
Not from me.
Not now. Not tomorrow.
Especially when she’s supposed to be dead.
Because I already made my choice.
The moment I looked into her eyes for the first time in two years I knew I couldn’t do it yet.
I stepped onto a path from which there has never been any returning.
Every lie I’ve told since then has been for her.
To keep her alive for just a little longer.
The orders I’ve ignored. The job I couldn’t bring myself to finish for the first time in my life.
They all lead to here. To this kitchen. To this woman standing in my arms as though the world has never once taught her to fear what I am.
She doesn’t know it yet, but somewhere beyond these walls are people who believe her to be dead already, and if they discover the truth, they’ll not only finish what I refuse to start, but they’ll come for every person who stood between them and the life they believe has already ended.
I’m covered in the blood of the man whose organs were sent in place of hers.
The ones expected to arrive at the address Thomas sent me because I couldn’t bring myself to take her life without first getting to know the woman I was being asked to erase.
I told myself that was all it was. Curiosity.
Professionalism. A final act of due diligence before carrying out the inevitable.
I lied.
I never imagined this would actually happen.
Not to me. It never has before her, and it will never happen after her, because there is one thing that has been so abundantly clear to me in the past four years since the day I first saw her wandering around my graveyard, talking to the bones that rot beneath the soil. There will only ever be her.
Whether I realized it then or not is irrelevant because the truth has been there all along.
The moment she reached for the blood on my face instead of recoiling from it.
The moment she chose me. Everything else ceased to matter.
If the poison that is this world insists on her dying, then I will gladly follow her into the afterlife, because I’d happily leave this place behind knowing she’s not here.
Knowing she’s on whatever other side will greet me.
I don’t believe in heaven, fuck, I don’t believe there is a God at all, not with the horrors of the hell on earth has to offer.
But wherever she goes after this, after I finally follow through with what I was ordered to do, wherever her soul comes to rest.
That’s where you’ll find me.
Because I refuse to spend an eternity, if eternity even exists, searching for her the same way I spent the last four years watching over her from the shadows.
But for now, we have this moment. One stolen from fate.
One borrowed from tomorrow. One that belongs to no one but us.
I surrender to it with the same quiet reverence she offered me, lifting one hand with painstaking care until my fingertips brush the curve of her jaw as though I’m asking permission all over again, my thumb settling beneath her chin with barely enough pressure to keep her close while the other finds the small of her back, tangling in her long black hair and drawing her toward me one hesitant inch at a time.
She comes willingly, the soft sigh that escapes her dissolving against my mouth before either of us can claim it, and I feel the last fragile distance separating us disappear beneath the weight of a choice neither of us is trying to take back.
The kiss deepens not through urgency, but through slow discovery.
I commit every fleeting sensation to memory, the tentative way she leans into me, the faint tremble that passes through her shoulders before melting away beneath my hands, the hesitant brush of her fingertips as they slide from my jaw to the back of my neck as though she’s reassuring herself that I’m real.
I trace the delicate curve beneath her cheekbone while the other hand remains pressed against her back, drawing her closer by fractions instead of inches, allowing her every opportunity to pull away.
She never does. Instead, she presses into me further, closing what little distance remains between us until there’s nothing left separating our bodies except our breathing, growing frantic with each second that passes.
I answer her with equal care, tilting my head slightly, lingering rather than taking, learning rather than claiming, even though every bone in my body wants me to do just that.
Every movement is cautious, like we’re both afraid too much haste might shatter the miracle we’ve somehow found ourselves standing inside.
She presses her body against mine, her courage growing with every second, her fingers threading into the hair at the nape of my neck as though she has finally stopped questioning whether she belongs here and has decided, for one stolen moment, that she does.
She’s unravelling me, and I surrender without resistance, allowing her to guide the kiss wherever she wants it to go, following every gentle shift of her mouth, learning her in the only way she’ll let me.
There is no demand hidden in her touch. No hesitation anymore either.
Only trust, unfolding one careful heartbeat at a time, and I meet it with the same patience she’s unknowingly taught me over the past week, refusing to rush this.
Her small frame settles lightly against mine, and I feel the quiet exhale that escapes her.
My hands remain exactly where they are, resisting every selfish instinct to hold her tighter, the instinct building somewhere deep inside me that begs for more. More of her.
She’s the first to pull away, and it takes me a second before I realize I’m not breathing.
Her lashes lift slowly, revealing eyes so impossibly blue they seem to catch every flicker of light lingering within the room.
She simply studies me with an expression full of wonder, one I do not deserve, but welcome all the same.
I can feel the imprint of her kiss still resting against my mouth, my thoughts scattered beyond recognition, every carefully constructed wall inside me reduced to little more than rubble, leaving me standing before her with dazed bewilderment.
This woman. My little ghost has breathed life into me and she doesn’t even know it.
Neither of us speaks. Words feel painfully inferior now, incapable of carrying the weight of what just happened.
Just when I think she’ll walk away, that she’ll regret ever touching me.
Ever knowing me, she reaches for my bloodied hands.
Her fingertips slip between mine, not bothered by the crimson staining my skin.
She doesn’t wipe it away. She simply closes her hand around mine and gives the gentlest tug.
“Come with me,” she whispers, and like a lost fucking puppy, I follow.
I’d follow her into the mouth of hell if she asked me to.
She turns first, never once releasing her grip on me, guiding me through the quiet house with unhurried steps.
Does she know what she’s doing? Doing to me?
Stripping away carefully placed layers of the man I’ve spent years forcing myself to become, replacing him with someone who has begun wanting things he has absolutely no right to want?
My chest tightens with a feeling so unfamiliar to me I don’t even attempt to name it.
Naming it would make it real. And if it’s real, then so is everything waiting beyond it.
The order. The lie. The life I borrowed for her knowing full well I’d have to answer for it eventually.
For now though, she keeps walking, and I keep following, every step carrying me farther from the man I was when I walked through the front door only moments ago, covered in another man’s blood. Someone dangerously willing to lose everything… if it means keeping her.
The house seems to pulse beneath our feet, bearing silent witness to what’s happening here. I’m not so sure I even know myself. But the ghost before me seems to.
I’ve never been nervous before. Not about anything.
Not walking into an execution. Not being the one carrying it out.
Not staring down the barrel of a gun knowing only one of us will be leaving the room alive.
But this? This is different. She leads me up the staircase as though she’s done it hundreds of times before, her fingers still laced through mine.
It feels like the most natural thing either of us has done all week.
“I used to picture you, you know?” she says, her soft voice breaking over the silence and the chaos that is my mind. She doesn’t turn around, but I know she’s waiting for an answer as she takes one step at a time, guiding me upstairs.
“You have?”
“I didn’t know your name or even if you had one, but I pictured you here while I was away.”
Away.
Not gone.
The distinction catches my attention more than it probably should.
I’d always assumed she belonged to the village beyond the cemetery, slipping through the trees whenever I lost sight of her.
Vanishing as quietly as she’d appeared. I found myself wondering where she went most of the time.
Where she came from. Then again, I’d also spent four years thinking she was a ghost, so maybe I didn’t think about where she might be from nearly enough.
“What made you think about me?”
That was a stupid thing to say, and before I can try and rephrase, she speaks.
“I think…” She worries her bottom lip between her teeth for a moment, looking over her shoulder at me for the briefest of seconds, searching for the right words to say as she turns back around and continues down the hallway until we come to a stop at my…
bedroom door. Her fingers loosen around mine, her eyes lifting to the weathered timber before a soft flush creeps across her cheeks.
Like it has finally occurred to her where she’s led me.
A nervous smile teases the corners of her mouth, and for the first time since she kissed me, she almost looks… shy.
“I think…” She lets out the smallest breath of laughter, shaking her head at herself. “I’ve spent so long pretending this place existed that I sometimes forget it actually does.”
She looks up at me then, her expression carrying the same wonder she’d worn downstairs.
“You’d bring me here. Away from the outside world.” Her cheeks are flushed pink, and I realize that’s a nervous tell of hers. “Claim me as your own and in ways no one else can.”
My throat tightens and I lose all sense of everything as I hear her words. I am trained to read people. To know every tell. Everything there is to know about a person. Yet, this woman. This strange, perfect, beautiful woman has me all over the damn place.
“You want me to claim you?” My breathing picks up, and I’m suddenly aware of the blood covering my skin and clothes.
I no longer trust my own instincts. Every certainty I’ve ever possessed deserts me the moment she looks at me, replacing years of discipline with something so dangerous to me.
Something no training could have prepared me for.
Something I now know I was never meant to survive.
Her.