13. Eva
EVA
I grab my phone, click it on, and the screen lights up the darkness.
Fuuuuuck.
It’s two in the morning, and I’ve been staring at my ceiling for the past three hours because my brain won’t shut the hell up.
Three hours of replaying the same day on a loop…the Molloy compound, Wolfe’s brothers, the conference table, the data, the kitchen, the sandwiches, Wolfe’s thumb tapping against the counter.
The way his voice rippled through me when he said, “I can’t stop noticing you.” The way his hand brushed mine in the hallway when we left, so light I almost convinced myself I imagined it.
Almost.
I drop my phone next to me, roll over, and press my face into the pillow to silence my groan.
This is bad. This is really, really bad.
Because the smart thing to do is stay in this bed, force myself to sleep, and wake up tomorrow with a clear head, clean boundaries, and the reminder that this man lied to me about who he was for weeks.
But my brain doesn’t give a rat’s ass about smart right now.
My brain cares about the look on Ronan’s face when Wolfe shut him down with one sentence.
My brain cares about the way Cillian said, “take care of my brother” like he already knew something I haven’t admitted to myself yet.
My brain cares about the fact that Wolfe Molloy sat in my kitchen and told me the truth when he could have kept lying, and when I told him to get the fuck out, he went.
He left. He didn’t argue. He didn’t beg. He just left.
Daniel would have argued. Daniel would have explained and justified and charmed and twisted until I couldn’t tell the difference between his bullshit and the truth. Typical gaslighting behavior. He’d make you feel crazy for being upset about the thing he did.
What an asshat.
But Wolfe didn’t do that. He sat there and took everything I dished out and then left when I told him to leave.
That’s the part I can’t stop thinking about, which is infuriating because it shouldn’t matter. A man who respects your boundaries after lying to you for weeks shouldn’t get a prize. That’s the bare fucking minimum.
But the bare minimum is more than anyone else has given me. Which is so depressing I could scream.
I kick off the covers, get dressed, and grab my jacket.
Because if nothing else, I have a solid track record for making really fucking stupid decisions.
I walk down the quiet sidewalk, the streetlights flickering overhead.
Wolfe’s light is on in his apartment. Of course it is. The man doesn’t sleep. I’m starting to think sleep is just another thing his brain decided was optional, like normal food, and alcohol, and facial expressions.
I shoot off a text from the burner once I’m at the top of the stoop.
You up?
Three gray dots appear almost instantly.
Yeah.
I type again.
I’m downstairs.
The door buzzes ten seconds later. I take the stairs two at a time because fuck the threat of elevators. Stairs are so much safer.
He opens the apartment door in a Metallica shirt and sweatpants.
No glasses. His hair is sticking up on one side and his blue eyes look tired in a way I haven’t seen before.
Not the analytical tired, the kind where he’s been staring at his computer monitor for too long.
This is the bone-deep kind that comes from carrying things your mind won’t allow you to put down.
I know that brand of tired. I wear it every freaking day.
“Hey,” I say.
“Hey.” He steps back to let me in.
I take a deep breath once I’m inside. I don’t know why, but the clean scent of fabric softener and dryer sheets makes me feel happy.
Comforted. Warm. There’s an empty bowl and spoon next to his monitor, which I don’t allow my eyes to linger on because I’m not here to work.
I walk toward the living room area, noting that the Cheerios box is on the counter, lined up with the edge.
I sink onto his couch for the first time. In the past, I’ve always taken the desk chair. The couch feels different. More personal. Like choosing it means something I’m not ready to name.
He sits at the other end, leaving about two feet between us.
Smart man.
“Can’t sleep?” he asks.
“Nope.”
“Me neither.”
“Yeah, but you never sleep,” I say.
“I sleep.” He brings a hand to the back of his neck and rubs it hard. “Just not well.”
“Since when?”
“Since always.” He leans back against the cushion. “My brain doesn’t have an off switch. It just runs. When I was a kid, my parents tried everything. White noise machines, weighted blankets, medication. None of it worked.”
“Your mom,” I say. “You never talk about her.”
“She died when I was thirteen. Cancer. It was fast.”
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I lost my parents, too. It really sucks to go through that loss.”
He rests his arm behind his head. “How’d your parents die?”
“Car accident,” I say, a lump lodging in my throat. I don’t usually talk about my parents. The accident was crushing since we were so close. I’ve never gotten over them being gone. “Tell me about your mom.”
“She was the buffer,” he says. “Between my dad and the rest of us. When she was alive, he was still himself. But she kept the worst of it in check.” His thumb taps against his knee. “After she died, there was nothing between him and us. Nothing between him and me.”
“What do you mean?”
“He wanted me to be something I wasn’t. Normal, I guess. Easy. A kid who played sports and made friends and didn’t take apart the television remote to see how the infrared signal worked.” He shrugs. “I wasn’t any of those things. And he took it personally.”
“Personally how?”
He fixes his piercing gaze on me. “You really want to know?”
“I’m sitting on your couch at two in the morning. Yeah, I want to know.”
He’s quiet for a second. His thumb taps faster.
“He tried to fix me. He set me up with specialists, therapists, different behavior programs. When those didn’t work, he tried other things.
Yelling. Punishing. Taking away the stuff I was obsessed with so I’d be forced to engage with the real world.
” His jaw tightens. “He broke a radio I’d been rebuilding.
A vintage one. I’d spent three months on it.
He smashed it on the kitchen floor because I missed a family dinner to work on it. ”
My chest hurts. Actually, physically hurts.
“After that, I stopped showing him things I cared about. I just did it all in my room with the door locked. He thought I was getting better because I stopped being weird in front of him.” A pause. “I wasn’t getting better. I was just getting better at hiding.”
Sweet Lord.
I’m looking at a man who learned to put on a mask before he learned to drive. He figured out that the safest way to exist in his own house was to stop being himself in front of the person who was supposed to love him the most and without question.
I get that. You learn what to hide and then you hide it, and eventually the hiding becomes so automatic you forget what was underneath.
“Your brothers,” I say. “Did they know?”
“Cillian knew. He’s two years older and we’ve always been close. He used to sit outside my door when my father was on a tear. He never said say anything, just sat there so I’d know someone was on the other side.”
That tracks. Cillian leaning against the doorframe, not because he wants to bolt.
Because he learned to be the person between the threat and his brother.
“What about Ronan?”
“Ronan was Dad’s pet project. His golden boy. He didn’t see what was happening to me because Dad made sure he didn’t.”
“And now?”
“Now Ronan runs the family, and he’s got the same instinct Dad had. He has to control everything and trust nothing. But Ronan…for as much of an asshole as he is, he’s not the vindictive bastard my father was. He’s just...” He searches for the word.
“Cold,” I say.
“Yeah. Cold.”
“But he listened to you today when you told him to back off.”
“Ronan listens to me because he can’t afford not to. I’m the one who keeps the systems running. I’m the one who sees things nobody else sees. He doesn’t like to depend on anyone. But he needs me.”
“That’s a shitty way to live.”
“It’s the only way I know.”
I stare at him. He’s sitting two feet away from me on a secondhand couch in an apartment that smells like a dry cleaner, telling me about a childhood that hollowed him out, and a family that needs his brain but doesn’t know what to do with the rest of him.
And he sounds so…logical. About all of it. There’s no emotion in his voice, and based on things he just told me, there should definitely be a lot of it.
“Wolfe,” I say, leaning forward, watching his thumb tap, tap, tap with lightning speed.
“Yeah.”
“The radio your dad broke. The vintage one.”
“What about it?”
“Did you ever rebuild it?”
He looks at me. Something flickers behind his eyes. “No.”
“Why not?”
“Because he broke it on purpose to hurt me. And every time I looked at the pieces, I felt that. So I threw them away.”
“That’s the saddest thing you’ve ever told me.”
“I’m aware.”
I don’t think about what I do next. My brain doesn’t give me a warning or a list of reasons not to. My hand just moves. I reach across the two feet between us and touch his arm.
He goes still. Completely, totally still. Like time is frozen. His thumb stops. His breathing hitches. After a few seconds, his eyes drop to my hand on his arm and stays there.
Three seconds. Four. Five.
“Eva,” he says in a husky voice.
“Don’t say anything,” I say. “Just... don’t.”
He doesn’t.
I crawl across the couch and kiss him.
It’s not smooth. I come at him from a weird angle because my body decided to do this before my brain mapped out the logistics of my position. For a hot second, I think I’ve made the biggest mistake of my life.
Then his hand comes up and grazes my jaw. Just his fingertips. It’s light, almost as if he’s checking to make sure I’m real.
And he kisses me back.
Slow. Careful. Methodical. The exact way he approaches everything. His thumb traces along my jawline and tingles explode over my skin. I feel it in places that have nothing to do with my face. My neck. My chest. My belly. The base of my spine.
Oh, holy shit, this man can kiss.
I should pull back. I should definitely pull back.
Instead, my hand slides from his arm to the back of his neck. His thick dark hair is soft between my fingers. He makes a sound, not quite a moan, but something that tells me he likes what I’m doing.
That sound destroys me.
His other hand finds my waist. He doesn’t pull me close.
Doesn’t grip me tight. He just holds me, his fingers pressing into the fabric of my shirt like he’s memorizing the shape and feel of me.
I shift closer in response. My knee is pressed against his thigh and there’s no space between us anymore.
His mouth is warm, and he tastes so fucking sweet…
like honey…and my brain is dissolving into static.
His hand moves from my jaw into the back of my hair.
His fingers tangle in it and a butterfly swarm erupts in my belly.
His tongue coils lazily with mine, electricity shooting to the ends of my hair.
For those minutes, the world narrows down to his mouth, and his hands, and the sound he made, and the heat building between us like something with its own pulse.
His thumb strokes the side of my neck. My whole body reacts.
I press closer, melting into him. His grip on my waist tightens…
just barely, just enough that I can feel the control he’s struggling to keep.
And knowing that he’s holding back makes me want to break through that barrier completely. I want to shatter the hell out of it.
I want to. God, I want to.
But then his hand slides to the small of my back.
The warmth of his palm scorches my skin and sends a jolt through me that’s so sharp it cracks through the carnal haze.
Not because it’s wrong. Because it’s right.
So freaking right and good. Because my body wants to lean all the way in, and my brain just caught up to what my body’s been doing and it’s screaming at me to stop.
Not because of him. Because of me. Because with Daniel, I let myself fall without question. And then, I ended up in a courtroom first, jail second.
I pull away. Breaking that kiss takes everything I have. Every muscle in my body fights me on it, and the sound that comes out of my mouth when I break the kiss…a ragged breath that sounds suspiciously like a whimper…is embarrassing as hell.
His eyes are open. Of course they are. Wolfe Molloy doesn’t close his eyes during a kiss because closing his eyes would mean missing data.
But they look different than I’ve ever seen them. They’re dark, unfocused, and glazed, like his brain just short-circuited.
“You’re staring,” I whisper. My lips are still close enough to his that I can feel his breath.
“I can’t help it.”
“It looks like your brain just went offline.”
“Yeah.” He swallows. “It’s a little slow to reboot.” His hand is still on the small of my back. Neither of us has moved to remove it.
My heart slams against my ribs. My skin is on fire everywhere he touched me. His hand on my back is burning through my shirt. I want to push it lower, and I want to run out the door, and I want to kiss him again until neither of us can think straight.
“I should go,” I say, clearing my throat.
“Yeah.” His voice is rough. Rougher than I’ve ever heard it.
I don’t move.
“Eva.”
“Yeah.”
“If you don’t move, I’m going to kiss you again. And I’m not sure I’ll stop.”
“Is that a warning or a promise?”
“I don’t know. That’s the problem.”
I stare at him. His hand is still on my back. His eyes are still dark. And every cell in my body is at war with every thought firing in my brain.
I pull his hand away from my back. I hold it for a second. His pulse throbs in his wrist. It’s fast, hard, matching mine.
“Not yet,” I say.
He nods. Once. He doesn’t argue. He doesn’t push. He watches me stand up and doesn’t say a single word to make me stay.
Goddammit. That’s the thing that makes me want to stay the most.
I walk to the door and stop with my hand on the handle. Because apparently that’s my thing now.
“Wolfe,” I say, turning to look at him one last time.
“Yeah.”
“The radio. The one your dad smashed.”
“Yeah.”
“You should rebuild it.”
He doesn’t say anything. But his thumb starts tapping again, and this time I think it means something different.
I walk out into the hallway, my heart punching a hole in my chest, and close the door behind me.
Letting out a shaky breath, I lean against it and press both hands over my mouth because my lips are still buzzing, and my skin is still burning, and my heart is beating so hard I can hear it in my ears.
I just kissed a Molloy. I kissed him and it was fucking incredible. His hand was in my hair and on my waist and on the small of my back, and he drew a sound out of me that I will never admit to making.
I wanted to stay so badly that leaving felt like tearing open my own chest.
It also felt like the most honest thing that’s happened to me since before prison.
I’m so fucking screwed.