Xavier
“Well, that’s fucking unsettling,” I groan, leaning back in my seat as Yale ends the call. Silence is tense in my arms, and I pull her against my chest. “So, we bury it. We know, Envy knows, and that’s it, right?”
Zayden shakes his head. “The recruit that killed Gio had a phone in his room, and made calls after the kill. Envy tried to trace them and got nowhere.”
Fucking great. I want to rant about the danger that puts us in, but Silence is already pale enough.
“Then we do what we can, right? The chances of it getting back to us are slim. We’ll deal.
We put Gio on ice, we deal with the Morelli family if it comes to it.
Otherwise, we carry on as normal.” My brothers nod, but Silence remains quiet. “Wanna fix up my stitches again, Q?”
While Yale works and Zayden checks in on Monica’s security, Silence and I return to the medical room. No morphine this time, thank God, but also no easy conversation either. She’s barely said a word.
Sitting on the stool and cleaning up my wound again, she’s tight lipped. A small line between her brows gets deeper with every passing second, and I have a feeling if I could read minds, hers would be a blur of total fucking panic.
“You do this a lot in work?”
She looks up at me. “Hm?”
“Stitches and stuff.”
“Oh, yeah. A lot.”
She continues with her task, and I look around the room as if inspiration for conversation will pop up. I don’t talk to Silence. I don’t really talk to anyone. Flirting isn’t my thing, and conversing is low on my list of priorities.
“Do you like … being a nurse?”
Silence shrugs. “Most of the time, yeah. It’s stressful. I like the people I work with, though.”
“Steffi?”
She raises her gaze to me. “How do you know Steffi?”
“You talk about her to Yale. I listen, sometimes. Not in a weird way.”
Her smile is small. “Yeah, like Steffi. And Monica, too.”
God, this is hard. It’s so much easier to annoy her. But if this, whatever this is, goes beyond this safe house, we can’t base our relationship on bickering.
Relationship.
Shit.
“Can you teach me?”
Silence finishes and peels off her gloves. “Teach you what?”
“Stitching. Stitches,” I say, pulling my shirt down. “You said I did a good job the other day. Maybe I could learn some shit.”
She visibly brightens. “Really?”
“Yeah. Can’t hurt to know stuff like that.”
She seems suspended in excitement, like she doesn’t know where to start. Hopping up, she dashes over to cabinets and starts collecting supplies.
“We can practice on bananas! The skin is thick and—” She dumps things into a shallow basket. “We can race each other!”
I grin. Shit. So this is what Silence likes. Teaching people. I have a lot to learn, so maybe we won’t have to argue to get by.
“Come on.” She takes my hand and pulls me to my feet. “This is going to be so much fun!”
It’s not fun.
It’s difficult.
An hour later, we’re in the kitchen, and I’m on my second banana, a frown permanently fixed on my face, my tongue between my lips.
“Human skin is not this thick,” I grumble.
“You’d be surprised,” Silence says, watching my technique. She’s a good teacher. She showed me once, explained each step, and has let me do my own thing. Not once has she taken over, which I’m glad of, because I will get this fucking right.
“I’ve cut enough people open, Silence. This banana is subhuman.” I drop the stitch. “My hands are too big. This is fucking annoying.”
Yale is sitting at the kitchen table with his laptop and watches with amusement, but he doesn’t tease me, so that’s something.
Silence smiles. “You’ll get it. It just takes practice.”
“I’m cramping.” I stretch out my fingers.
“But are you having fun?”
“I know you are.”
She flushes. “I really am.”
Seeing her like this makes me wonder how I kept to myself for nine years. Maybe it’s because she was always standoffish in my presence, and now she’s looking at me like I’m more than her annoying brother-in-law.
“How about I teach you something now?” I suggest.
Her smile almost knocks my heart clean out of my chest. “Like what?”
Twenty minutes later, we’re outside, a sniper rifle in front of us. We’re lying on a tarp and have a blanket over us, but Silence is still shivering as she looks down the sight. Our breath fogs, and her nose is pink, but she remains focused.
“What exactly am I shooting? Don’t say deer. I won’t shoot a deer.”
“I’m not a fucking monster, Q,” I say. “Just a tree.”
She frowns. “A tree? That’s easy.”
“It’s really not.”
“Pah.” She wiggles her body as she presses her eye to the sight, her finger resting on the trigger.
“Which one are you going for?”
“The creepy dying one next to the wall,” she says. “You’re going down, sucker.”
I snort. “Quit it with the trash talk. You’re scaring me.”
She laughs, then refocuses. “I have to breathe out, right? That’s what they do in the movies.”
“That’s more for a moving target, but you can if you want to.” She wiggles again, and I laugh. “You keep shimmying. Just take the shot.”
“I’m nervous!”
“The tree needs to die, Silence. Take the shot.”
She wets her lips, breathing out slowly, and her finger twitches—but she doesn’t squeeze the trigger.
It isn’t because she can’t do it. I saw the determination in her eyes when she faced off against Ryker. She’s holding back for another reason.
I shift closer to her, my lips by her ear. “Picture someone who does deserve to die.” Her breathing increases, and she swallows hard. “Who deserves to die, Q?”
She rolls her lips together. “No one.”
“Liar.” I kiss her earlobe, and she leans into me slightly. “There’s nothing wrong with fighting back. Choosing your life over theirs isn’t a sin. This”—I tap the rifle—“is you taking control. Dead men aren’t a threat.”
The tenseness in her body seems to shove into mine, and I’m acutely aware that I hate doing this to her. This isn’t teasing, it’s unearthing pain, and I don’t want her to hurt—but sometimes it’s necessary.
“He’s already dead,” she whispers.
I watch her, but she’s still focused on the sight. “Did you kill him?”
“No.”
“Then this is your chance. Why does he deserve to die, Silence?”
Her lip trembles. “Because he took everything from me.”
She squeezes the trigger.
The kickback has her pulling in a breath, but she remains steady. The bullet tears through the dead tree, wood splintering and spitting across the wall.
She lifts her head from the sight, eyes wide, lips parted.
Her shoulders drop slightly, and a thousand expressions cross her face. Shock. Fear. Relief. That’s the feeling a weapon can give you—not just control, but freedom. The choice to fight, to chance to win, to come out on top after slaying your demons. I see that in her, now.
Her gaze shifts to me, brown eyes large. “I did it.”
I give her a single nod. “You did. How do you feel?”
“I don’t know, I—” She blinks fast, and as quick as she freed herself, she returns to her body. It’s a snap, and she’s present, and so am I. The cold presses into my face, the ground is hard against my body, and my heart is thrashing about violently in my chest as I share this moment with her.
And finally, she kisses me.
It’s desperate, breathless, a battle. She tugs me closer, and I move her onto her back, my tongue delving into her mouth. Desire burns through my blood and I’m already hard, pressing myself between her legs, but I’m not fucking her on the ground.
I push my hand between her lower back and the tarp and pull her to me before standing. My stitches pull, but all my blood is rushing to my dick anyway. I carry her over to the side of the manor house, kissing her as I press her back to the brick.
“My leggings,” she whispers, and I place her on her feet. I kneel, tugging the clothing down, yanking her shoes off and tossing them aside. It’s a flurry of kisses and shedding of clothing, and the world falls away as I lift her again and bury my cock inside her.
She cries out sharply, clinging to me as I slam into her. She’s tight and hot, soaked and so addictive. Every stroke of my cock snatches more of my breath, and I capture her mouth with mine.
My thrusts become deep and hard, bottoming out inside of her, fucking her like we’ll break in two if we stop.
“Xavier,” she says against my lips. “Tell me I’m not broken.”
I slow, her breath tickling my mouth. “What?”
“Say he didn’t break me,” she begs, her eyes shining. “Tell me I’m not like him.”
I don’t know who she means, and I don’t care. If he wasn’t already dead, his heart would be in my fucking hands.
“You’re not broken, Q. Not even close.” I run my nose along hers. “You’re perfect. Perfect for me, perfect for us.”
She lets out a small whimper. “He took parts of me.”
“Then we’ll give them back to you,” I say, and she meets my eye. “Anything you think you’ve lost, we’ll find together. If that’s what you need, we’ll give that to you. All of us.” She searches my eyes, brows pulled together, lip trembling.
She kisses me again, soft at first, clinging to me. “Make me feel good.” I move my hips, and she closes her eyes. “Make me forget.”
So that’s what I do. I lose myself in her, in pleasing her, in taking her away from whatever monsters she’s been running from.
Her pussy flutters as I fuck her hard and fast, and I can’t believe how sharply our relationship has changed.
Days ago, she’d hardly been able to look at me without us arguing, but now our eyes are locked as she comes around my cock.
A few strokes later, I fill her, almost buckling with the intensity of my orgasm.
Still buried inside her, I rest my face in her neck and catch my breath.
“Thank you.”
I grin against her shoulder as I kiss it. “For the pep talk or the orgasm?”
Silence laughs, and it’s like it heals a little of my soul to hear it.
“Both.”
“Hey, you two—” Yale rounds the corner and stops when he sees us. “This is training?”
I arch a brow. “Yes. Can’t you knock?”
“Very funny,” Yale says. Silence chuckles as I place her on her feet and tuck myself back into my jeans. “We need you inside. I know who Ryker Blake is.”