Chapter 58
DEFENDING HER > DEFENDING THE NET
Nate
“She’s not a phase. She’s a fucking revolution.”
By the time he took Holly inside to bed, the house felt like a museum.
The lights were too soft, the air too still, the silence curated like it had been polished by generations of people who believed emotion was something you kept behind glass.
Nate walked her down the hallway slowly, matching her pace on her crutches, hating the way the pain made her mouth go tight even when she was trying not to show it.
He helped her into the guest room that felt more like a carefully staged exhibit of hospitality. It was all linen sheets, perfect corners, and nothing warm enough to be real. She smiled at him like she was fine, as though she hadn’t been carved open at dinner and expected to bleed politely.
He’d wanted to rage. He’d wanted to tear the whole dining room apart with his bare hands. But Holly had met his eyes across the table and given him the smallest shake of her head, that quiet don’t she used when she didn’t want him to make it worse. So he’d swallowed it.
“You sure I can’t get you anything?”
Holly yawned, the jet lag and the family drama combining with her medication into a cocktail of me go sleepy now.
“I’m fine,” she promised. “Just need to sleep.”
He moved in and pressed a soft kiss to her hair.
He could tell she hadn’t been expecting it from the way she’d tensed up beneath him, but he followed it up with another just because he fucking could.
Because she was precious to him, and he wanted her to know it.
He tucked the blanket around her to make sure she stayed warm, and then he left the room with a gentleness that felt like betrayal.
When the door clicked shut behind him, the fury he’d been holding back surged up so hard it tasted like metal.
He stood there for a moment in the dark hallway, breathing through it, hands flexing at his sides the way they always did before a fight.
The old Nate was right here, twitching under his skin, the part of him that solved pain with impact, that understood violence like a native language.
It’d been so easy to let him out to play. Storm downstairs, slam his mother’s perfect kitchen drawers, blow the house wide open with noise and anger. That was what they all probably expected from him, after all. That was the version of him everyone understood.
But he didn’t. Couldn’t. Because thanks to Holly, he wasn’t that guy anymore. She’d shown him how to do better. And he couldn’t repay her for that by falling back to his fists in a temper tantrum.
So he went downstairs without slamming doors.
Without shouting. Without giving anyone the satisfaction of calling him unstable, difficult, or deranged.
He walked straight into the kitchen like a man carrying something dangerous in his chest and refusing to drop it until he was sure he could detonate it to maximum effect.
His mother was sitting at the island counter with a cup of tea and a glossy magazine.
She glanced up when he entered, looking surprised and pleased for a moment, until she noticed the determined expression on her only son’s face.
And then the performative motherly love melted away, leaving that same calm authority Nate had lived under his entire life.
A slow, familiar dread pressed at his ribs, but he didn’t soften.
He chose to stand at the edge of the island like it was the Italian marble battlefield he was willing to die on.
His icy blue gaze fell to the woman who’d given it to him, the set of his jaw declaring he was done being trained to jump through her hoops.
“We need to talk about Holly,” he began, his tone deceptively even.
His mother’s eyebrow lifted the barest fraction. It was the look of a woman thinking here we go, and it instantly pissed him the fuck off.
“Nathanael,” she started.
“No.”
The word came out sharper than he intended, but it landed clean and stopped his mother as if he had slapped her. “You don’t get to dress up your behavior in manners and pretend it wasn’t cruelty. You knew exactly what you were doing.”
Helene’s mouth tightened into a small, disapproving line. “I was being honest.”
Nate let out a breath that wasn’t a laugh. “No, you were marking territory. Like always.”
Helene straightened, every inch the queen offended in her own castle. “You bring a stranger into this home and expect me to smile while she ruins your future.”
“Holly isn’t a stranger,” Nate cut her off. This time the anger broke through properly. Not loud or messy, but absolute. “She’s my partner. The one person holding me together for months while everyone else watched me fall apart and said I told you so.”
Helene rolled her eyes, waving a hand at her son. “You’re infatuated, that’s all.”
Nate felt a thunderclap sound deep within the recesses of his soul.
The hard, clean certainty he’d never held onto in this house before.
Because his mom was very good at twisting things, and it’d always been easy for her to convince him that he wasn’t good enough.
Wasn’t popular enough. Wasn’t strong enough.
But when it came to Holly? He’d never believe a word out of her mouth.
“She’s not a phase.” He spoke in hushed tones now, almost like his anger couldn’t bear to be tempted by anything louder. “She’s not a fling. That woman is the best thing that’s ever fucking happened to me, and if you can’t see that then it’s your loss, Mor.”
He vibrated with rage now. It coursed through his veins like wildfire, scorching every single one of his cells like a virus burning through his body. The silence that followed was immediate and heavy, like the whole house leaned in to listen.
Helene stared at him as if she didn’t recognize the man standing in her kitchen.
Nate watched the confusion pass over her face, the tiny flicker of alarm beneath the composure.
He realized in that moment that his mother had never expected him to actually grow a spine.
She’d built her entire model of him around the assumption that mother knew best and he’d always cave.
That he’d always come home and fold himself back into the shape she’d picked out for him.
Well. Tonight she was getting a fucking education.
“She dances for a living,” Helene scoffed, reaching for logic as her weapon of choice. “That world isn’t stable. It isn’t respectable. You need someone who can anchor you, Nathanael. Someone who’s steady while you’re off hitting a piece of plastic around a frozen pond with a stick.”
Nate leaned forward just slightly, huge hands flattening on the island. His eyes locked on his mother’s, like he was daring her to blink and miss his rebellion.
“Holly’s the most stable person I’ve ever met. She works so fucking hard. She takes her pain and turns it into art and still shows up smiling. She’s got more discipline in her little finger than I’ve had in my whole career.”
He watched each thing land on his mother’s shoulders, one after the other.
“I love her,” he admitted, throwing up his hands like there was nothing else for it. As though nothing could save him now, and even if there was, he wouldn’t want it.
His breath went tight in his throat as he spoke, because admitting it out loud made it real in a way that hurt. “I think she loves me, too. And she believes in me,” he said, voice quieter now but more lethal. “I won’t let you treat her like she’s disposable.”
His mother’s nostrils flared. “You’re being incredibly foolish, my son.”
Nate’s jaw clenched. “Nah. I’m being honest.”
Then he straightened, stepping back as if making room for the final truth he’d come down here to deliver.
“If you want me in your life, then you respect her. You don’t get to mock her, test her, or humiliate her for sport. You don’t get to make her feel like she’s standing in the wrong story.”
Helene’s face went pale with the shock of being challenged by the son who’d always been too loud everywhere except where it mattered.
“If you can’t do that,” Nate finished, “we’ll be leaving and you’ll never see me again.”
One heartbeat. Another.
Then, from the doorway, Sigrid’s voice cut through the tension like sunlight. “About time.”
Nate turned his head just enough to see her standing there in her robe, hair messy, eyes bright with fierce approval. She looked at him like she couldn’t be prouder.
Nate’s chest heaved once, hard, as gratitude for his baby sister flooded him. He hadn’t realized how much he’d needed someone he cared about to confirm he wasn’t ruining everything by choosing love.
His throat tightened until it hurt, realizing he’d fight for Holly no matter who the war was against. Not to win her, or keep her. And he sure as fuck wasn’t doing it because he thought she needed saving. He was doing it because she deserved to be chosen.
He turned back to his mother, holding her gaze across the counter until she looked back at her magazine, dismissing him like she’d done so many other times in his life.
She wasn’t going to bend. He could see it in the set of her jaw, in the cold way she flipped the page as though he had nothing of value left to say.
Fine. Hotel it was.
But Nate wasn’t just leaving his childhood home behind for his girlfriend.
He was leaving his past behind for his future.