Chapter 14
VALENTINA
Darkness folds around me like a blanket—thick, warm, false security. Something is on my skin before I open my eyes: breath, too-close and trembling. A weight settles at the edge of the bed; a hand ghosts my hip as if it’s trying to learn the map all over again.
“How early is it?” I murmur, voice rough as gravel. My fingers hook the sheet, half-inertia, half-hope. The clock on the nightstand is a dark, indifferent block—time meaningless in the shadow.
“Four.” Isaiah’s voice is close and small, as if he’s afraid the word will crack if he lets it out too loud. “Four a.m.”
I try to roll away, to bury my face under the pillow and steal back the sensible sleep that keeps the world from unspooling. “Then go to sleep,” I tell him, soft and sleepy. “It’s stupid—get some rest.”
“No.” The single syllable cuts the room open. This isn’t the Isaiah who howls a challenge at the sky; it’s thinner, rawer—someone who forgot the mask. “No. Not this morning.” He breathes the words like a confession. “This is my last time to have you before…before you’re his.”
The ache in his voice is a thing I can taste—desperation braided with an impossible, tender grief.
He says it like a wound offered for me to press my fingers into.
Anger bubbles—because he’s reckless, because he never gives anything so vulnerably—but something heavier sits under it.
My lashes stick together. My body answers him before my thoughts can protest.
I sit up; the room tilts. The dark is full of him—his shape at the foot of the bed, the rise of his shoulders, the thin moon that finds the crown of his head and rims his moss hair silver.
He looks smaller than daylight lets him be, jaw working with a tremor I haven’t seen.
God. I didn’t know I could make him look fragile.
“What’s up?” I whisper, wiping the sleep from my eye.
His hands cup my face with an urgency that heats my skin.
Callused palms, careful pressure—holding me as if I might drift off the edge of the world.
“Because I don’t know how long I get,” he says.
“Because after tonight—” he swallows, the sound too loud—“—I don’t know if I get another dawn with you that isn’t stolen.
I don’t know if I get another moment alone with you.
” His thumb traces the corner of my mouth, wiping something I didn’t know had leaked out.
I swing my legs to the floor, barefoot on cool wood.
My robe slides open; the thin tank and panties I sleep in are nothing to his gaze.
He presses his forehead to mine—raw contact that feels like a prayer and a demand at once.
“I don’t need the future,” he admits, voice cracked.
“I need this—right now. I need to know you wanted me once. That you can still come to me. If he ever makes you feel anything less than perfect, I’ll take you away from here. ”
His thumbs find the hollow at my throat and rub in a slow circle, as if pressure could unknot the ache. Something inside me that I didn’t know was taut loosens; a single thread snaps and I let it. Tender and terrible, I step into him.
He kisses me then—not the claim he throws across a room, but a smaller, shaking thing that is apology and plea folded together.
It is not neat. It gives no promises. It asks for nothing but this breath.
My hands knot into the line of his back and anchor myself to the only constant I’ve had since the rest of my life started to fray.
When we break—breathless, messy—he buries his face against my neck and whispers, “Get dressed. I want to take you somewhere.”
I dress in the quiet: leggings, an oversized top, slouchy socks tucked into sneakers—ordinary clothes that feel ridiculous against the pulse in my skin.
Isaiah watches me like he’s memorizing the way the fabric moves on me.
He catches my shoulder with his hand as if to steady me and grins, crooked and reverent.
“Ready?” His voice drops, low and dangerously-soft.
“As I’ll ever be,” I say, tugging my sleeves over my hands.
We move through the Raiders’ club like ghosts—shadows swallowing the noise and the faces. Outside, the night air is sharp and thin. Isaiah’s bike waits like a promise, chrome catching the first paling of the sky.
He swings up, pats the seat behind him. “Come on, Angel. Don’t make me beg.”
The pet-name lands like a blessing. I slide on, wrap my arms around his middle. He doesn’t joke. He’s worshipful in the small things—his hands settle on the handle bars, revving the engine twice.
“You begging?” I edge, and the word is lighter than I mean.
A laugh cracks from him—soft, with a low undercurrent that might be awe. “You think I beg?” His voice is amused, then earnest. “I don’t beg. I keep.”
The bike roars under us, a living beast, but all I feel is him.
Isaiah is heat, steady and unyielding, his back pressed firmly into my chest, his heartbeat a wild drum I can sense even through leather.
His scent folds around me—smoke and cedar, the faintest scent of ink that clings to his skin no matter how many times he showers.
It’s sharp, sweet, and devastating. I bury my face against his shoulder and breathe it in like oxygen.
The speed steals my breath, but his warmth steadies me.
Each time the bike leans into a curve, I tighten my arms around his waist, my palms flat against the hard line of his stomach.
He doesn’t flinch—he only presses one hand briefly over mine, a silent reassurance, as if to say hold on, Angel, I’ve got you.
The woods whip past in a blur, shadows tearing by like secrets, the trees flashing silver in the moon’s dying light and then pink in the first flare of dawn.
Cold air claws at my cheeks, but he is a furnace, everything in me pulled toward him.
The faster we go, the more the world disappears until there’s only the rush of wind, the growl of the bike, and the steady, burning truth of Isaiah under my hands.
The horizon is bleeding open ahead of us, gold spilling between the trees.
He slows and turns down a road deeper into the forest. The asphalt narrows, hemmed in by towering pines that blur into streaks as the bike growls over roots and fallen needles.
The air sharpens, colder here, resin and damp earth rushing into my lungs with every breath.
My cheek is pressed to Isaiah’s back, the warmth of him cutting through the chill.
Each shift of his shoulders, each subtle tug of his body against mine, feels deliberate—as though he’s guiding not just the bike but me, steadying me through every bend.
His scent grows stronger in the enclosed dark of the woods—smoke threaded with ink and something darker, almost sweet, like heat buried in wood.
It sinks into me until I can’t tell where the ride ends and he begins.
The trees break suddenly, the world spilling open as we crest higher ground. Isaiah eases off the throttle, the engine dropping into a low rumble that shivers through my thighs before he finally coasts to a stop.
The hush of dawn spills over us like a held breath finally exhaled. The first blade of sunlight cuts across Isaiah’s profile—wild moss-green hair catching fire at the edges, the black ink of his tattoos glinting like carved scripture against his skin.
I climb off, legs still shaking from the ride, and his eyes track me the way a starving man tracks a meal.
“Beautiful,” he murmurs. For a second I think he means the sunrise. But his gaze doesn’t leave me.
My pulse stumbles. “You dragged me out here just to stare at me?”
Isaiah’s mouth curves, slow and dangerous, but his voice is reverent when it comes: “Angel, I’d burn a thousand dawns just to look at you like this. Free. Mine.”
The word lands heavy, wrapping around my ribs. He doesn’t reach for me right away. Instead, he steps back toward the bike, crouching by the leather satchel strapped behind the seat. When he rises, there’s a steel thermos in his hand.
“Do you know the first time I saw you?” His voice carries in the hush, thick with memory.
“I was on detail—Xavier’s orders, watching you from a distance.
I hated it. I thought it was a prospect’s job.
But then…” He shakes his head, unscrewing the cap with a slow twist. “Then I saw you on the roof of your old house. It was early, the air still cold enough to bite, and you were sitting there with a blanket around your shoulders, drinking tea while the sun broke over the houses.”
I go still, breath caught.
“You looked like an angel,” he admits, low, rough. “And for the first time in years, I felt at peace just…watching. Like if the world ended in that moment, it wouldn’t matter, because I got to see you like that.”
The steam from the thermos unfurls, and the scent curls into me before he even offers it: vanilla bourbon.
My throat goes tight. It’s my favorite blend, the one my mother had shipped from London the Christmas before she died.
The one I finished the morning he’s describing—the day I couldn’t sleep, couldn’t think, the day I sat on that roof trying to quiet the noise of the night I couldn’t remember.
Trying to silence the hollow of losing her, of losing myself.
I blink hard, swallowing against the knot in my chest. “That was the last bag,” I whisper, almost to myself.
“I know,” he says, holding the cup out to me like an offering. “I tracked them down. Have you been to London?”
“No,” I smile.
“I have to take you,” Isaiah smiles, his fingertips grazing against the outside of my arm, leaving sparks in his wake.