Chapter 7 — Routines That Shouldnt Intersect
POV: Elena
The guest bathroom mirror was a blade of tempered glass covering the entire wall, designed to reflect the forest outside and, cruelly, the wreckage within.
I pulled the fabric of my blouse collar aside with trembling fingertips, exposing the sensitive skin where my neck met my shoulder. What had been a reddish mark yesterday—the product of pressure and saliva—had blossomed today into a violent nebula of purple, blue, and pale yellow.
It wasn't a teenage hickey. It was a contusion.
It was Gabriel Moretti's loss of control made visible, stamped on my flesh like a private property warning.
I touched the mark lightly. The pain was immediate—a sharp stab that traveled from my neck to my belly, making my muscles clench not in revulsion but in shameful conditioned response.
My body didn't interpret it as damage; it interpreted it as memory.
The memory of his hot breath, the strength of his hands pinning me against the cold metal of the elevator, the whispered promise that he would have taken me right there if logic hadn't intervened.
“You're sick, Elena,” I whispered to my pale reflection, washing my face with ice-cold water to try to erase the heat rising in my cheeks.
Thomas was a pawn in an arms trafficking scheme. Richard Hale was a corporate traitor. And I was trapped in a glass house on top of a mountain, developing Stockholm syndrome for the jailer who planned to destroy us all to save his own reputation.
I dried my face on the plush towel that smelled of expensive fabric softener and sandalwood—his scent was in everything here, soaked into the very fibers of the house—and left the bathroom.
The house was wrapped in that particular silence of a rainy Sunday, where the sound of water hitting the roof creates a bubble of acoustic isolation. There were no office sounds today. No printers, no furious phone calls, no frantic clicking of keyboards.
It was Sunday. The day the world rests.
But at Blackwood Ridge, rest felt like nothing more than a tactical pause before the next battle.
I walked barefoot down the polished concrete hallway, the cold floor biting at the soles of my feet—a constant reminder of where I was.
I hadn't brought slippers. I hadn't brought leisure clothes.
I was wearing the same gray tailored pants from yesterday, now hopelessly wrinkled, and an oversized black cashmere sweater I'd found folded on a shelf in the guest room closet.
I stole it. Or borrowed it. The moral distinction seemed irrelevant when you were co-conspiring to bring down an elite law firm.
The sweater fell to mid-thigh, the sleeves covering half my hands, and it smelled like him.
Wearing it felt like an embrace I hadn't asked for, but that my body eagerly accepted.
I reached the main living room.
Gabriel was there.
He was sitting on the Italian leather sofa, his long legs stretched out, a laptop precariously balanced on his knees. But it wasn't the technology that made my steps falter.
It was his appearance.
The lawyer in his armored suit had disappeared.
In his place was a man dressed in dark gray sweatpants and a worn black cotton t-shirt that stretched across his broad shoulders and revealed the muscular definition of his arms every time he typed.
He wore prescription glasses—thick black frames—and was barefoot.
Seeing Gabriel Moretti's bare feet felt like a greater violation of intimacy than seeing him naked. It was domestic. It was human. It was proof that he existed outside of war, and that made him infinitely more dangerous.
He didn't lift his head when I entered, but I saw the corner of his mouth twitch.
“Coffee's in the kitchen,” he said, his voice deep and drawling—the voice of someone who'd been awake for hours but hadn't yet used his vocal cords. “And there are eggs, if you know how to do something besides cut peppers angrily.”
“I know how to cook, Gabriel. Poverty teaches skills that wealth outsources.”
I walked to the open kitchen, feeling his gaze burn into my back. I knew he was looking at the sweater. At the fact that I was wearing his clothes. The tension in the air shifted, growing thicker, heavier.
I poured a cup of black coffee, holding the hot ceramic like a shield, and turned. He'd removed his glasses and was watching me now, the laptop forgotten.
“It looks good on you,” he commented.
“What?”
“The sweater.” He tilted his head, his dark eyes traveling over my body from collar to bare feet. “Looks better on you than on me.”
I felt my face heat, a traitorous reaction I couldn't control.
“It was the only warm thing in the closet. My work clothes weren't designed to handle the cold in this... luxury cave.”
“It's vicu?a cashmere.” He shrugged, minimizing the fact that I was wearing the equivalent of three months of my rent. “You can keep it.”
“I don't want your gifts, Gabriel.”
“It's not a gift. It's logistics.” He put his glasses back on, typing something quickly. “I'd rather have you dressed in my clothes than shivering and compromising your cognitive productivity. We need to review Richard's fraud timeline.”
I walked to the living room and sat in the armchair across from him, tucking my legs up and covering my feet with the hem of the sweater.
“Did you find anything else?” I asked, steering the conversation to the safer ground of corporate crime.
“I found deleted emails on the ghost server. Richard was pressuring the Turkish logistics team to speed up the shipment. He mentioned ‘end-client delivery deadlines.’” Gabriel turned the laptop screen toward me. “The end client is a separatist militia on the Syrian border.”
I stared at the screen, reading the cold words that translated death into delivery schedules.
“Thomas didn’t know,” I murmured, feeling a weight lift from my chest, only to be replaced by a new kind of horror. “He really didn’t know. He thought they were replacement parts. Richard used him as a human shield from day one.”
“Yes.” Gabriel closed the laptop with a soft click. “Your brother is a greedy idiot, Elena, but he’s not a monster. Richard, on the other hand… Richard is a functional sociopath.”
“Like you?” The question escaped before I could filter it.
Gabriel went still. He removed his glasses again, holding them by the arm, and fixed me with that surgical intensity that made me feel dissected.
“I’m a pragmatic narcissist. There’s a difference. I manipulate the system to maintain order. Richard manipulates the system to create chaos and profit from the wreckage.” He stood, the movement fluid as a big cat stretching. “And that’s why he’s going to fall. And I’ll still be standing.”
He walked to the stone fireplace that dominated the side wall. Wood was stacked there, but the fire was out. He crouched, picked up a long lighter, and lit the gas pilot that would ignite the real wood.
I watched his back. The way the black t-shirt stretched across his muscles when he moved. The scar on his right hand gleaming in the growing firelight.
It was a domestic scene. A man lighting the fireplace on a rainy Sunday morning. A woman drinking coffee in the armchair, wearing his clothes.
If someone looked through the window—if there were anyone within six miles to look—they would see a couple. They would see intimacy. They would see peace.
The lie of that image made my stomach turn.
We weren’t a couple. We were accomplices. Enemies who slept under the same roof because the world outside wanted to devour us. And yet… yet being there, in that shared silence, felt like the most natural and terrifying thing that had ever happened to me.
“You’ve never brought anyone here, have you?” I asked. It wasn’t a question about women. It was a question about loneliness.
Gabriel remained crouched before the fire for a moment, watching the flames lick the dry wood.
“This house wasn’t built for visitors, Elena.
It was built for disappearing.” He stood and turned to me, his face lit from below by the orange glow, casting deep shadows in his eyes.
“When I come here, it’s because I need to silence the noise of the city.
People bring noise. They bring expectations.
They want to talk, they want attention, they want me to be the Gabriel Moretti they see in the society columns. ”
He walked toward me, stopping a couple feet from the armchair.
“And here… I don’t want to be anything.”
“And what am I?” I asked, my voice low. “Am I noise?”
He looked at me. Really looked. His gaze dropped to my feet covered by his sweater, traveled up my folded legs, moved over my hands holding the mug, and settled on my face.
“You’re a different frequency,” he said, his voice hoarse. “You don’t ask for attention, Elena. You demand focus. It’s different.”
“That sounds like something you’d say about a complex legal problem.”
“Maybe you are.” The faintest smile, almost imperceptible, curved the corner of his mouth. “The most complex problem I’ve ever had to solve.”
He reached out.
My heart skipped a beat. I thought he was going to touch me. I thought he was going to repeat what he’d done in the kitchen, or in the elevator. My body braced, muscles tensing, skin tingling in anticipation.
But he just took the empty mug from my hands.
“I’ll make more coffee,” he said. “And I’ll make scrambled eggs. Do you prefer them with cheese or plain?”
I blinked, stunned by the abrupt change in tone. From deep psychological analysis to breakfast menu in three seconds.
“With cheese,” I replied, my voice weak.
“Perfect.”
He turned and went back to the kitchen.
I sat watching him, listening to him open the refrigerator, grab a frying pan. The mundane sound of eggs being cracked.
This routine… this forced domesticity was more dangerous than any threat from Richard Hale. Because when Gabriel threatened me, I knew how to defend myself. I raised my barriers, used my anger.
But when he made coffee and wore sweatpants, and looked at me as if I belonged on that sofa… my barriers didn’t just lower. They melted.