Chapter 10 — The Door I Dont Lock
POV: Gabriel
Richard Hale's blood was surprisingly warm.
I could feel it on my knuckles, a viscous heat that contrasted violently with the frigid air conditioning of the archive room.
The metallic scent of oxidized iron filled the space, drowning out the sterile smell of old paper and printer toner.
It was a primitive perfume, the signature of a line that hadn't merely been crossed, but obliterated.
Richard was on the floor, curled in a fetal position against the base of a gray metal shelf. His three-thousand-dollar Italian suit was ruined, the lapel stained scarlet. His nose was crooked, bent to the left at a grotesque angle, and blood poured freely, dripping onto the industrial carpet.
He moaned, a low, gurgling sound, holding his face with trembling hands.
I should feel remorse. I was a lawyer, an officer of the court, a man who had built a career on the premise that civilization is maintained by restraining our basest impulses. I should be horrified by the brutality I had just inflicted on my partner of a decade.
But as I wiped the blood from my right hand with a white linen handkerchief, the only thing I felt—pulsing through my veins with the force of a black tide—was absolute, terrifying satisfaction.
The adrenaline wasn't fading. If anything, it was mutating. The physical violence had opened a floodgate inside me, and now what flowed through wasn't rage anymore. It was desire. A voracious hunger, sharp and urgent, that demanded I continue what I'd started—but in a different way.
Richard spat a blood clot onto the floor and tried to sit up, propping himself on his elbows. He looked at me with one swollen eye and the other brimming with tears of pain.
“You're finished, Gabriel,” he hissed, his voice nasal and wet. “Aggravated assault. Serious bodily injury. I'm going to sue you until you lose your license, the firm, and your freedom. You're leaving here in handcuffs.”
I stopped cleaning my hand. The handkerchief, now stained red, fell to the floor beside him like a surrender flag I had no intention of accepting.
“You think you have leverage, Richard?” I asked, my voice strangely calm—completely at odds with the violence of the scene.
“I have my broken face as proof!” he shouted, and the effort made him cough up blood.
I walked over to him, stopping inches from his outstretched legs. I took my phone from the inside pocket of my jacket, which I'd thrown over a table before I started beating him.
I opened the app connected to the listening device that was, at this exact moment, pressed against the warm skin between Elena's breasts.
I tapped the screen.
Richard's voice, clear and arrogant, filled the silence of the room:
“...I can save Thomas. I have access to the original logistics files. I can prove the order came from above... In exchange for loyalty... I need you to give me what Gabriel has. The translations. The notes. Everything he's hiding about the Turkish connection.”
Richard froze. The sound of his own confession seemed to hurt more than the broken nose.
“Obstruction of justice,” I listed, counting on fingers stained with dried blood.
“Witness coercion. Conspiracy to conceal international arms trafficking. And, of course, the tacit admission that you have access to the original Vanguard documents, which makes you the primary signatory of the fraud.”
I crouched in front of him, invading his space, forcing him to look at me.
“Assault is a state crime, Richard. Arms trafficking and terrorism are federal crimes. If you call the police on me, I call the FBI on you. I get two years' suspension and maybe community service for 'temporary emotional distress.' You get thirty years in a maximum-security prison in Arizona.”
Real fear—the kind that dissolves arrogance and leaves only survival instinct—flooded his good eye.
“What do you want?” he whispered.
“I want your resignation. Now.” I leaned closer, breathing in the fear and blood rolling off him. “You're going to claim health reasons. You're going to sign the transfer of your shares to me at face value. And you're going to leave this city by the end of the week.”
“The firm is my life...”
“The firm was your life. Now your life is whatever I decide to leave you.” I stood up, brushing an imaginary speck of dust from my pants.
“If you touch Elena again, if you even look at her, or if you try to leak any information about Vanguard... I release the recording. And then I finish what I started on your face.”
Richard lowered his head, defeated. He knew how to do the math. He knew he'd lost.
“Go to hell, Gabriel.”
“I'm already there,” I replied, turning my back on him. “And I'm about to find the only thing that makes the fire worth it.”
I left the archive room, leaving him bleeding on the floor, and closed the door.
The hallway was deserted. The sound of the fight must have been muffled by the acoustic walls, or maybe the staff were smart enough to know that when partners “discuss” things, it’s better not to hear.
I walked toward my office.
My steps were quick, heavy. My heart pounded against my ribs like an industrial hammer. The image of Richard touching Elena’s neck, tearing the collar of her blouse, played on a loop in my mind, fueling the furnace burning in my gut.
He had touched what was mine.
The possessiveness, raw and toxic, flooded my limbic system, shutting down the areas responsible for logic and restraint.
I needed to see her. I needed to touch her.
I needed to erase Richard’s fingerprint from her skin and replace it with mine, so deep and permanent that she would never forget who she belonged to.
I reached the door to my office.
It was locked.
I turned the handle. Nothing.
I smiled. A tense, dangerous smile. She had obeyed.
I took the key from my pocket, my hands trembling slightly—not from fear, but from an electric anticipation that made my skin tingle.
I unlocked the door and entered.
Elena was there.
She was standing in the middle of the room, her back to the panoramic window that showed the city of Ashford in the rain.
She had removed the torn sweater. She was wearing only the black lace bra and tailored pants.
The listening device was still there, a black dot against the pale skin of her sternum, rising and falling with her frantic breathing.
But what caught my gaze wasn’t the partial nudity. It was her expression.
She wasn’t cowering in a corner crying. She was standing, arms crossed over her chest, eyes fixed on the door, waiting. There was fear there, yes. But there was something more. There was a mirrored darkness, a response to the violence she had witnessed.
I closed the door behind me and turned the lock. The sound of the metal sliding into place was the only warning she had.
Elena looked at my hands. At the dried blood on my knuckles.
“Did you kill him?” she asked. Her voice didn’t tremble.
“No.” I walked toward her. The space between us seemed to carry a static charge strong enough to light a bulb. “But I wanted to. God, how I wanted to.”
I stopped one step away from her. Her scent—lavender, cold sweat, and femininity—hit me like a drug.
She uncrossed her arms and reached out, hesitantly touching my injured hand. Her skin was soft, warm, a shocking contrast to the violence I carried on mine.
“He deserved it,” she whispered, tracing the cut on my index finger with her thumb. “When he touched me... I wanted you to do exactly what you did.”
Her confession was the trigger.
I grabbed her waist with my clean hand and pulled her against me. The impact of our bodies was violent. She gasped but didn’t pull back. She grabbed my shoulders, nails digging into the white shirt, pulling me closer.
“You’re mine,” I growled, my voice coming out guttural, unrecognizable. “Say it.”
“I’m yours,” she responded, without hesitation, eyes locked on mine, dilated, black with desire.
I didn’t wait any longer. I captured her mouth with mine.
It wasn’t a kiss. It was a collision. It was a bite, an invasion, a desperate claim.
Our mouths crashed together, teeth against teeth, tongues fighting for dominance.
Her taste was sweet and intoxicating, mixed with the metallic taste of my own blood where I had bitten my lip in anger minutes before.
Elena moaned against my mouth and spread her legs, letting me fit between her thighs. I felt my aching hardness pressing against her belly through the fabric of our pants, physical proof of the madness consuming me.
My hands roamed her back, feeling the bare skin, warm, alive. I found the bra clasp and broke it. I had no patience for hooks. The fabric tore, and she was free, pale skin exposed to the gray light of the office.
I pulled back just enough to look at her.
She was beautiful. She was chaos incarnate. Hair disheveled, lips swollen and red, chest rising and falling rapidly. And at the center of it all, on her neck, the purple mark I had left. The mark Richard had dared to touch.
The sight of that bruise, defiled by another man’s touch, blinded me.
“He touched here,” I murmured, running my thumb forcefully over the mark, erasing the phantom sensation of Richard’s fingers.
Elena shuddered, throwing her head back.
“Erase it,” she begged, her voice breaking. “Take his touch off me, Gabriel. Please.”
That was my ruin. And my salvation.
I lifted her by the waist and set her on the edge of my solid mahogany desk. The movement knocked over a stack of folders, the weight of the law falling to the floor, forgotten and irrelevant.
I stood between her legs, my hands gripping her knees, spreading her open for me.
“I'm going to make you forget his name,” I promised, lowering my mouth to her neck, biting the skin just above the old mark—renewing the pain, renewing the possession. “I'm going to make you forget your own name.”
My hands went to her belt. My fingers were clumsy, trembling with urgency, stained with dried blood.