Chapter 13 — None of This Is Safe
POV: Elena
The private elevator that led to the penthouse of Obsidian Tower had no buttons. Just a biometric reader that glowed with a cold blue light, indifferent to the chaos we carried in our wet clothes and on our bruised skin.
Gabriel kept his left hand pressed flat against the mirrored metal wall, eyes closed, head tilted slightly back.
His right hand—the one he'd used to destroy my apartment door and, before that, Richard Hale's face—hung at his side, dried and fresh blood mixing into a dark crust over his swollen knuckles.
I stood beside him, gripping my overnight bag so tightly the leather handle creaked. The weight of the listening device in my pocket seemed to have grown, transforming from a simple piece of plastic into a gravitational anvil that bent the space around me.
He didn't ask for it back.
He told me to keep the weapon that could destroy his life. “If I try to hurt you again… use it.”
I looked at his profile reflected in the metal.
He looked exhausted. The mask of the invincible lawyer had melted away with the rain, leaving behind only a man with dark circles under his eyes, soaked hair plastered to his forehead, and a tension in his jaw that suggested he was holding up the entire world with his teeth.
The elevator stopped with a soft ding, almost insulting in its normalcy.
The doors opened to the vast, dark living room of the penthouse.
This wasn't my first time here. I'd come for dinner with the Swiss clients, when he'd dressed me up like a luxury doll. But that night, the place had been lit, staged, prepared for the performance.
Now, it was steeped in shadows. Only the light from Ashford filtered through the panoramic windows, painting the polished concrete floor with streaks of diffused neon and rainy gray. The air was cold, still, carrying that smell of ozone and solitude that seemed to be Gabriel's natural fragrance.
He entered first, without turning on the lights.
“Leave your bag in the master bedroom,” he said, his voice hoarse, without turning around. “I'll get the first aid kit.”
“Master bedroom?” The question came out automatically. “The contract said guest room.”
Gabriel stopped in the middle of the room. He took off his wet jacket and tossed it over a designer armchair, a careless movement I'd never seen him make.
“The contract is over, Elena.” He turned to me, his dark eyes absorbing what little light remained. “You saw what happened today. You have the recording in your pocket. There are no more guests in this house. Only accomplices.”
The weight of the truth in those words made me shiver.
I walked toward him, ignoring the order to go to the bedroom. I stopped a foot and a half away, invading the personal space he usually defended like a fortress.
“Sit down,” I ordered, pointing to the sofa.
He frowned.
“I said I'll get the kit…”
“Sit down, Gabriel.” My voice didn't tremble. For the first time since I'd met him, I wasn't reacting to him. I was acting. “You're bleeding on your thirty-thousand-dollar rug.”
He stared at me for a long second, measuring my determination. Something in his eyes softened, or maybe it was just exhaustion winning out over his defenses. He sat heavily on the leather sofa, resting his elbows on his knees, his injured hand hanging between his legs.
I went to the kitchen, found the emergency kit in a drawer I'd noticed during dinner with the Swiss clients—a habit when you live on high alert; you always map the exits and the bandages—and filled a basin with warm water, grabbing some clean towels.
I returned to the living room and knelt on the floor, between his legs.
The positioning was intimate, submissive in form, but dominant in function. I was taking care of him. I was touching his violence.
I took his right hand. It was warm, feverish. The cuts were ugly, deep, the skin torn from the impact against teeth and wood.
I dipped the towel in the water and began to clean the blood.
Gabriel hissed when the fabric touched the wound, but he didn't pull his hand away. He kept watching, his gaze fixed on the top of my head.
“Why are you doing this?” he asked quietly.
“Because if it gets infected, you lose the hand. And you need the hand to sign my brother's checks.”
“Don't lie to me, Elena. Not now.”
I stopped. I lifted my face to look at him. We were so close I could feel the heat radiating from his body, smell the rain on him and the whiskey he'd drunk before coming to get me.
“Because you got hurt for my sake,” I admitted, the truth scraping against my throat. “You broke down my apartment door because you thought I was in danger.”
“You were. Thomas is unstable.”
“Thomas is an idiot, not a murderer.” I went back to cleaning his hand, now applying antiseptic. The sting made the muscles in his forearm contract under his wet shirt. “But you… you were ready to kill. I saw it in your eyes.”
“And that doesn’t scare you?”
“It should.”
I finished cleaning and started bandaging his hand with gauze, my movements precise and firm.
“It should make me run to the police station and turn that device over to the first detective I found. But the only thing I felt when you walked into that room was... relief.”
Gabriel used his good hand—the left one—to cup my chin, forcing me to meet his eyes again. His touch was gentle, a terrible contrast to the violence we’d just tended to.
“You’re broken, Elena,”
he whispered, running his thumb over my lower lip, still swollen from his kiss in the office.
“I broke you. I dragged you into my mud, and now you think you breathe better in it.”
“Maybe I was always broken.”
I pressed my face into his hand, closing my eyes for a second, letting myself feel the comfort of that broad, rough palm.
“Maybe I just needed someone who wouldn’t try to fix me, but who’d break the rest of the world with me.”
He let out a guttural sound, something between a moan and a growl, and pulled my face up to capture my mouth.
It wasn’t like in the office.
In the office, it had been war. Conquest. A desperate attempt to claim power over chaos.
Here, in the darkness of the penthouse, with the rain beating against the glass like a funeral drum, it was a pact.
The kiss tasted of promise and desperation. Slow, deep, devouring. He kissed me as if trying to draw the air from my lungs and replace it with his own.
I felt his hands on my shoulders, pulling me up, lifting me off the floor and settling me in his lap. My legs wrapped around his waist automatically. His wet pants pressed against my skin through the thin fabric of my clothes.
“Gabriel...”
I whispered against his mouth, feeling physical need awaken—painful and immediate—ignoring the exhaustion, the fear, the logic.
“Shh.”
He buried his face in my neck, inhaling deeply right where the purple mark pulsed.
“Don’t talk. If we talk, we’ll remember all the reasons this is wrong. And I don’t want to be right tonight.”
He stood with me still wrapped around him, as if I weighed nothing, and walked toward the hallway.
We didn’t go to the bedroom. We went to the master suite bathroom.
It was a vast space lined with black volcanic stone, with a shower that looked like a waterfall cascading from the ceiling. Gabriel set me on the cold marble counter and stepped back just enough to turn on the water.
Steam rose instantly, fogging the mirrors, creating a warm mist that isolated us even further from the world.
He started undressing. The white shirt, now stained with blood and rain, fell to the wet floor. The belt. The pants.
I watched him. His body. The old scars, the tense muscles, the raw beauty of this man who was both my savior and my executioner.
He moved closer and started unbuttoning my blouse. His fingers, even with the bandaged hand, were surprisingly deft.
“You’re trembling,”
he noted, sliding the blouse off my shoulders.
“I’m cold.”
“Liar.”
He unbuttoned my pants.
“You’re afraid this means something.”
“And doesn’t it?”
He stopped, his hands on my hips, his skin burning against mine.
“It means you’re in too deep, Elena. It means there’s no emergency exit anymore.”
He undressed me completely, letting the clothes form a pile of soaked fabric on the floor. I felt exposed—not just physically, but existentially. The dim bathroom light highlighted every mark, every bruise, every trace of what we’d done and what we were.
We stepped into the shower.
The hot water hit us, washing away the cold sweat of fear, the smell of the old apartment, the dirt of Ashford. Gabriel pulled me under the stream, embracing me from behind.
I felt his chest against my back, his hardness pressing against my ass. He rested his chin on my shoulder, his hands splayed across my stomach.
We stayed like that for endless minutes. Just breathing. Just existing in the safety of that wet embrace.
It was a false safety. I knew that. Richard Hale was still alive. The prosecutor’s office was still investigating. I had a blackmail device in my bag and a fugitive brother in a cheap motel.
But in that moment, with the water running over our bodies and Gabriel’s heart beating in sync with mine, none of it mattered.
“Turn around,”
he whispered.
I turned.
The water ran down his face, making him look like he was crying, though I knew Gabriel Moretti didn’t cry.
He lifted me, pressing me against the black stone wall. I wrapped my legs around his waist again.
He slid into me slowly.
This time, there was no pain. Only fullness—absolute and complete. A sense of fitting together so perfectly it made me gasp, throwing my head back against the wet stone.
He moved with a steady rhythm—relentless but controlled. He wasn’t trying to dominate me; he was trying to merge.
“Look at me,”
he said, his voice hoarse.
I opened my eyes. The water blurred my vision, but I could see the intensity in his face. The naked vulnerability he only showed in these moments, when the barriers fell.