Chapter 23
CIARAN
Rain hammers against the transport windows while Dad and Mom argue about something again.
It’s not a real argument. Just one of those familiar disagreements that always ends the same way, with Dad acting like he’s won while somehow doing exactly what Mom wanted.
I stop listening halfway through.
Everyone knows he’d burn the world down for her if she asked.
Then Dad goes quiet, staring through the rain-streaked windows while Mom follows his gaze.
The silence is what I remember most.
Not the impact or the gunshots that followed, but the silence beforehand, stretching longer and longer until even I knew something was wrong.
"Angela."
As Mom turns toward him, following his gaze, headlights explode across the rear window behind us.
Too close.
The first collision throws me sideways, metal shrieking around us as Dad swears and Mom grabs my shoulder.
Another impact hits, followed by gunfire and exploding glass, the transport spinning so violently that the world becomes a blur of noise and flashing lights until I hear Dad shouting.
Smoke mixes with the rain. Blood drips into my eyes.
The transport door is open, and Dad is dragging me away from it, his hand locked around my arm while I struggle against him, kicking, twisting, trying to break free.
"Mom!" I scream. "Mom! Mom!" The word keeps tearing out of me as panic claws through my chest. I can’t breathe. My heart hurts. Everything hurts. "Dad, we can’t leave her. Mom!"
But he keeps pulling me forward.
"Ciaran."
His grip tightens hard enough to hurt, but I fight him anyway, twisting against his hold while my shoulder screams in protest.
"Mom!" My voice breaks. "Dad, stop! Mom’s still in there!"
Guards race through the rain around us, shouting over the storm while lights flash across the road and someone yells for a medic.
I barely hear any of it because Mom is still inside.
Then I hear a Noctis, its melody drifting through the rain and gunfire with impossible clarity, drowning out the shouting, the sirens, even my own heartbeat.
For one terrifying second, I stop fighting.
Then I hear a woman’s voice, cold and furious. "After everything, it always comes back to you."
I don’t understand what she’s talking about. Rain hammers against the wreckage while guards shout over one another, Dad barking orders louder than all of them as someone tries to pull me away from his side.
Mom says something I can’t hear, and the woman laughs, a sharp, bitter sound that somehow cuts through the storm.
"You got the family. You got the house. You got him," she says, another gunshot cracking somewhere in the distance. "But this was supposed to be mine."
Everything blurs after that, memories slipping over each other.
Dad shoves me toward one of the guards, a gun appearing in his hand before he turns back toward the transport.
The woman says something else, but the shouting and the rain swallow most of it, leaving only the final words echoing in my head.
"...taking it back."
And then I remember Mom reaching for me, and my hand stretching toward hers with the blind desperation only a child can feel.
I never reach her, because Dad drags me into the rain instead, my feet slipping across wet pavement while I scream and fight him with everything I have.
After that, everything blurs together. The faces disappear first, then the shouting, then the blood, the entire memory breaks apart around the edges until I can’t tell one moment from the next.
But the Noctis remains, lingering long after everything else disappears.
I can still hear it drifting through the storm, impossibly clear beneath the gunfire and the screaming, threading itself through the chaos while everything else slips away.
Even now, years later, I remember the feeling it left behind—a cold certainty settling somewhere deep inside my chest, as if something important was being taken from us and I was too young to understand why.
Then even the music begins to fade, carrying the rest of the memory away with it.
Ishould be in the fighting pit right now, halfway through a workout or buried beneath three different assignments before breakfast even starts. That’s what my mornings usually look like.
Not this morning, though, because Rowan has somehow wrapped himself around me in his sleep like he belongs there.
He’s sprawled across my chest with his face tucked into the side of my neck, one arm draped possessively around my waist while our legs remain tangled beneath the sheets. Every now and then, he shifts a little closer when I move, as if he’s afraid I’ll disappear if he loosens his grip.
And somehow, somewhere between falling asleep after midnight and waking up like this, I managed to convince Rowan to sleep naked with me.
After he reached for his clothes with pink cheeks and that shy little crease between his brows, I told him he looked beautiful like this and asked him to stay.
Naturally, that lasted about three seconds.
Not that I’m complaining. He’s naked now, exactly where I want him, and I’m not about to start questioning my victories.
One thing I’ve learned about Rowan is that he likes praise far more than he lets on. He softens beneath it, practically aching for it, especially when I’ve got my hand wrapped around his throat, controlling his breathing while I tell him how good he’s being for me.
Now I can feel the warm press of his half-hard cock against mine, slowly dragging my body awake with it.
It should probably concern me that Rowan Ashford can get me hard this easily now. That all he has to do is cling to me sleepily and mumble against my throat for my brain to stop functioning entirely.
But lying here with him wrapped around me like this, I honestly can’t bring myself to care. My body has apparently decided one very important thing already: it wants Rowan.
Constantly.
In my arms. Beneath my weight. Giving me every vulnerable part of him.
A rush of heat trickles down my spine at the memory of my cock plunging into his tight hole as I held him against the bathroom wall, his legs locking around my waist. I was rough, and he reveled in it, demanding more and kissing me senseless, urging me to go harder.
I never imagined Rowan would want me like this. It’s his first time, so I tried to take it slow, but somewhere in the middle of it, we just... fit. Every time I touched him harder, he only pulled me closer, and by the end of it, I stopped thinking entirely.
I couldn’t seem to get enough of him after that. He kept opening for me more, pulling sounds out of me I usually keep buried.
At one point, I bent him over the edge of the tub and fucked him hard enough that Rafe started banging on the wall, yelling for us to shut the hell up before we brought the house down.
Not even Rowan seemed to care.
I spent the night learning Rowan’s body, and he met every touch with this overwhelming hunger that kept driving me back to him.
After I’d completely wrecked him, he dragged his tongue over my skin with this dazed little look on his face that nearly killed me.
We kept going until the noise downstairs finally died out, and he was barely awake when I carried him back to bed from the tub.
“Why are you looking at the water like it’s magic?” I asked him, my voice thick with the aftermath of us.
He stiffened, his head resting against the porcelain. “Back home, only the extremely wealthy have the luxury of a bath. The rest of us use communal showers. They’re quick. Functional. Cold.”
I tightened my grip around him then, pulling him closer against my chest.
And maybe that moment affected me more than it should.
Because Rowan looked at that stupid bathtub like it was a miracle instead of plumbing, and somehow I was the one he chose to share it with.
Then later, somewhere between sleep and consciousness, I remember pressing a kiss against his mouth before wrapping myself around him completely, wanting him held close enough that he wouldn’t even think about slipping away from me.
His sleepy little sound against my throat nearly destroyed me.
“You can never escape me now, mouse,” I whispered into his skin, and fuck me, I meant every word of it.
At some point during the night, I climbed over him again, and now I’ve practically got him pinned beneath me, all warm skin and tangled limbs while his heartbeat taps steadily against my chest.
The best part? Rowan doesn’t fight it. If anything, he seems calmer when I hold him down, like some exhausted hidden part of him enjoys being kept exactly where I want him.
I can’t move now without waking him, and despite everything, I don’t want to.
A few hours ago, his body went tight beneath my hands, his brows drawing together like something ugly had followed him into sleep. I smoothed my hand slowly down his spine until the tension finally eased, feeling him melt back into me.
Some irrational part of me wanted to crawl inside his head and rip apart whatever was haunting him before it ever gets close to him again.
Rowan can be strangely soft sometimes, almost painfully easygoing in ways that make no sense considering where he came from, but I can’t forget that Dad asked me to watch him for a reason.
The town visits. The library. The footsteps following him.
Something isn’t adding up.
I mean, who’d want to track him down if not me? It doesn’t make any fucking sense, but he sure has talent for ending up exactly where he shouldn’t be.
And yet, lying here with him tangled around me, it’s hard to imagine he’s anything other than exactly what he claims to be. A shy scholarship student with too many responsibilities on his shoulders and a body that still goes tense in his sleep like he’s bracing for impact.
I probably shouldn’t be thinking about how to make any of that better just because he gave me the best sex of my life. It’s reckless. Dangerous.
But when I turn my head and look at him sleeping against my throat, lips parted, his breathing slow and warm against my skin while his cock rests lazily against mine beneath the sheets, all I can think about is the fact that he stayed.