Chapter 26 #3
I wondered if maybe the terrible part was never terrible to Tobias for long. Maybe it became a sequence of steps almost immediately—what needed cleaning, what needed moving, what needed explaining away. Maybe that was why he could look at a dead man and see only the next thing to be done.
I felt his gaze before I saw him turn.
Even from below, even with the tank lights rippling over the catwalk and Ben shifting around the body, I knew the moment Tobias’s attention left Mark and found me again. It landed on me with the same physical weight it always did.
I looked up.
He was staring down at me.
Leaving Ben to deal with the body, same as last time, and I suspected most of the time, Tobias came down the stairs.
He did not look like the man who had watched the sea snakes strike. He did not look like the man who had calmly explained why Mark was here, or the man who had told me to sit and watch and promised I could have anything I wanted if I was only good.
He looked like the man from the dream.
Not exactly.
Worse, maybe, because this was real.
He descended through bands of blue light and shadow, one hand trailing along the rail, his eyes fixed on me with an intensity so complete that I forgot, for one breath, about Mark on the catwalk above us.
By the time his shoes touched the floor, my pulse had begun to move strangely, too fast and too heavy, like my body could not decide whether it wanted to flee or stay exactly where it was.
I didn’t move.
I only watched him approach.
My legs were folded beneath me, my hands tucked against my knees, and for once, I had no sarcastic comment ready.
No question. No accusation. The whole room felt too large and too close at the same time, water moving behind glass, snakes disappearing into darkness, Ben’s footsteps and grunts overhead, and Tobias coming toward me like I was the only thing in the wing he could still see.
He stopped in front of me.
For a moment, he only looked down.
I looked up at him silently, unsure what I was supposed to do with my face, my hands, my breathing, any part of myself.
I had watched what he wanted me to watch.
I had stayed where he told me to stay. I had been good, I guessed, though the word felt strange and sickly inside my head now, tangled with fear and praise and the warm scrape of his nails through my hair.
Tobias lowered himself to his knees in front of me.
The movement startled me more than it should have.
Maybe because Tobias did not kneel like someone diminishing himself. He knelt like he was bringing himself closer to something sacred. Like getting on my level was not a loss of power but a deliberate act of devotion.
His hands lifted slowly, giving me time to flinch.
I didn’t.
Maybe I was too tired. Maybe too overwhelmed. Maybe some part of me had been waiting for him to touch me since the moment he started down the stairs, and I hated that possibility too much to look at it directly.
His fingers brushed along the sides of my face with such care that my chest hurt.
“Cove,” he murmured.
My name sounded different in his mouth now.
Not careful.
Not warning.
Not coaxing.
Reverent.
I swallowed, but no words came.
His gaze moved over my face, searching for something. Permission, maybe. Forgiveness, though that was impossible. Proof that I was still with him in whatever way he needed me to be.
Then he drew me forward.
The embrace was not sudden, but it still stole the air from me.
One of his arms wrapped around my back, the other cradling the back of my head, and he pulled me against him as if the distance between us had become something intolerable.
His body was warm and solid, his shirt smelling faintly of saltwater, clean soap, and the expensive cologne he wore so lightly I only noticed it when I was close.
I should have stiffened.
I did, at first.
My hands hovered awkwardly between us, caught against my own knees, while his hold tightened—not trapping, not crushing, but complete enough that I could feel the tremor move through him.
Tobias was trembling.
Barely.
But he was.
That did something awful to me.
Something soft and wounded and furious all at once.
“Tobias,” I whispered, though I didn’t know if I meant it as a question or a warning.
His hand slid into my hair.
“I am so proud of you,” he said against my temple, voice rougher than I had ever heard it. “You did so well.”
My eyes burned from how conflicted that praise made me feel, and yet, I still wanted to lean into it.
He pulled back just enough to look at me.
His eyes were dark, almost black in the aquarium light, and the emotion in them was too much. Too naked. Too immense. Not the detached focus from earlier, not the clinical interest, not even the hunger I had started catching in him over the past few days. This was deeper than that.
This was the thing underneath everything.
The thing that had been there since before I had a name for it.
His thumb grazed my cheek.
I realized I was crying only when he wiped away a tear.
“Don’t,” I tried to say, but the word had no strength behind it.
He heard the protest anyway.
I knew he did.
For one fragile second, he paused, then his gaze dropped to my mouth, and my heart stuttered.
“Tobias—”
He kissed me.
Softly.
Not hard. Not punishing. Not like the man who had just ended someone’s life upstairs and then came down to collect me.
His mouth touched mine with a restraint that felt almost painful, warm and careful and devastatingly gentle, as though he were afraid that anything more would break me or frighten me back behind my own eyes.
I sat there with his hand in my hair and his mouth on mine, surrounded by water and blue light and the aftermath of something I could not think about without falling apart.
Then he kissed me again, a little deeper this time, still soft but less uncertain, his breath catching when my lips moved beneath his by instinct or confusion or something much worse.
My hands found his shirt without permission from the rest of me, fingers curling into the fabric as if I needed an anchor.
He made a sound.
Quiet.
Broken.
My whole body reacted to it.
The kiss ended, but he did not move away.
His forehead rested against mine, his breathing uneven, his hand still curved around the back of my head like he was holding me together, or holding himself together through me.
“I love you,” Tobias said.
The words struck so hard I stopped breathing.
He said them quietly, but there was nothing tentative in them. No uncertainty. No fragile, newly discovered thing being tested aloud. He sounded like he was confessing something ancient, something that had existed long before either of us was ready to hear it.
“I love you,” he repeated, and this time his voice broke around the edges. “I have loved you in every way I have understood how to love anything, and in several ways I still do not understand at all.”
I stared at him.
The aquarium wing blurred.
The snakes. The tanks. Ben above us. Mark. The water. The locked rooms. The dream. The glass. His hand pressed to mine through a barrier that had always been there, even before I knew what it meant.
“I don’t…” My voice failed. I swallowed and tried again. “I don’t know what to do with that.”
Pain moved through his face, but he did not retreat from it. “I know.”
I laughed once, broken and wet. “Of course you do.”
His thumb stroked my cheek again, catching another tear. “You don’t have to do anything with it yet,” he said. “You don’t have to answer it. You don’t have to forgive me. You don’t even have to believe that it is love, if the word means something different to you than it does to me.”
“I think it does,” I whispered.
“I know,” he said again, softer this time. “But it is what I have. It is what I am giving you.”
“That’s not fair.”
“No.”
“You keep giving me things I can’t give back.”
His expression tightened. “I don’t need you to give it back.”
“That’s worse.”
“Perhaps.”
I closed my eyes because looking at him hurt too much.
His arms remained around me, steady and warm, and I hated that I did not want them gone.
I hated that after everything, after the horror above us and the confession between us, some shattered part of me still wanted to fold myself into him and disappear for a while.
I hated that his kiss still lingered on my mouth.
I hated that the word love had not sounded wrong from him, only dangerous.
Especially dangerous.
Because Tobias did not love like a normal person.
Tobias loved like the ocean took ships.
Completely, and without apology, always without returning what it claimed.
I opened my eyes.
He was still there, waiting.
Watching.
Mine, some terrible part of my mind supplied, and I didn’t know if the thought belonged to him or to me.
Above us, Ben cleared his throat.
Neither of us moved.
I had no idea whether I was trapped behind the glass or whether I had finally pressed my hand through it.