Chapter 27
Cove
Three Days Later
The vacation house was smaller than Tobias’s main estate. Which meant, in Tobias terms, that it was still larger than any normal person’s house had a right to be.
I sat in the back of the car beside him, watching the ocean appear and disappear between stretches of scrub as Ben drove us along the road leading toward the property. The late afternoon sun hung low over the water, turning everything gold at the edges.
Tobias’s hand rested in the space between us, not touching me, but close enough that I could feel the warmth of his skin radiating toward me.
I even had my phone.
Tobias still watched me when I had it, and I was painfully aware that certain calls would not go through without consequences I was not ready to test, but it sat in my pocket like a small, fragile piece of the world had been returned to me.
I should have hated that I was grateful, and I did, but I was also grateful enough that I didn’t put much energy towards that hatred.
“You’ve been quiet,” Tobias said.
I looked away from the window. He was watching me with that severe, controlled tenderness that still made my stomach pull tight in a way I did not know how to name without making everything worse.
He looked like he always did; his hair and beard neatly styled, glasses spotless, shirt immaculate despite the long drive.
There was something different in him, too, though, something that had shifted since he kissed me beneath the sea snake tank and told me he loved me with Mark’s body still cooling somewhere above us.
God.
That was my life now.
A man had died, and my brain had filed the moment under both trauma and first love confession.
I was probably going to need therapy for the rest of my life, assuming Tobias ever let me near an actual therapist who wasn’t vetted, monitored, bribed, or secretly on his payroll.
“I’m just thinking,” I hummed, gazing at the sea passing us by again.
I wanted to be in it.
That want had been there since the moment Tobias told me where we were going, bright and painful and impossible to separate from everything else.
He had promised me this.
A trip up the coast with open water and free-diving. A weekend outside the main estate, away from everything that house represented.
He had said I could have anything I wanted if I proved myself.
I had proven myself by watching someone die.
That should have ruined my desire, but I still wanted to go into the water more than I wanted to sit with the moral consequences of how I had earned it.
Ben slowed as we approached the gate. It opened before we reached it, black metal sliding away from the drive with the same smooth obedience as every other door in Tobias’s world.
Tobias turned his hand palm-up on the seat between us.
An offer, not a demand.
His hand was elegant, long-fingered, pale against the dark upholstery, the kind of hand that looked like it belonged on piano keys, expensive glassware, or curled around the back of my neck.
The kind of hand that had held me still.
The kind of hand that had wiped tears from my face.
The kind of hand that had fastened cuffs, treated rope burns, and brought me pleasure.
It was also the kind of hand that killed.
The duality of Tobias Kelly was not subtle.
It was not even really duality, I thought. There were not two separate men. Not a good one and a bad one, not a monster wearing a caretaker’s skin or a caretaker corrupted by monstrosity.
He was all of it at once.
Singular.
He was the man who had locked me in a room and the man who brought me extra blankets because he knew I got cold. The man who could look at Mark’s limp body like a logistical issue and then look at me like I was the only thing in the world capable of hurting him.
And I—
I did not know what that made me.
But I took his hand anyway.
Tobias gently squeezed the back of my hand as the car rolled through the gate.
The house was less imposing than the main estate, with more weathered timber and less glass.
The path down toward the beach was visible beyond the house, narrow and pale as it wound between rocks and old driftwood.
The ocean was even closer than I expected, close enough that when Ben parked and turned off the engine, the whole world seemed filled with the sound of it.
Ben glanced at me in the rearview mirror. “Welcome to the murder-free vacation home.”
“Ben,” Tobias groaned.
“What? That’s reassuring.”
I gave a small, surprised laugh, which Ben caught and grinned as if he had just won something.
The laugh died before it could become anything bigger, but not fast enough. Not before Tobias looked at me and his expression shifted in that specific way I had started to recognize with inconvenient accuracy, as if every accidental bit of softness from me entered him like sunlight.
I looked at the door handle.
“Can I get out?”
“Yes,” Tobias said.
I waited.
His brows drew together faintly before it dawned on him. “You may open the door yourself.”
“Wow,” I muttered. “Freedom is taxing.”
Ben snorted from the front seat as I opened the door and stepped out into the salty air. I took a step toward the path to the beach before I remembered myself.
Tobias was beside me a moment later. “Not yet,” he said softly.
I bristled. “I wasn’t going to run.”
“I know, precious, and I know you want the water. I’m not going to keep you from it, but I need to check the conditions before we head down there. Why don’t we bring our things inside first?”
Ben was already getting luggage from the trunk, pretending not to watch us with the deeply obvious discretion of a man who watched everything.
“I suppose,” I grumbled, drawing out the word like a petulant child.
Ben handed me my bag with a wink and carried the rest inside. I expected Tobias to shadow me, but instead, he let me lead, content to trail behind as if amused by the spectacle of me attempting independence.
The interior of the house was spare and elegant, with massive windows facing the sand and surf, floors of pale timber, with no rug or couch cushion out of place.
There were no visible family photos, no clutter, but a wall-sized photograph of a diver floating in an abyss of ultramarine.
The diver’s body was both dissolving and lucid, soft-edged with motion blur, swimming up or down or nowhere in particular—suspended in the white noise of the deep.
I paused in front of it, unconsciously reaching for the diver’s trailing hand.
I could almost feel the cold even through the wall.
Tobias’s presence was suddenly behind me, arms wrapping around my middle as his chin dropped onto my shoulder.
“Do you like it?” he asked.
There was something in the way he asked, not seeking my approval so much as seeking proof of alignment, a way to confirm that whatever inside me responded to the open water was the same thing that answered him.
“Yeah,” I said, barely above a whisper. “It’s…” Gravitational, I wanted to say, but that would have made it too personal. “Beautiful.”
Tobias’s hands didn’t just rest; they gathered around my ribs, the way you’d grip the shell of something fragile before lowering it into the water. I heard my own breathing over the surf, shallow and not quite even.
“You can go in the water tomorrow, first thing,” he murmured, still with his face just behind my ear. “If you’d like to go down to the shore tonight, though, maybe we can bring our dinner with us.”
“That sounds nice,” I murmured.
Out the window, the sky went from gold to blue, and it occurred to me that this was the first time, maybe ever, that I had been somewhere with Tobias that was not explicitly about containment. Not about keeping me, but maybe about keeping me with him.
The three of us meandered down to the shore that night, the air briny and cool, the horizon bleeding out into blackness while the surf came and went.
Ben had brought us sandwiches and soup in a battered thermos and even brought a tartan blanket I suspected had never been used, let alone touched sand.
He laid it down for us with a kind of quiet ceremony, then disappeared with a well-timed “I’ll leave you two to it,” which sounded casual but was almost certainly meant to remind us both that he was always nearby.
I sat at the very edge of the blanket, letting my feet bury into the sand.
The wind had picked up as the sky faded, bringing the scent of eucalyptus and fermentation from some pile of seaweed further down the beach.
At first, I ate in silence, half-listening to Tobias’s even breathing beside me, wondering if he’d ever get cold or if he was the kind of person who thrived on being barely alive in adverse conditions, like lichen or cockroaches.
Eventually, I asked, “Will you come into the water with me tomorrow?”
He looked at me as if he’d genuinely never thought of it. “If you want me to,” he said, the words slow and heavy, their meaning so plain it was almost embarrassing. “I’m not much of a swimmer, but I would.”
I kicked sand with my heel. “You don’t— I’m not saying you have to. I just. It might be nice.”
“It would be,” he said, and his hand found my ankle, thumb tracing over the bone as if memorizing where it protruded. “I’ve never been swimming with anyone, actually.”
“Seriously?”
“I was not a social child, Cove.”
“And now you are…” I trailed off, not sure how to finish it. A grownup? A billionaire? A mad scientist who kidnapped his favorite aquarium intern?
He filled in for me. “Now I am the same, but with better means. And you.”