Chapter 4 Sunlight and Shadows
Sunlight and Shadows
Edith
I wake up tasting figs.
Not literally—my mouth is dry from wine and the ceiling is unfamiliar and for three disorienting seconds I don't know where I am.
Then the canopy filters dawn light into something rose-gold, and the sheets shift against my skin with a friction that costs more than my monthly rent, and it comes back. Santorini. His villa. His bed.
His pillow, which I'm clutching like a teddy bear and which smells like cedar and spice and a man I let feed me fruit from his fingers last night.
I release the pillow. Sit up. Reach for my phone before my brain is fully online.
4:47 AM. One bar of signal.
The fear comes then: not a wave but a slow seep, like cold water finding the cracks. I pull up Signal and type with fingers that are steadier than they should be: I'm safe. No contact. Any updates?
Delivered. Not read. Rachel's asleep. Portland is ten hours behind, and my lawyer has a life that doesn't revolve around my paranoia.
I stare at the screen anyway. Willing it to light up with something, reassurance, a timeline, an all-clear that means I can stop flinching at shadows and start being a person again.
Nothing.
The villa is quiet in the way that makes silence feel intentional.
Not the ambient hum of a hotel, ice machines and hallway footsteps and someone's alarm going off three rooms down.
This is the silence of a place designed for one person, situated at the edge of a cliff, separated from everything by stone paths and flowering vines and a drop to the Aegean that would kill you before anyone heard you scream.
If someone came for me here, there would be no witnesses.
The thought propels me out of bed. His sheets slide off my skin, silk, actual silk, the kind that makes you aware of every inch of yourself, and I pad barefoot to the window.
Dawn is painting the caldera in shades of rose and coral, the water below so blue it looks rendered.
White buildings glow like they're generating their own light.
Obscenely beautiful. Aggressively peaceful. And I can't shake the feeling that I'm missing something obvious.
The blade is still in the nightstand drawer. I checked last night after dinner, after his fig and his truth and his "the world is dangerous, even in paradise." It looked different then: not a curiosity but a confession. Protection, he said. The word of a man who expected to need it.
I don't open the drawer this morning. I know what's in there, and knowing is enough to keep me sharp.
The pool, then. Sensible plan. Burn off the restless energy, the wine headache, the sense-memory of his thumb wet with fig juice where my mouth had been.
My black bikini is the sensible one, full coverage, holds everything in, designed for swimming rather than display.
I catch my reflection in the bathroom mirror as I pull the straps over my shoulders.
Average. Curvy in ways I've learned to dress around rather than into.
Freckles across my shoulders from yesterday's sun.
Hair doing its perpetual impression of a woman who lost a fight with humidity.
Good enough for 5 AM laps with no audience.
The path to the pool is quiet. No breakfast sounds, no housekeeping carts, no other guests in robes shuffling toward coffee. The resort sits empty around me like a theater between shows; beautiful, maintained, waiting.
Why is it empty? The thought catches, holds.
The plumbing story Thysa told me yesterday was smooth.
Too smooth, delivered with the practiced ease of someone who's explained it before.
But there are no plumbers here. No construction sounds.
No "out of order" signs on doors. The villa I'm staying in—his villa—has perfect water pressure and hot water that doesn't quit.
If the plumbing in the main building is bad enough to cancel a corporate retreat, wouldn't there be evidence? Wouldn't someone be fixing it?
File it away. Keep watching.
The infinity pool stretches before me, its surface unbroken, reflecting the pre-dawn sky like a mirror tipped on its side. I drop my towel on a lounger and stand at the edge.
The water looks cold. Good. Cold is clarity, and clarity is what I need after a night of wine and candlelight and a man who said "don't stop" when I touched his scars, with a voice so raw it sounded like the words were torn out of him.
I dive.
The shock steals my breath. Three perfect seconds of nothing: no fear, no analysis, no memory of fig juice on my lips. Just cold water closing over my head and my body remembering what it can do. Then I surface, gasping, and the world floods back.
Laps. Front crawl until my shoulders burn. Backstroke while I stare at the paling sky and try to organize my thoughts into something useful.
What I know: Kaz is hiding something. The resort is empty for reasons that don't add up.
He has a weapon in his nightstand and scars that tell a story he won't finish.
He runs hot, literally, physically hot, to a degree that goes beyond metabolism and into territory I can't explain.
He fed me figs from his fingers and said "don't stop" and looked at me like I was the only real thing in his world.
What I don't know: everything else.
"You're up early."
I inhale water and come up choking.
Kaz is standing at the pool's edge, and every rational thought I've assembled in the last twenty minutes scatters like paper in wind.
He's shirtless.
Not the kind of shirtless you see in gym selfies or cologne ads.
This is functional. Built. The body of someone who earned every muscle through necessity rather than vanity—broad shoulders, defined chest, a torso that looks designed to absorb impact.
Bronze skin pulled tight over the kind of mass that suggests he could do structural damage without trying.
But the scars. God, the scars.
I traced the ones on his hands last night by candlelight.
They were intimate then—silver threads in warm bronze, each one a story I wanted to hear.
In the harsh early light, they're something else.
They cover him. A thick line across his ribs that looks like it should have killed him.
A starburst pattern on his left shoulder—something that detonated outward from a central point, leaving behind a radial scar like a frozen explosion.
More across his abdomen, his arms, his collarbone.
Each one a different weapon, a different encounter, a different day he almost didn't survive.
This man didn't serve in the military.
This man was in a war.
"Sorry." His voice is rough with sleep, or what passes for sleep. Board shorts sit low on his hips, and I drag my eyes back to his face before he catches me cataloging him like a field report. "Didn't mean to startle you."
"It's fine." I tread water, acutely aware that I'm in a bikini, and he's looking at me with those amber eyes that see too much. "Couldn't sleep."
"Neither could I." He sits at the pool's edge, legs sliding into the water. The position should read casual. It doesn't. He's still coiled, alert, watching the perimeter even as he watches me. "How's the villa treating you?"
"Perfectly. Thank you. Again." I paddle closer without meaning to. Something about his gravity—the sheer physical fact of him—pulls at me in a way that bypasses decision-making entirely. "The bed is incredible."
"Good." A beat. Then, quieter: "You looked peaceful. Sleeping."
The words are out before he can catch them. I see the moment he realizes what he's said—his jaw tightening, a micro-flinch, the look of a man who's revealed something he didn't intend to.
I could ask how he knows what I looked like sleeping. Security cameras seem likely in a place like this. The thought should bother me more than it does.
"How do you know what I look like sleeping?"
His expression does something complicated. "The villa has monitoring. For security. I checked the feed to make sure you were—"
"Safe?"
"Safe."
We look at each other. The word hangs between us, carrying more weight than four letters should. He watched me sleep. He's not apologizing for it. And I'm not angry about it, which probably says something about my survival instincts that my therapist would find concerning.
"You're a strong swimmer," he says, redirecting with visible effort.
"High school swim team. Badly." I float closer, close enough now to feel the temperature gradient.
The water around him is warmer—noticeably, measurably warmer, as if someone dropped a heating element into the pool where he's sitting.
"That pool didn't have a view, though. Fluorescent lights and chlorine and someone's mom yelling about running. "
His mouth curves. The smile transforms his face—softens the sharp angles, crinkles the skin around his eyes, makes the scar through his left eyebrow look like a line of laughter instead of violence.
"No caldera?"
"Just a motivational poster about believing in yourself." I gesture at the view—dawn turning the cliffs to copper, the sky streaked with gold. "This is better."
He slides into the pool.
The displacement is wrong.
I'm a biology major. I understand volume and density and the way water responds to mass. When a man his size enters a pool, the water should rise a certain amount, shift a certain way, displace proportionally.
The pool surges. Not proportionally—dramatically.
I'm pushed backward by the wave of his entry, rocked on water that suddenly has currents and force.
He sinks deeper and faster than he should, going under like he's made of something denser than bone and muscle, and when he surfaces, water sheets off him in a way that suggests his body has more surface area than what I'm seeing.
He weighs more than he looks. Significantly more.