Chapter 14
fourteen
Dom stared into the darkness, counting breaths that refused to deepen into sleep.
The moonlight cut a silver path across the bed, illuminating the curve of Vivi’s shoulder, the sweep of her hair across the pillow.
He’d been lying there for hours, watching the slow rise and fall of her breathing, waiting for exhaustion to claim him.
It never came. His mind raced with schematics and security protocols, with the weight of tomorrow’s mission, with the heat of Vivi’s skin against his earlier on the terrace.
With everything he stood to lose if he failed.
He slipped from beneath the sheets, careful not to disturb her.
The tile floor chilled his bare feet as he padded across the room to the window.
The night pressed against the glass, vast and indifferent.
Somewhere out there, his family was looking for him.
Somewhere out there, Sabin sat in a concrete room with broken fingers and determination etched into his face.
The Aegean sprawled before him, dark and restless. Moonlight scattered across the water like shards of silver, breaking and reforming with each wave. There were no boats, no lights from distant islands. Just water and sky melding into a seamless horizon of black.
Dom rested his forehead against the glass. Cool, solid, unyielding. Like the walls of this place. Like the task ahead of them. Like the history that stood between him and the woman in the bed behind him.
He heard the rustle of sheets, then the soft pad of feet crossing the floor.
He didn’t turn. Didn’t need to. He’d know the sound of Vivi’s footsteps anywhere—lighter than they should be for someone her height, deliberate but never heavy.
The skill of a woman who’d spent years making sure no one heard her coming.
She joined him at the window, not quite touching. The heat from her body radiated across the small space between them. He wanted to close that gap. Wanted to pull her against him, bury his face in her hair, feel her heartbeat against his chest. He kept his hands at his sides.
“Can’t sleep?” Her voice was soft, husky with the remnants of rest.
“Too much noise in my head.” He tapped his temple. “Security rotations. Access points. Contingencies.”
“Liar.” She didn’t look at him when she said it, but he caught the curve of her mouth in the reflection on the glass. Not quite a smile. Not quite not.
He exhaled a small laugh. “That obvious?”
“Always has been, with you.”
They stood in silence for a moment, watching the water. Villa Pandora slept around them—the staff retired, Stavros’s machinery at rest, no performance required. Just the two of them and the sea and tomorrow waiting at the edge of everything.
“Do you remember the first time we tried to infiltrate that embassy in Prague?” he asked. “When I couldn’t sleep for three days beforehand?”
“You threw up in the hotel bathroom an hour before we went in,” she said. “Then walked in there like you owned the place. Charmed the ambassador’s wife into giving you a private tour.”
“Yeah.” The memory warmed him. “Sabin was so pissed. Said I was showing off.”
“You were.”
He smiled. “Maybe a little.”
She shifted her weight and leaned her shoulder against the window frame. “I was ten the first time Sabin and I ran a job together.”
Dom turned to look at her. Her face was softer in the moonlight, the sharp edges of the day blurred into something gentler. Something closer to the girl he’d met all those years ago.
“I didn’t know that,” he said. “I thought the Monte Carlo job was your first.”
She shook her head. “No. That was just the first one that mattered. The first one was on Bourbon Street in New Orleans. Small-time stuff. Sabin had this idea for a con—a way to make quick cash off drunk tourists.” She smiled slightly at the memory. “He called it the ‘Lost Little Sister’ routine.”
Dom settled against the opposite side of the window frame, giving her space to tell the story.
“I‘d pretend to be separated from my tour group—crying, scared, wallet stolen. Just pitiful enough to draw attention, but not so much that anyone would call the cops. Sabin would pick the pockets of everyone who came to help. And when someone offered to call the police, he’d swoop in as the relieved big brother.” She mimicked Sabin’s deeper voice: “’Oh thank God, I’ve been looking everywhere for her! ’”
Dom smiled, easily picturing Sabin’s dramatic performance. “I can’t see you playing the distressed damsel.”
“I was...convincing.” There was no shame in her voice. “We made three hundred dollars that first night. More the next.”
“And your parents?”
“They had no idea. Dad was consulting in Europe that summer. Mom was buried in her research. Sabin told them he was working at the French Market.” She traced a pattern on the glass with her finger.
“The look on Sabin’s face afterward—God, Dom, I’ll never forget it.
He was laughing so hard he could barely stand, already planning the next job, the bigger score, the riskier play.
He had this light in his eyes, like he’d found exactly what he was meant to do in life. ”
Dom watched her profile, the way her expression softened with the memory, the slight curve of her lips.
“You loved it too,” he said.
“Yeah.” She nodded slowly. “I did. The rush. The challenge. The feeling that we were smarter than everyone else in the room.” She glanced at him. “You know that feeling.”
He did. It was what had drawn him to her in the first place. That thrill of risk, that sense of being truly alive only when the stakes were high enough to matter.
“It’s like being on a high wire,” he said. “Nothing between you and disaster but your own skill and nerve. Nothing else feels that real.”
“Nothing,” she agreed.
They fell silent again. The waves rolled against the cliff far below, a constant, rhythmic sound that filled the space between words. The Villa remained still around them, its security systems humming beneath the quiet.
“I think that’s why losing Brennan hit so hard,” Dom said after a while, the words appearing in his mouth before he’d fully formed them in his mind. “He was the only one of us who loved the edge as much as I did.”
Vivi turned toward him, her expression caught somewhere between surprise and curiosity. He rarely spoke about Brennan. Rarely allowed himself to open that wound.
“Tell me about him,” she said.
Dom swallowed. Looked back out at the water. “Brennan was... he was fire. All energy and light and danger. Couldn’t sit still, couldn’t follow rules, couldn’t play it safe to save his life.” He paused. “Literally, as it turned out.”
She didn’t push. Just waited, giving him the space to find the words.
“When he died... something cracked in the family that had always seemed uncrackable.” He pressed his palm against the cool glass.
“We’ve all got designated roles, you know?
Davey’s the leader. Elliot’s the mediator.
I’m the wild card. Daphne’s the computer whiz.
Liam’s the sharpshooter. We all click together, but Brennan was.
.. he was the spark. The one who made us all more alive somehow. ”
“And Cade?” she asked softly.
“Cade was the rock. Solid. Dependable.” Dom laughed without humor. “At least that’s what we thought.”
“Until he wasn‘t.”
“Until he wasn’t,” Dom agreed. He took a breath. “His betrayal... it didn‘t just hurt. It hollowed something out in Davey specifically. Changed him.”
“How?”
Dom stared at his reflection in the glass, at the ghost-image of himself superimposed over the night sea.
“Davey built his whole identity around protecting the family. Being the one everyone could count on. And then Cade—the person he was closest to after our father—turned to the enemy. It was like...” He searched for the right way to describe it.
“Like watching someone get shot and realize they’ve been wearing fake body armor.
Everything they believed about themselves just.. . wrong.”
Vivi was quiet. Dom could feel her watching him, but he kept his eyes on the water.
“Some nights the grief for Cade is worse than the grief for Brennan,” he admitted. “Because Brennan didn’t choose to leave.” The words felt raw in his throat. “He would never have left us like that.”
He hadn’t said any of this before. Not to his father. Not to his uncles. Not to his brothers.
“I told Davey it would be okay,” he continued, his voice lower. “That we’d figure it out. But I don’t know if we will. I don’t know if he’ll ever be the same.”
Vivi stepped closer. Not touching him yet, but close enough that he could feel the heat of her, smell the jasmine of her skin.
“Maybe he’s not supposed to be the same,” she said.
Dom looked down at her. Her face was tilted up toward his, the moonlight turning her eyes to silver.
“I miss who I was before Istanbul,” she said. “But I don’t want to be that person again. She was reckless. Selfish. She didn’t know what it cost to lose someone.”
“And now?”
“Now I know exactly what it costs,” she said. “And I’m still deciding if it’s worth paying again.”
He understood what she was saying. What she was offering—not forgiveness, not yet, but possibility. A door left open, just a crack.
“I’m freezing,” she said after a moment. “Come back to bed.”
She held out her hand. Dom took it, her fingers warm against his palm, and let her lead him away from the window, back through the darkness to the bed they’d been sharing without touching.
This time when they slid beneath the sheets, she didn’t turn away.
She moved closer, fitting herself against him, her head resting on his shoulder, her arm across his chest. He held his breath, afraid to break whatever spell had fallen over them.
Then, slowly, he wrapped his arm around her, drawing her closer.
She felt right there. Like she’d always belonged.
“This doesn’t mean I’ve forgiven you,” she whispered against his skin.
“I know,” he said.
“And it doesn’t mean we’re back together.”
“I know that too.”
She was quiet for a long moment. He thought she might have fallen asleep, but then she spoke again, her voice so soft he almost didn’t hear it.
“But I’m tired of pretending I don’t still care what happens to you.”
Dom tightened his arm around her, afraid to speak, afraid to move, afraid to do anything that might shatter this fragile peace between them. Instead, he pressed his lips to the top of her head, breathed in the scent of her hair, and let the weight of her against him anchor him to the moment.