Chapter 35
Bastien Montclaire
Turns out, nothing kills seduction faster than a corpse on the floor.
Adrenaline claws through my veins as I stand over the body.
The room is wrecked with furniture skewed and blood where there shouldn’t be. My pulse pounds hard, trying to tear through my skin.
Then I feel her eyes on me.
I lift my head.
She’s on the bed, naked, hands clutching at her throat. Her breaths come in short, ragged pulls, and tears streak down her cheeks. Her gaze is wide and wild, fixed on me.
On my face.
Fuck.
Fuck.
Fuck.
This is the first time she’s ever seen me.
I’m covered in someone else’s blood, standing over a corpse, panting like a wild animal. This is not how I meant for this to happen. Not even close.
I move slowly. My hands rise, palms open, showing her I’m not coming after her. My chest heaves with the aftermath of the fight, breath scraping raw across my throat.
Her eyes don’t move.
Don’t blink.
She just stares, trembling, trying to understand who the hell I am.
I step over the dead man’s body, careful and controlled, every instinct still wired for threat. My focus never leaves her, not the way she holds her throat, not the tremor in her arms, not the terror widening her eyes as I move closer.
She recoils when I take another step—shoulders tightening, chin tucking, her bruised throat disappearing behind her hands. She’s protecting herself from me.
Me.
She doesn’t know who I am.
The realization hits hard.
I stop where I am, the distance between us now a gulf. My hands stay raised, palms open. My voice is the only anchor I can give her.
“It's me, Babygirl.”
Her breath catches, and her eyes flash with recognition.
The terror in them breaks, and something in her shatters wide open.
Her body softens, every tight line and defensive curl unwinding, and then she’s moving.
Not cautiously or hesitantly. She launches herself off the bed and into me with a force that almost knocks the breath from my lungs.
“Bastien.”
The way she says my name, shaky and strangled, full of relief and disbelief, undoes me in places I didn’t know could come undone.
“You saved my life.”
She wraps her arms around my neck, trembling as her body presses against mine. I slide my arms beneath her, holding her tight to my chest.
“He was strangling me,” she whispers into my shoulder. “I couldn’t… I couldn’t breathe.”
If I could kill him again, I would.
A violent tremor rolls through me. Fury roars up, white-hot and blinding.
My jaw locks so hard it aches. My hold tightens without meaning to, as if I could shield her from what already happened, as if I could rewind the last ten minutes and take the bruises from her throat and give them to the bastard on the floor instead.
She buries her face against my neck, breath shaking against my skin. I shut my eyes and hold her as tight as I dare, clinging to the illusion that I can keep her safe.
For a moment, wrapped around me, she is mine. But I know I won’t get to keep her.
Her grip tightens when I pull back, fingernails catching my skin, but I guide her onto the mattress with slow, steady pressure. “Easy, Babygirl. Sit for me and breathe. I’ve got you.”
Her breath shakes out in broken pulses, but she obeys.
I rise and turn to the body. My pulse is still a war drum in my ears, but my hands move steadily, trained and automatic. I roll the man onto his side, my fingers working with the same practiced efficiency drilled into me during missions I’m not allowed to talk about.
Pockets first. Empty.
Waistband next. Nothing.
Shoes. Sole inserts, tongue, heel. Clean.
No ID. No wallet. No identifying marks at all.
Of course. Killers don’t carry IDs they can drop as incriminating evidence at murder scenes.
I turn him again and slip my hand into the inside pocket of his jacket. My fingers brush plastic, lightweight and cheap.
There it is. A burner phone—disposable and untraceable. A phone you buy with cash and destroy before sunrise.
I take it out, my jaw ticking once. Behind me, Laurette’s breath stutters, but I don’t look back. Not yet.
I thumb the burner awake. No passcode. No contacts. Just a call log with one number repeated over and over.
I hit call without hesitation and lift the phone to my ear. It rings once before a woman answers, clipped and sharp, her German accent threaded with impatience. “Is it done?”
“There was a complication.”
A moment of silence. Then a vicious scoff.
“I don’t care about your fucking complications. I want that bitch dead before morning. She cannot show up for court. Do you understand?”
Every muscle in my jaw knots. The room narrows around me, heat crawling up my spine in a slow burn I have to force down.
I hang up without a word.
The phone stays in my hand, but my focus snaps to Laurette sitting on the bed, eyes blown wide.
Someone sent a man to kill her. And they’ll try again.
But they’ll never succeed while I’m breathing.
Not ever.
Laurette’s voice breaks the silence, thin and trembling. “That was… damn… that was Evan’s mother, Helene Lemaire.”
I don’t need her to explain how she knows. The clipped German, the venom in every syllable, the entitlement of a woman who’s never heard the word no. It all fits together.
I nod once.
She swallows hard, eyes flicking from the phone to the dead man on her floor.
Shock must be rippling through her—how calculated it was, how well-funded, how easily Helene Lemaire reached into her life. But the deepest cut is the simplest one. The mother of the man she’ll prosecute in court tomorrow sent a killer into her bedroom tonight.
Laurette’s world and mine don’t touch, not officially, not on paper. But right now they collide, shatter, and fuse.
There’s no undoing it. Not for her.
Not for me.
A low breath slips out of me, half-laugh, half-disbelief, as I stare at the burner phone, the corpse, and the bruises blooming across Laurette’s throat.
I rub a hand down my face. “Well, this is a fine fucking mess.”
She’s still shaking and pulling in shallow, uneven drags of air, but the lawyer in her comes roaring back fast. “It’s okay. The law will protect you. I’ll protect you. I’ll handle everything, Bastien.”
God. She truly believes that. She’s sure she can fix this and everything will be okay.
I glance from the corpse on her floor to the wide, unsettling sincerity in her eyes.
“No, Babygirl. You don’t understand.” I take a step closer, holding her gaze. “I can’t be here when the police come.”
She blinks at me, confusion struggling with fear. “What do you mean you can’t be here?”
There’s no clean way to give her the truth. No version that won’t break everything between us.
And I won’t lie to her. I can’t.
“I’m not the good guy.”
Her head shakes before the words even settle. “I don’t believe that.”
Of course she doesn’t. She’s still high on survival, holding fast to the idea that the man who saved her is someone heroic.
“You saw what I’m capable of with my bare hands. Heroes don’t do that.”
I hold her gaze and let the truth settle for a moment.
“Don’t mistake what I did for goodness. I stop monsters by becoming one.”
“What do you mean?” Her voice is thin, still raw from the trauma to her throat.
I drag a hand through my hair, searching for the least damaging version of truth that’s going to break us anyway.
“I take care of evil men the world overlooks… men the law lets slip through its fingers.”
Her breath stutters just once, but I catch it.
She’s hearing the truth underneath.
And it scares her.
Good. It should.
“You hurt bad people?”
I fight the instinct to look away. “We can’t have this conversation, Laurette. Once we do, there’s no coming back.”
Her chin lifts a fraction, bruised and trembling, but unyielding. “I can’t move forward with you unless I know who you are and what you do.”
Of course she wants the truth.
And of course the truth is the one thing that will tear us apart.
“If I tell you, I have to run. You took an oath to put away men like me. And I won’t wait around for you to decide I’m next.”
Pain flickers across her face, but her eyes remain locked on me. “Do you break the law, Bastien?”
I should lie, shake my head, vanish into the night before this gets worse. But she’s staring at me with those blue eyes I’ve fallen so hard for.
“You can’t handle what I do.”
But the truth is simpler. Darker.
I can’t handle watching her hear it.
“You and I want the same thing—justice for victims. But I don’t rely on courts or juries to give it.”
Her brows pull together, the faintest shake of her head. “How then?”
There’s no clean way to do this, no gentle version of the truth. So I give her the sharpest one.
“Allen Hoffman. Abram Gray. Jacob Buford. Silas Rourke. Julian Lemaire.”
The list goes on and on.
Her breath stutters. Those names mean something to her. They’re men who vanished or turned up dead, all tied to acts of violence no courtroom ever managed to reach.
Her world tilts. I see it happen.
She studies my face, searching for any sign she’s misunderstood.
“You killed all of them?”
I hold her gaze, unblinking. “I made sure they can’t harm anyone ever again.”
I’m deliberate with every word—enough truth for her to understand but not enough to confess.
The realization settles over her face. The slow, awful understanding of who I am and what I’ve done. Her breath catches, and her eyes don’t move.
She’s looking at me, seeing both the man who saved her and the monster she’s been warned about her entire career.
I see it hit her.
And it sinks into me too.
“I understand what you have to do next.” I take a step toward her, hands open, careful. “I’ll never hurt you, Laurette. All I’ve ever wanted is to keep you safe.”
She stays still, but her eyes flicker. Fear?
Maybe.
Probably.
I reach for her anyway, because this is the last time I’ll ever get to. She lets me pull her against my chest, trembling, her cheek pressed to me like she’s trying to memorize the shape of this moment before it’s gone.
And it is.
It already is.
“This is goodbye,” I whisper into her hair.
Her fingers clutch at my shirt, the faintest shake betraying everything she doesn’t say. I close my eyes and inhale the scent of her skin, the warmth of her breath, the weight of her falling apart in my arms.
The words come out rough, unplanned. “Something is happening to me.”
I shake my head once, hoping that might steady it.
“I didn’t think I was built for this… for wanting someone the way I want you.”
My voice lowers, quieter, honest in a way that costs me.
“I think I’m falling in love with you, Babygirl.
At least that’s what it feels like. Or perhaps I’m already there and just refusing to call it what it is.
” A breath. “At the very least, I’m obsessed with you.
And that’s never happened before. I’ve never felt this way about anyone. ”
I look at her, studying her.
“You’re the one I never saw coming.”
I press my lips to the top of her head because I couldn’t bear it if she turned away from my kiss.
My hand slides down her back, slow, savoring. “I’ll remember every moment we’ve shared. Every second.”
I hold her one last time, letting the ache sink bone-deep.
Letting her go tears at me from the inside, but I do it. Slowly. Carefully. Too sudden a motion, and the fragile connection between us could snap.
Her fingers slip from mine, and her breath catches. I force my hands to fall away from her.
One step back. Another. Then I turn toward the doorway.
I don’t glance back over my shoulder. I can’t. If I see her face—see even the smallest flicker asking me to stay—I won’t leave. And staying will ruin us both.
So I walk.
My mind shifts into a mode I hoped I’d never need. Five years of preparation snap into place like pieces of a weapon reassembling themselves.
Shut it all down. Cut every tie. Disappear before sunrise.
A new name and a new city. A man with no traceable past.
But one truth carves its way into me as I leave: I’ll never stop watching over her.
She’ll never know I’m there. But I will be.
She’ll survive. And I’ll be the ghost haunting her perimeter to make sure of it.
My hand closes around the doorknob. My throat forces out a whisper, so soft it barely registers.
“Goodbye, Babygirl.”
I step out into the hallway, heartbreak clinging to me. I leave her with a dead man on the floor and the truth burning down everything we will never be.