Chapter 36
Laurette Devereux
Something inside me splits clean down the center the moment he walks away.
One minute his arms were around me, breath warm at my ear. The next he’s turning away, moving down the hallway, and something inside me tears loose.
I sit there naked on the side of the bed, sheet pooling at my feet, watching his silhouette grow smaller. The house has never been this dark and cold.
My bedroom—the place he ruined me in the best ways—looks wrong now. An overturned lamp. A dent in the wall. The place where one man tried to kill me… and he didn’t let him.
The air is wrong—too still and sharp, vibrating with everything that just happened. This isn’t my room anymore. It’s the shell of a moment I almost didn’t survive.
My hand drifts upward, touching the tenderness circling my throat. The pulse there flutters unevenly.
His parting words ring through me, soft and devastating. This is goodbye, Babygirl.
My lips are dry. I drag my tongue across them, but the taste in my mouth is still copper and panic. My hands won’t stop trembling.
I didn’t think I was built for this… for wanting someone the way I want you.
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. At the very least, I’m obsessed with you. And that’s never happened before. I’ve never felt this way about anyone.
You’re the one I never saw coming.
The words replay, scraping through my chest. I thought this was heat and distraction, something reckless to keep the loneliness from swallowing me whole.
But somewhere between the danger and the dark and the way he touched me as though I was something worth guarding with his life, something shifted.
My fingers curl against my throat.
I’m falling in love with him.
I lurch forward so fast my foot catches on the rug, sending me stumbling. My hand slaps the doorframe to keep me upright, breath burning in my lungs.
He’s one second from disappearing.
“Don’t go.” It spills out, broken and desperate.
He halts at the front door, the words hooking into him.
“Please, Bastien.”
A single tear falls, hot and unbidden, tracing a line I don’t have time to wipe away.
He goes still at the sound of my voice, but he doesn’t turn. His shoulders tighten, rising with a slow, deliberate breath, as if he’s trying to talk himself into walking through that door.
When he faces me, the look in his eyes is a punch straight to the ribs. Torn but decided.
“This can’t continue. Not now that you know what I am.”
The words land between us like a verdict.
I take a step forward, bare feet whispering across the floor. The distance is impossibly wide, an ocean he refuses to cross. He doesn’t reach for me. Doesn’t soften. He’s bracing, already halfway gone.
“To be fair, I still don’t know exactly what you do.”
He shifts, ready to leave.
“And I don’t care. I’ve never felt this way about anyone.”
Bastien halts. Truly halts.
His jaw loosens, and his breath slips sharp between his lips. His fingers flex at his sides.
“Tell me what that means.”
I close the distance by a step, my pulse thundering against my bruised throat.
“It means I think I’m falling in love with you too.” The words shake out of me, fragile and fierce all at once.
Another step and I’m almost touching him. “I can’t bear it if you open that door and vanish. I can’t stand the thought of never seeing you again.”
Cold ripples across my skin, fear and longing tightening every inch of me.
He moves before I can blink.
Three strides—long, hard, decisive—and his hands are on me, pulling me into him with a force that steals the air from my lungs. My back meets the wall, his body caging mine, heat rolling off him in waves. His fingers slide into my hair, fisting at the base of my neck, tilting my mouth up to his.
The kiss hits like impact, sharp and hungry, almost brutal with how badly we both want it.
His lips crash into mine, parting them, swallowing the broken sound that slips from my throat.
I grab fistfuls of his shirt, bunching the fabric, dragging him closer like I’m afraid he’ll vanish if I loosen my grip for even a second.
My hands tremble as they climb to his shoulders, then to his jaw, tracing the rough scrape of stubble and the heat of his skin.
His thumb sweeps along the column of my throat, pausing over the tender bruise the intruder left.
His touch there makes something inside him break.
I sense it in the desperate press of his mouth, in the way his other hand drags down my back and pulls me flush against him, with no space left between us.
“Bastien,” the whisper spills into his kiss, soft and shaking.
He groans into my mouth—low, guttural, wrecked—and deepens the kiss.
“I’m obsessed with you, Bastien,” I breathe against his lips. “I can’t get enough of you.”
Everything in him stills long enough for me to catch the tremor that runs through his body. Then his hands clamp around my hips, hauling me tighter, his mouth claiming mine again with a fevered, consuming tenderness.
His kiss tells me everything he’s too afraid to say aloud.
Our mouths are still touching when a thought slices through me. It pulls a shiver up my spine, breaks the kiss, leaves our breaths tangled in the inches between us.
“What do we do about him?”
Bastien doesn’t flinch. He eases back enough to see my face, his hands still firm on my hips. His breath steadies in a way that tells me he’s already ten steps ahead.
“How do you want to handle it?”
Calm. Controlled. As if we’re discussing the weather, not a dead man sprawled on my bedroom floor.
My fingers tighten around his arms, and I grip the muscle beneath my palms. His steadiness is a contrast to the panic pulsing under my skin.
My gaze flicks toward the darkened hallway where my world shifted tonight.
“I don’t want to sit in front of people I know and explain any of this.” A breath shudders from my chest. “I can’t tell them I was having the best sex of my life with someone I can’t name.”
He nods once. A single, silent acknowledgment.
The weight of my choice is absolute. Everything I vowed to uphold lies behind me. Everything I want stands right in front of me.
I step into him, shoulders braced, breath evening out. “I can’t lose you. I won’t.”
My hand reaches for his, and when his fingers wrap around mine, the decision seals itself inside me.
He leans in and presses a slow kiss to my forehead before stepping back. The warmth lingers as he thinks through his next step. This is a problem he already knows how to solve. Of that, I’m certain.
“I’ll take care of the body and his car.” His gaze flicks upward toward the bedroom. “You’ll straighten things while I’m gone and put everything back where it belongs. Then you’ll shower.”
A chill skims over my skin. “What about forensic evidence from the struggle? Blood? Fibers? Prints?”
His answer comes without hesitation. “I’ll come back and erase this as though it never happened.”
He says it with a calmness that makes the hair on my arms lift. A composure that tells me this isn’t new to him. A poise I’m already trusting.
“I can’t sleep in that room. I don’t know if I ever will again.”
“Then you won’t. Pack what you need for tonight and tomorrow. We’ll come back later for the rest.” He pulls me in for another kiss on my forehead. “You’re coming home with me, baby.”
I nod before my brain can form a single protest.
We return to my bedroom, and I slip into the bathroom to pull on my robe. The mirror catches me—bruised throat, kiss-swollen mouth, wide, frightened eyes staring back. I force myself to look away.
Something in Bastien’s face has shifted. The warmth that held me is gone, sealed away behind a hard, lethal calm I’ve never seen on him before. I’m watching a stranger wear the shape of the man I love.
A man who kills to protect.
A man who loves me and shows it in the darkest ways.
He doesn’t speak, but he doesn’t need to. His gaze sweeps over the room once and lands on the body. His shoulders square and his jaw sets. Every line of him sharpens into purpose.
This is who he is when he works.
The transformation is seamless, terrifying, and strangely beautiful in its certainty.
I stand in the bathroom doorway, my fingers curled around the frame, as he crouches beside the dead man with clinical precision. No hesitation, fear, or revulsion. Just method.
And experience.
He lifts the body in a single, controlled motion, efficient and practiced. Muscles bunch along his arms and back, moving with a surety that turns my stomach and steadies it at the same time.
And I understand. This is the world he lives in. This is the world I just stepped into. And there’s no turning back.
I chose this.
I chose him.
Bastien carries the body toward the hallway, his silhouette framed by the soft spill of light, danger and devotion bound in the same shape.
I watch him go, feeling myself break and mend in the same breath.
Because I’m his now.
And God help me, he’s mine.