POV Mara
"Now for the next moves," Adrian said, pushing his empty coffee cup aside with deliberate precision. "I'm still a functioning asset for Mare Nero, which means I need to show my face at the office today."
Something primal twisted behind my ribs—not fear exactly, but this nauseating recognition that he'd walk back to them, those same monsters who'd orchestrated my parents' execution, and I'd be left here drowning in the silence they'd created.
He stood, crossed to a garment bag I hadn't noticed, and unzipped it with casual efficiency. "I'll need to account for where I was until dawn, and explain how I found the car."
Then he reached into his bag and pulled out my phone—my actual phone, the one they'd stripped from me in that gray room—and set it on the table between us like an offering.
"Got this on the way out. Figured you'd want it back."
My hand moved toward it before I could stop myself, this piece of my old life that felt foreign now, contaminated by everything that had happened since they'd taken it. The need for it warred with revulsion, with the knowledge that every contact there belonged to a girl whose parents were still alive.
The shirt came off first, yanked over his head without ceremony, revealing the bruises I'd painted across his torso.
My mouth went dry—not from desire, or not just from desire, but from this visceral recognition of my own violence mapped across his skin.
Each mark a choice he'd made to let me hurt him, to trust me with his pain, and God help me, it made me want to trace them with my tongue, to apologize with my mouth in ways that would only create more damage.
He pulled out a crisp white shirt, shook it once. "I'll tell them you're a crazy problem. Unpredictable. Dangerous."
"Excuse me?" The words came out sharp, but I couldn't stop watching his hands work the buttons, couldn't stop the heat pooling low in my belly at the methodical way he covered evidence of what I'd done to him.
"It's a theater, Mara. Not belief." His fingers moved to his waistband, and my brain stuttered when he dropped the sweatpants without warning. "If they think you're unstable, they won't look for patterns. Won't credit you with strategy."
The slacks slid up those absurdly athletic legs, expensive fabric clinging to muscle that belonged on someone who ran toward danger for sport.
He tucked in the shirt with practiced efficiency, and I tracked every movement like my survival depended on memorizing the geography of his hips, the way fabric settled against skin I wanted to taste.
"What am I supposed to do while you're playing corporate?" My voice came out steadier than the chaos in my head, which felt like its own betrayal.
"Wait here." Cufflinks next, and why was watching him thread metal through fabric making my pulse race like I was seventeen and stupid again? "I need you safe while I navigate this."
"I don't do waiting well." Understatement. Waiting meant thinking, and thinking meant remembering the exact shade of surprise in my mother's eyes, meant hearing that specific silence after bodies stop being people.
"I know." He knotted his tie in quick, sure pulls that made me imagine those same hands around my throat, not violent but possessive, holding me still while he—
Stop.
"But right now, patience keeps you alive. Keeps us both alive."
The jacket completed the transformation, and looking at him made my chest ache with something worse than grief.
He reached for the gun on the nightstand, my gun now, and the loss of it felt like losing my last defense against the wanting that threatened to consume me whole.
"I'll be back by evening," he said, weapon disappearing with practiced ease. "Lock the door. Don't answer for anyone."
Then he was gone, and I was alone with my phone and the catastrophic realization that I wanted him to come back more than I wanted to breathe.
I kept the phone in airplane mode, paranoid even in my paranoia, but used the safehouse's sketchy Wi-Fi to spin up a fresh eSIM. The device felt like holding a grenade—all that potential connection to a world where people still thought I existed normally.
Some mindless series played on the phone's screen, people with problems that didn't involve choosing between vengeance and whatever this thing with Adrian was becoming.
The hours crawled, each minute stretching like wire about to snap. Afternoon bled into evening with that specific weight of time spent hiding from yourself.
By sunset, I found myself staring at Sera's contact information, thumb hovering over the message field. My best friend. The only person outside this nightmare who'd notice I was gone.
But contact meant exposure, meant risk, meant—God, what if they already had her? What if she was leverage, the kind they extract locations from with tools I'd seen too many times?
A knock shattered my spiral, sharp and sudden. My hand reached for the gun that wasn't there—muscle memory mocking me—before grabbing a kitchen knife that felt laughably inadequate, like bringing a poem to a gunfight.
Through the peephole: a courier already retreating, a large box abandoned like a question I didn't want to answer.
I waited. Counted. Opened the door ready for violence that didn't come.
Inside: clothes that screamed anonymity, the kind that erased you from memory. I changed fast, adding an oversized hoodie that dropped shadows across my face like I was already disappearing.
I confidently headed out onto the street because I had to make sure that everything was okay with Ser.
The street outside was perfectly neglected—buckled sidewalk, dead streetlight, the kind of place where screams went unheard.
A tired sedan begged to be stolen, and my fingers were already working when a hand landed on my shoulder.
I pivoted, struck, swept—but the figure absorbed it all, drove forward, and we hit asphalt hard enough to embed gravel in my palms.
The weight of him pressed me down, and I knew him by scent before logic caught up—soap and cologne and that maddening something that made my body betray every survival instinct I had.
"What the hell are you doing?" Adrian's voice came out rough, breath warm against my face, and I hated how my body softened under his, how every cell remembered the shape of him.
I bucked hard, trying to throw him off, but he held me easily, and the ease of it—God, the controlled strength—sent heat flooding through me that had nothing to do with anger and everything to do with the devastating need to surrender, just once, to let someone else carry the weight of choosing.
His gaze tracked across my face—eyes, cheekbone, mouth—lingering on my lips long enough that I felt it like touch. When his eyes met mine again, his pupils were blown wide with something that matched the hunger eating me alive from the inside.
"Let go," I said, forcing a steadiness I didn't feel.
His mouth tilted into that smile that undid me, shameless and knowing. "If I don't—then what?"