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I glance down at my coffee, trying not to smile.
Later that day, I hear him humming. It’s soft, almost absentminded — just a few notes under his breath while he looks over something at the kitchen table.
It’s nothing. Barely a sound.
But it’s the first time I’ve heard him do anything that sounds remotely like contentment. I stand in the hallway for a second too long, listening. Then I move away before he notices me watching.
At dinner, we don’t talk much, but it’s not stiff like before. The silence stretches between us like a blanket, not a wall. He brushes past me at the counter when he’s cleaning up, his hand grazing my lower back as he reaches for a towel.
It’s a small, unintentional touch but it makes me freeze in my chair, and I realize something I hadn’t before.
My closed off fake husband is cracking open. Not wide, not all at once — but just enough for light to get in. I turn to look at him and my heart gives a small leap.
He’s been here for me. Not because he has to be, but because he chooses to be.
And for the first time in our marriage, I know without a single doubt that this strange, quiet thing growing between us will become something real.
And I will be more than his wife in name.
20
Chapter 17
Zasha
I walk into the room to find her already asleep in my bed. She’s been there every night since Luisa died, and there is no way I am letting her go back to a different bed. She is curled up on her side, wearing one of my shirts like it belongs to her. And it secretly makes me happy to see her comfortable in my clothes,
although I would rather have her out of them and naked next to me.
I’ve stayed beside her every night, burning with lust, yet I haven’t laid a single hand on her. Not because I didn’t want to. Fuck, my cock is straining from wanting to. But I have restraining myself because I couldn’t. Not when she’s been sobroken with grief. So, I’ve done my best to wait while I burn up with passion.
Waited, while she murmured in her sleep. Waited, while she pressed her face to my chest and cried until her body went limp, and her thigh slips over mine.
I feel my body stir, and my shaft begin to rise, and I know I have to walk away, or I won’t be able to control myself much longer.
Sitting alone in my office in the dark, one hand cradling a half-finished glass of scotch, the other twitching with the ghost of her presence. The light from my laptop glows faintly on the desk, casting long shadows across the floor. I should be going through shipment reports, security footage, intel briefings.
But all I can think about is Mara.
How she loves the simple things in life, how she dances barefoot and forgets she’s doing it. The way she grieves like the people she loves are stitched into her soul. She teases me like I’m made for her amusement. And the fucked-up thing is... I want to be.
I want to be the reason she throws her head back and laughs with reckless abandon. I want to be the one she comes home to.The one who gets to watch her in all her moods — fierce, playful, sad, stubborn, radiant.
I’ve seen a part of her most people never will. The softest parts. The wildest, too. I’ve seen her strength, not in the way she fights, but in the way she crumbles and keeps going anyway.
And God help me… I don’t just want her.
I love her.
That’s the first time I let myself admit it.
The word drops into my chest like a bullet — silent, sharp, final.
I love her.
I love the mess of her. The beauty of her. The stubbornness and the mischief and the quiet way she looks at me like she knows I’m dangerous and still doesn’t flinch.
Fuck pride. Fuck fear.