Page 241 of Fractured Loyalties

“You hate me,” I say.

“Sometimes,” she answers. “Not now.”

My shoulder knocks hers. “Good.”

Her head tips against my arm and stays there. The baton lies still across her lap like a promise that can be kept.

Outside the window, the night sky stretches out. The city keeps its own counsel. Lydia’s shadow shifts under the door. My phone buzzes once on the nightstand with a new text from the same number as before.

Window soon.

I turn the screen face down. I will open it when I decide to go looking for the next throat that needs my hand. Not before.

Mara’s fingers find mine. They’re steady.

“Tomorrow,” she says.

“Tomorrow,” I answer.

We sit in the calm I made at a cost I will pay again.

Chapter 41 – Mara - Before the Storm

The wordtomorrowstill hangs between us like a blade. He says it, I repeat it, but I can’t make myself believe in the safety of that promise. Tomorrow is not a thing we’re guaranteed. Tomorrow feels like a cliff we’ve already stepped over, and tonight is the only ground left under our feet.

I don’t let go of his hand. I can feel the faint sting of scrapes across his knuckles, the places where bone met bone, the lives he ended still etched into the skin I hold. He doesn’t try to hide it. He never hides it from me. That honesty terrifies me more than any lie could.

His phone lies face down on the nightstand, humming with silence I know isn’t silence at all. He hasn’t touched it since the last message. That restraint tells me something Elias will never say out loud: he is buying this moment for me, carving it out of a war that is already calling his name.

Lydia’s shadow shifts once under the door. Watching. Guarding. Then gone. For the first time since he walked back in, the apartment feels like ours.

“You should sleep,” I whisper, though it sounds ridiculous even as I say it.

His mouth curves, not a smile, more like the shadow of one. “You don’t want me unconscious right now.”

I don’t. God help me, I don’t. The thought of closing my eyes and waking up to him gone—walking into whatever storm waits tomorrow—squeezes my chest so hard I want to claw it open.

Instead, I turn toward him, sliding the baton from my lap onto the nightstand, placing it beside his phone like they belong together—two kinds of weapons, both meant to keep me steady.My hand rests on his chest again, right over the rhythm that never falters.

“Tell me it’s enough,” I say. “That tonight is enough to hold you until tomorrow.”

His eyes lock onto mine, steel catching fire. “Mara, you’re the only thing that has ever been enough.”

The words scorch through me. Not sweet, not gentle. They’re too raw, too heavy. They feel like ownership and confession bound in the same breath. My ribs ache with the weight of it, and still, I lean in.

His hand slides to the back of my neck, firm, guiding, demanding nothing less than all of me. When his mouth finds mine, it isn’t coaxing. It’s claiming. Salt and heat, iron and hunger. I taste everything he won’t say, every death he’s dragged home on his skin.

And I let him. I open for him because I’m so goddamned tired of pretending I don’t want the very thing that could ruin me.

I don’t know if this is surrender or survival. Maybe it’s both.

His mouth takes mine like he owns the oxygen in the room, and I’m allowed to share it because he says so. I answer with my hands, fingers catching the open edges of his shirt, tugging him closer, a little greedy and not sorry for it. The bed shifts behind my knees. Elias doesn’t rush. He steers.

“Words,” he says against my lips. “Tell me what you want from me tonight.”

“You,” I manage. “All of you.”

“Clearer.”