Page 246 of Fractured Loyalties

I arch against him, needing the contact, needing to feel alive under his weight. “Then do it. Don’t let him take any part of me back.”

His breath shudders against my skin. Then his mouth is on mine again, slower this time, deliberate, lips softer, almost reverent. The contrast steals my air more than the brutality did. It’s worse, because it threatens something deeper: it feels like care.

When he finally eases out of me, I feel the loss like a wound. He pulls back enough to strip his boxers off completely, tossing them aside, then drags the sheet over both of us. His arm bands around me, iron and heat, dragging me to his chest until my cheek rests over the hammer of his heart.

Neither of us speaks for a long time. Lydia’s presence is a quiet shadow outside the door. It should feel like a prison. It doesn’t. It feels like a cocoon, the last fragile stillness before the world cracks open again.

My fingers trace the scar along his rib. He doesn’t flinch. He lets me.

“Tomorrow,” I whisper.

“Tomorrow,” he echoes, voice low but certain.

He tilts my chin up until I meet his stare. “If we go after Volker, you don’t look away. You don’t run. You see me for what I am and still choose me.”

I nod. My throat tightens. “I already have.”

The words hang there, thick and dangerous. His jaw flexes like he’s fighting himself. Then he kisses me again—gentle this time, as if it’s the only thing that might undo him.

And for a moment, before the storm swallows us, it feels like we’re the only two people left in the world.

His palm moves to my lower back, heavy, anchoring.

I listen to the beat of his heart. It’s steady now, even after the violence, even after what he left in me. I wonder if it ever falters. I wonder if I’ll be the only one who makes it stumble.

“You’ll sleep,” he says, almost like an order.

“I don’t sleep easily.”

“You will,” he replies. And for some reason, I believe him.

The last thing I feel before the dark takes me is the press of his mouth against my temple. Not rough. Not claiming. Something stranger, something that feels almost like a vow.

And then I fall, knowing when I wake, tomorrow will no longer be just a word. It will be a reckoning.

Chapter 42 – Elias - Volker’s End

Mara’s hand slips from mine when I leave the bed. She doesn’t wake, or if she does, she pretends. The sheet rises with her breathing, her lashes casting faint shadows against her cheeks. She looks untouched by the night, though my teeth left marks and my hands mapped every inch of her until she broke under me. She’s not untouched. She’ll never be again.

The clock on the wall says it’s almost dawn. Pale light leaks through the curtains, thinning out the edges of the room. I dress without sound, layering black against black, steel against skin. The knives are where they belong. The gun sits heavy against my ribs. Every part of me is accounted for.

Except her.

I stand at the doorway longer than I should. Lydia waits outside. I can feel it, but I don’t move yet. Mara shifts on the bed, her thigh bare where the sheet slides, and I want to go back and wake her with my mouth between her legs, leave her undone one more time before I leave her with the storm I promised.

But Volker waits.

And if I don’t cut him out now, he’ll send someone who doesn’t stop at shadows and warnings. Someone who won’t wait in a Civic. Someone who will carve his name into her life the way Caleb once tried.

That thought makes the decision for me.

I step into the hall. Lydia leans against the wall, tablet tucked under her arm, hair pulled back into something that makes her face look sharper than usual.

“You look like a funeral,” she says.

“It will be.”

Her mouth tilts. Not a smile, not really. “Where?”