Page 72 of Fractured Loyalties (Tainted Souls #2)

I wake to an empty stretch of sheet and the ghost of heat on the pillow where his head should be.

For a second, I think he’s in the shower.

Then the hush of the safehouse tells a different story.

There’s no water running, no drawer sliding, no measured movement that belongs to Elias.

Only the distant sound from the highway and the faint click of keys out in the hall where Lydia lives like a shadow.

My body aches in places that feel claimed. Marks sting when I shift. I sit up, and the sheet drags over my hips. A dull pull at my wrists reminds me of leather and a knot I asked for. I should feel ashamed. I don’t. I feel anchored and furious in equal measure.

He said tomorrow. He said we plan. I said I’d watch him and not look away.

I swing my legs out of the bed and stand.

The floor is cool under my toes. The house opens ahead of me, all clean lines and glass, morning pressed flat against the windows.

I take his shirt from the chair and shove my arms into it, buttons left undone because I don’t want barriers right now, I want the air on my skin to remind me I’m here.

When I step into the hall, Lydia glances up from the kitchen counter. Tablet open. Mug steaming. Face unreadable.

“He’s gone,” I say, even though I already know the answer.

She nods once. “Before dawn. Didn’t slam a door about it.”

I grip the edge of the counter to stop my hands from shaking. “You let him walk out.”

“I don’t let Elias do anything,” she says. “I track. I warn. I catch what I can when people fall.” Her gaze flicks down my body, not prying, cataloging. “You okay?”

“I don’t know.” The honesty drags out of me. “He promised he’d plan with me. He promised I wouldn’t be a passenger.”

“Promises live in rooms,” she says. “Men like him live in motion.”

It should infuriate me. It does. But the anger sits next to something else: fear, and under that, a wrong thing I refuse to bury—relief that he’s the one cutting instead of me.

The door lock thuds.

Lydia’s posture changes. Not a flinch. A subtle shift like a cat hearing the right set of footsteps. Elias steps in with the morning on his coat and the kind of stillness that means he’s emptied himself out somewhere else.

Our eyes catch and hold. That’s all it takes. I step toward him without deciding to.

He’s marked. Knuckles raw. Black shirt with stains a sink can’t catch. His pupils are steady. The calm in his face is dangerous because it never comes free.

“Volker?” I ask, voice roughened from the night.

“Gone,” he says. “Caleb, too.” His jaw doesn’t move.

Two bullets of truth. I expected one. The second hits me lower, base of the spine, like a wire cut. Air rushes in too sharp. I steady myself on the island because my legs don’t want to cooperate.

“I wanted to be there,” I say.

“I didn’t.” He closes the space and stops an arm’s length away, as if he’s checking me for damage. “You don’t need his face inside your head again.”

“I already live with it.” My voice breaks. “Every year. Every wall. Every time a car idled too long outside my building.” My hands curl on the stone. “I wanted to see it end.”

“It ended,” he says, quiet steel. “On my time. With my hands.”

Relief and guilt arrive together, two tides smashing into each other. The mixture tastes metallic in my mouth. I swallow it anyway, because it’s the only thing honest enough for this room.

“Thank you,” I whisper. “For doing what I couldn’t.”

His eyes flicker. Not triumph. Something darker. Ownership edged with care. He takes the last step, cups my jaw, and tilts my face up until he can read every tremor.

“Say the part you’re afraid to say,” he orders, like it’s a command that will keep me alive.

“I’m glad he’s dead.”

The world doesn’t end. The ceiling doesn’t crack. Lydia doesn’t gasp. Elias’s thumb slides over my cheek, and his mouth barely moves when he answers.

“Good.”

The word lands in my chest like a weight I finally know how to carry.

Lydia clears her throat, a practical intrusion. “I’ll give you two minutes to be human, then we talk about the drive he stole and the fallout that’s going to walk on its own legs. I’ll be in the hall.”

She leaves without waiting for us to nod. The door to the corridor settles, and the house gives us back our edges.

I look at his hands again. “Did it hurt?” I ask, and then hate the question. “I mean—”

“I don’t measure it that way,” he says. “I measured the moment I came home, and you weren’t flinching anymore.”

“I might flinch later.” I hold his stare. “But not from you.”

Something in his face loosens. Not enough for anyone else to see. Enough for me.

I should let the calm last. I don’t. The other truth has been gnawing at me since the day I walked into his world with my eyes open.

“I know about the club you visit sometimes. If we go forward,” I say, chest tight, “there are lines. No other partners. No ‘release valves’ because the war is heavy. If you need it, you take it from me, or you wait. I’m not asking. I’m telling you what keeps me here.”

He doesn’t blink. “You think I go to Dom’s to get what you wouldn’t give?”

“You go there because control feels safer than feeling,” I answer. “I understand it. I hate it.”

“Do you want punishment for it?” His tone flattens into something clinical. “Confession? Penitence? The theater of repair?”

“I want a vow,” I say. “And if you break it, I want the truth before I hear it from the wall. I won’t be surprised in my own skin.”

A beat. Two. He steps in and brackets my hips against the island. Heat coils low just from the weight of him there. He doesn’t use it. He uses words like knives he is willing to hand me.

“No other partners,” he says, steady. “No scenes without you. No rooms that don’t have your name in them. If I feel the edge closing on me, I tell you before I pick up a tool.”

My ribs loosen a fraction. “And I don’t run,” I say, a vow of my own. “Not when you aren’t pretty. Not when you come home with blood under your nails and call it protection.”

His mouth tilts, almost humorless, almost fond. “You like me better when I’m not pretty.”

“Sometimes,” I admit. “Sometimes, yes.”

He leans in until his forehead brushes mine, and for a second, the world quiets enough for me to hear the thick, grounded thud of his heart under my palms. He isn’t a storm in this moment. He’s a wall.

“Color?” he asks, not as a rote, but as an act of respect. He’s giving me the lever even while he crowds my space.

“Green for this,” I say. “For the talk. Not for what comes next.”

“What comes next?” His voice roughens, and it’s not control. It’s need. Mine, mirrored in him.

“You tell me the thing you hide even from yourself.” I lift my chin. “You tell me why owning the room keeps you sane.”

He stills. Only his thumbs move, sliding a slow line along the bones at my hips. He could deflect. He doesn’t. When he speaks, the words feel cut out of him.

“My father did collections for men who liked to call themselves businessmen.” He doesn’t dress it up.

He never does when the knives come out. “He took me with him because I was small and made people softer. He’d put a hand on my neck and tell me when to cry.

When to speak. When to watch. If I got it wrong, it was a lesson later in a room with the door shut. ”

My throat tightens, bile and fury flooding my mouth at once. He keeps going, voice even, like he’s dictating a report.

“The first time I watched a man die, I was twelve. The man who did it pressed a pistol into my hand after as a joke so everyone could laugh and say I pulled the trigger. I didn’t. I still smelled it for a week. Nothing made it leave.”

He doesn’t lift his eyes from mine. He doesn’t look away from the girl whose shame used to come on the heels of wanting the wrong man.

“My father died all alone, just like Caleb and some other men I’ve killed,” he says.

“No last words worth hearing. I witnessed it happen. I learned there that begging doesn’t buy anything that lasts.

Control does. So I built a life where every door opens when I tell it to.

Every person who belongs to me knows exactly what that means. ”

He waits for me to flinch. I don’t.

“Say the decision you’re making,” he murmurs, a kind of plea he’d deny with his last breath. “Say it out loud so it sticks.”

I take air in slow, steady gulps until my chest stops hurting. “I’m not afraid of what you are,” I say. “Only of a day when you keep it from me.”

His reaction is not dramatic. No collapse. No broken man at my feet. Just a long look that feels like heat and winter at the same time. He nods once, a clean cut of assent.

“Then we seal it,” he says.

He reaches for my wrist the way he always does before he binds—fingers pausing at the pulse, checking for more than consent. Checking for me.

“Color?” he asks again.

“Green to start,” I answer. “Yellow if I’m sliding. Red if I’m done. You give me the same.”

“You think I won’t.”

“I think you forget you’re human,” I say, and it lands the way I meant it to. He huffs a rough laugh that has no light in it and all the truth.

“Bedroom,” he orders.

I step back, and the island leaves my spine. His hand rests at the small of my back, not pushing, not guiding, reminding. We pass the doorway where Lydia’s shadow is a smear along the hall. She doesn’t turn. She knows when doors are closing that shouldn’t be opened.

In the bedroom, the sheets are a map of last night. He doesn’t touch them. He reaches for the belt draped over the chair and for the length of soft black rope in the drawer he keeps shut when we aren’t this.

“On the mattress,” he says. “Hands above your head.”

I go where he points me and lace my fingers into the headboard slat. He doesn’t leave me waiting long. The rope kisses my wrists and the knot that follows is a language he speaks in his sleep. Firm. Symmetric. Space enough for circulation. No space at all for doubt.