Page 20 of Midnight Between Us (The Timberbridge Brothers #4)

Chapter Seventeen

Keir

It’s been six weeks since I arrive at Sims’s house.

Long enough that I don’t need help getting out of bed. Long enough that I can limp short distances with the brace and barely feel like my bones are threatening to crack. Long enough that I should know what comes next. But I don’t.

This is my first real tour through the house. Not just the five steps to the bathroom or the shuffle to the couch. An actual attempt to move through the space, see the perimeter, and understand the fortress I’ve been sleeping in.

Confession time, this isn’t what I expected.

It’s not some crumbling farmhouse or quiet cabin tucked into the trees. It’s a modern structure from some fancy magazine for gazillionaires—angular lines, expansive glass windows that don’t bother with curtains, flat stone siding that blends into the woods like camouflage.

There’s a perimeter gate, barely visible through the brush. Surveillance cameras tucked into the eaves like they’ve always been there. One road dead-ends into the driveway and the lake. That’s it. No neighbors. No sign of life unless you count the birdsong that cuts through the late spring air.

We’re far enough from Birchwood Springs that no one would find this place by accident. But close enough that if something happens . . . she could still be collateral.

There’s no welcome mat by the door, no faded wreath or hanging plant like I imagined she’d have. Just a keypad and a reinforced door that clicks open when she taps in a code I’m not allowed to see.

I try to swing my good leg down from the bench. Brace for the shift. I’ve done this twice already today, but something catches. Pain laces through my thigh like a wire pulling tight, and my vision sways.

“Whoa,” the agent mutters, catching my side before I tilt too far. Simone’s there a second later, her hand under my elbow, the other against my chest like muscle memory.

“I’ve got it.” Simone’s voice is clipped, and I’m beginning to hate it.

It’s the only tone she uses with me now—crisp and distant. It’s as if she’s reading off a checklist instead of talking to someone she used to know. I’m almost certain that if I were any other patient, she’d be warmer toward him. Not me.

“You don’t,” I mutter, finding my footing again. “I’m fine.”

“You’re not,” she replies without looking at me. “You’re stitched together like bad origami.”

I almost laugh.

Almost.

But I don’t. Because I can feel her fingers through my shirt, and everything in me remembers this. The way she held me once after Dad beat me up when I was too angry to cry and too young to know the difference. Simone never asked if I was okay—just stayed until the shaking stopped.

Instead of focusing on the pain, I continue walking through the house.

This place breathes open. Cool air rushes past us.

It smells like lemon oil, antiseptic, and something faintly bitter.

Coffee, maybe. The floors are wood. No rugs.

No clutter. Like someone lives here out of obligation, not comfort.

A temporary life packed into clean corners.

There’s a laptop on the table. Some files are left half-closed.

A set of crutches leaning near a low-slung couch.

Which I assumed are the ones they gave me earlier and I refused to use them.

That’s the only time Simone had a somehow human response toward me.

She said something like, “You’re fucking stubborn, Timberbridge.

” The words might be different, but the hate was there.

There’s no trace of the girl I used to know and love.

Just the woman who learned how to erase herself well enough to survive.

I pause. Let my gaze drift past the hallway to the right—probably where the bedrooms are—and focus on the wall of monitors across the room. Surveillance feeds. The gate. The perimeter. Even a drone shot looping silently in the top corner.

“Fuck, this place is a bunker,” I say.

“No,” Simone replies, already moving toward the kitchen. “It’s my house.”

I scoff because nothing about this place feels like a home. Not even to her. The agent disappears into a side room, mumbling something about files. I don’t care.

I watch her move. Everything about her is professional and can’t fucking read her at all, and that drives me crazy.

I’ve known her forever and she became my little shadow when she was eight, and I was barely ten years old.

We were inseparable because even when the world didn’t like us, we understood each other.

Now . . . I did this. This is how I wanted to end whatever the fuck she thought we had. But I can’t stand it, and it’s been like this for weeks.

Every day, she checks my vitals without looking me in the eye. Schedules my therapy like she’s running a factory. Leaves my meals on the table next to my bed and only asks questions if they’re directly tied to my chart.

It’s been six weeks of that.

Waking up in this house that doesn’t feel like a home, being monitored by the only person I’ve ever been able to connect with who treats me with indifference and a dash of hate.

I’m not sure I’ll be allowed to leave.

Not because I’m still too injured. But because someone somewhere is deciding whether I live or die—and Simone might already know which side they’ve chosen.

My leg’s starting to throb, and my ribs feel like someone boxed me in with rebar.

I’m breathing harder than I want to, which makes me sound worse than I am.

Simone watches me—not in pity. In calculation.

“You should go back to your room to rest,” she says.

I nod.

Big mistake.

The floor tilts. Just slightly. My vision narrows, and my good leg buckles a half-second too late.

I don’t fall hard. But I do fall.

Straight into her.

She’s not big enough to catch me, but she tries anyway. Her hands go to my sides, shoulder beneath mine, and for one second, I’m pressed against her as if the past is still happening.

We freeze.

I feel her breath. Feel her pulse.

She doesn’t look up.

“Let go,” I whisper.

“Can’t,” she mutters.

I’m not sure which one of us she’s talking to.

Then the agent’s back, lifting my other arm as if none of it had happened. Between the two of them, I’m upright again. Simone steps back fast. Like contact with me burns.

She doesn’t touch me anymore.

Not like that.

Not since I fucked it all up.

And even now, after six weeks of silence, six weeks of her pretending I’m just another case to monitor, all it took was one second of contact—her hands on me, her breath close—and suddenly I’m back there, at the lake. In that moment. In the goddamn minute before I ruined it all.

It was late. Too quiet. The kind of night where everything already feels like an ending.

I’d just had a confrontation with my father. More like he used me like his punching back while Malerick had taken the kids away before he beat them, too. We protected them as much as we could until we couldn’t any longer.

Simone was already there, just as she used to be.

Curled up with a book on top of a blanket and a thermos right next to her with tea.

This time, she wasn’t sitting. She was pacing.

Barefoot in the grass. It was summer. Her hair twisted up like she didn’t care.

Wearing one of myflannel shirts—too big on her, sleeves pushed past her wrists.

“You okay?” I asked.

She nodded, then looked at my face and flinched. Sometimes she did a brilliant job at hiding the pain it caused her to see me like this.

“You should see the other guy,” I joke, kind of because lately I wasn’t just taking the blows. I was giving them just as well.

“This isn’t funny.”

“No, but you could make it better.” I winked at her.

I did the only thing that made sense.

I kissed her even when my lip hurt.

It was a mistake, but it was the only thing that ever felt right. Her mouth crashed into mine like she’d been waiting. Like she was just as angry. Just as scared. She tasted like every good memory I tried to bury. Sweet and sharp and mine.

Her hands fisted in my shirt. Mine were already in the flannel, pulling it up and over her head. We didn’t talk. Didn’t slow down. I laid her out on the blanket.

She looked up at me as if I was everything. And that scared the fuck out of me because I wasn’t anyone—I’m still a fucking nobody and Simone always gazed at me like I was her world.

She let me in. Let me take her. We moved as though we were drowning and neither of us cared if we surfaced for air.

She wrapped herself around me as if she couldn’t let go. Sounded like she was breaking every time I kissed her neck, every time I told her she was mine without using words.

I made her come more than once that night. I didn’t want it to end. Not because of the sex—though, fuck, it was everything—but because of her. Because it was Simone. Because no one ever saw me like she did.

When she fell asleep, tucked against me, her hand resting right over my ribs like she could feel the way I was holding on—I told myself I’d have to leave her soon.

I was beginning to become just like him.

Simone didn’t deserve to go down with me the way my mother and the rest of his children did.

Nope. I promised she would have a chance at a better life.

But did she?