She told you to let go.
The expression on Derek’s face as he’d jerked around. The one on Levi’s—flat, focused, all his usual warmth carved away until there was nothing left but intent.
Mine, that intent said.Don’t touch what’s mine.
The elevator chimed. The doors opened into the lobby, and I stepped out, the carpet catching my bare feet through the thin soles of my sneakers. I crossed to a grouping of armchairs near a potted palm and sat, my pulse still skidding.
I pulled out my phone, fingers not quite steady, and dialed the number Levi had given me earlier.
“Dominion Hall,” a calm male voice answered.
“It’s Amelia,” I said. “Levi asked me to call. He said to tell you to bring a duffel bag.”
There was a brief pause. No questions. No surprise.
“We’ll handle it,” the voice said. “Sit tight.”
The call ended.
I lowered the phone to my lap, exhaled slowly, and let the adrenaline rush catch up to me.
That was so hot.
The thought slid through me uninvited, and this time I didn’t bother batting it away.
Because it was.
I was a grown woman. A journalist who’d spent years chronicling the damage men could do when they treated violence as currency. I’d stood in hospitals and morgues and watched what happened when obsession turned into explosions. Intellectually, I knew all of that, down to my bones.
And yet.
My pulse was drumming at the base of my throat. My skin felt too tight. Under the adrenaline, something needy and old and bone-deep unfurled, like a big cat stretching after too long in a cage.
I pictured him back upstairs: big hands on Derek’s collar, shoving him through the doorway. That controlled, lethal energy turning inward instead of radiating down a hallway.
What would it be like to sit on his lap right now?I wondered, dazed.To straddle him on that stupid hotel bed, his hands still rough from a fight, his knuckles split and warm as they slid up my thighs? To feel all that dangerous, barely-leashed power and know—really know—that not one ounce of it was aimed at hurting me?
That it was all pointed outward.
Protecting me. Shielding me. Claiming me.
A small, inappropriate bubble of laughter rose in my chest. I smothered it behind my palm, glancing around the lobby to make sure no one was paying attention.
A couple with a stroller. A businessman arguing quietly into his phone. The front-desk clerk tapping something into a computer. No one cared that there was a woman in leggings and an old university T-shirt sitting in an armchair, slowly coming apart at the seams because her boyfriend had just gone full ex–special forces on her editor.
Boyfriend.
The word should have made me flinch. It didn’t. It just slotted into place with a kind of reckless, dizzy rightness.
I slouched lower in the chair, tipping my head back. My body felt like a contradiction—still amped with flight-or-fight, but underneath that, softer, looser. My thighs pressed together on their own, a small, private answer to everything my brain was pretending not to think.
You’re supposed to be the rational one, I reminded myself.The woman who writes about power structures, not the one who gets weak-kneed because a man growled on her behalf in a hotel hallway.
Except it wasn’t just the growl. It was the line underneath it—the one that said, without words:I will end you before I let you hurt her.
I’d spent my adult life proving I didn’t need saving. That I could walk into dangerous places under my own power and walk back out again. That I could file the story and fix my own lock and talk down my own threats.
And I’d done it. I was proud of it.
