“Rafe,” she says, voice soft but sharp at the edges. “What happened?”
I don’t answer right away. I cross the room, crouch in front of her, and take her hands in mine. My palms are still streaked with blood. She doesn’t flinch.
“They sent someone,” I say finally, voice low. “A jaguar.”
Her eyes search mine. “Roman.”
I nod once. “He said something before he died. Said our bond is his target.”
She draws a breath, slow, like she’s pulling it through water. “Then he knows.”
“Yeah,” I say, my voice heavier than I mean it to be. “He knows.”
She squeezes my hands, the glow pulsing under her skin where it touches mine. “Then we stop hiding.”
I stare at her, this woman who walked into my world thinking she was just profiling a fighter and now sits glowing in a villa with blood on her hands that isn’t hers but might as well be.
“You’re in this now,” I say, quiet but sure. “Whether you want it or not.”
She tilts her chin up. “I already was.”
The bull stirs at that, not with rage but something older, something like recognition.
I rise, pull her up with me, and look out the window. The treeline is dark again, the courtyard empty, but the scent lingers. Not just blood. War.
I wrap an arm around her shoulders, draw her against my side, and I don’t try to make a plan. I just stand there, watching the hills, feeling her heartbeat against my ribs, knowing Roman’s already moving pieces I haven’t even seen yet.
And I know one thing with a clarity that cuts through every other noise in my head.
If he wants her, he has to go through me.
20
KALEIGH
The scent of blood is a metallic whisper that clings to the air long after the courtyard has gone still. It threads through the cracks in the stone floor and drifts into the room like a quiet accusation. I kneel beside the basin, twisting the old tap until water trickles out in a thin stream, cold and slow, catching the dim light from the oil lamp on the nightstand. The glow still lingers on my arms, faint now but steady, like it has decided to live there instead of visit. My hands shake just enough to make the water ripple in the bowl.
Rafe sits at the edge of the mattress with his elbows on his knees, head bowed, the muscles in his back tight and rigid under the sweat-darkened shirt. His hands hang loose between his thighs but the tension in them is obvious, fingers twitching slightly as if the fight isn’t done inside him even if the courtyard has gone quiet. Blood streaks his knuckles, already drying in dark rivulets that trace the old scars across his skin.
“Hold still,” I say softly, dipping a cloth into the basin. “You’re bleeding more than you think.”
He lifts his head just enough to meet my eyes. “It’s nothing.”
“It’s never nothing,” I answer, wringing out the cloth until the water runs pink. “You keep pretending it is and one day your body won’t bother keeping up.”
A shadow of a smile flickers at the corner of his mouth. “You sound like a doctor.”
“I sound like someone who’s tired of watching you bleed.”
He exhales through his nose, a sound that carries both a warning and a kind of reluctant surrender, but he stays still when I take his hand and start wiping the blood from his knuckles. The skin is split open in three places, raw and angry, and I trace the edges of each cut with the damp cloth, careful and slow.
“You didn’t have to come out there,” he says after a moment, his voice low but rougher than before, like he’s trying not to grind the words into the air.
“I didn’t,” I reply, keeping my eyes on his hand as I work. “But you didn’t have to bring me here either.”
“That’s different.”
“No, it’s not.”
