Our words stretched through the morning, past the coffee and pastries, into the uncertain light of a future I never imagined having.
Menace and Bronc arrived with the weight of doom hanging on their shoulders. I’d barely digested my confessions to Juliet when Bronc’s icy glare made me shrink back, his disapproval a storm cloud in the room. He loomed over the table, blunt and impatient, as Menace laid out their plan. Declan’s name vibrated in my chest like a dull ache. They were going to King Rafe Mayfield, looking for allies in Birmingham. The cabin felt tight with tension as we left. Instead of driving me back to my apartment, Menace veered onto an unfamiliar road, the questions loud between us.
The silence spread, swollen and ugly, until I couldn’t stand it. “Where are we going?” I finally asked, the uncertainty raw in my voice.
Menace’s eyes stayed on the road, his face carved in stone. “Somewhere safe.”
The words did nothing to calm the storm inside me. The flat Texas landscape blurred past as my pulse thudded louder and more erratic. I watched him, searching for a clue, but he was unreadable.
We drove longer than I expected, each mile pulling me further from the certainty I thought I had. My fingers fidgeted in my lap, twisting my fear into tangles I couldn’t undo.
When he finally turned onto a quiet street lined with sprawling trees, I stared out the window, my breath catching. He parked in front of a stately colonial house, its black shutters standing in stark contrast to the crisp white siding. Boxwoods trimmed to military precision marched in neat rows.
He got out of the truck, his stride purposeful as he moved to the door.
I hesitated, my unease blooming into full-blown suspicion. The interior was just as pristine, with gleaming hardwood floors and crown moldings that felt both oppressive and elegant.
Then I saw it. My things, stacked neatly by the door. I turned to him, a storm of emotion in my chest.
“What is this?” The question came out sharper than I intended, my confusion laced with the beginnings of anger.
Menace’s voice was as blunt as his expression. “You’re living with me now.”
The shock left me momentarily breathless. It echoed inside, the way Bronc’s declaration of war had—too loud and final. My mouth opened, then closed again, my thoughts tangled and uncertain.
He moved past me, setting his keys down with the same kind of authority he wielded everywhere else. I stood there, my feet planted in rebellion, as the full weight of what he said crashed over me.
“You can’t just decide that for me.” My voice rose with the tide of anger building in my chest. “I’ve had people making my decisions my whole life. I won’t—”
I stopped, the fight bubbling too hot for words. The last shreds of my control slipped away, my anger sparking like wildfire.
He watched me, unmoving, as though the storm of my rage was nothing compared to the hurricane brewing between us. “You’re not safe on your own.”
It was all I needed to hear for my anger to consume me completely. “I’m not safe with you, either! Declan will come for me no matter where I am.” I turned, pacing the room in frantic strides. “You can’t protect me, Menace. No one can!”
The space between us was charged with everything I’d confessed to Juliet. The control, the powerlessness. He thought he could keep me here, thought he could claim me like he claimed the rest of his world. But I was done being someone else’s possession.
My footsteps echoed as I marched past him again and again, my frustration at a fever pitch. He was so still, so goddamn certain. It only fueled my desperation. “I don’t need you to keep me in a gilded cage,” I shouted, my words ricocheting off the elegant walls. “I don’t need another man telling me how to live!”
“Are you done?” His voice was infuriatingly calm, the eye of a storm that I couldn’t see.
I spun to face him, my chest heaving with the force of my rebellion. “I don’t think I ever will be.”
We stared at each other; the tension snapping like electric wires in the air. And then he moved, fast and inevitable, pinning me to the wall.
His mouth claimed mine, a branding more than a kiss. It seared through the anger, through the defiance, through everything that said I didn’t want this.
Because I did. More than I ever wanted anything.
His hands gripped my arms, holding me in place, but it was my need that kept me there. My hunger matched his, demanding and insistent, said with every movement that I belonged to him as much as he belonged to me.
I felt the shift in me, the loosening of the threads that tied me to a life of compliance. Menace wasn’t Declan, and he wasn’t Dominick. He was mine, and I was his, and it scared the hell out of me how much I wanted to be caught in his grasp.
The kiss deepened, rough and wild, his teeth grazing my lip until I moaned into him. I was lost in it, in the ferocity of his need and mine.
The taste of him filled me, more intoxicating than the terror that had driven me for so long. I pressed against him, desperate and reckless, my fingers tangling in his hair as the last of my fight crumbled to dust.
This was what I’d been running from and toward, the intensity of it too much and not enough. He knew it. Felt it. Matched it.
