Prime appeared in the doorway with ice wrapped in a towel. He also had a pill bottle in his hand.
“Valium,” he said, handing it to me along with a glass of water. “And these are painkillers. They’ll help her sleep.”
I gave Mehar one of each and held the water while she swallowed them down. Then I pressed the ice gently to her swollen eye and held it there.
“Rest,” I told her. “We’ll figure everything out tomorrow. Right now, you just need to sleep.”
The pills kicked in fast. Within twenty minutes, her breathing had evened out and her body had relaxed into the mattress. I pulled a blanket over her and sat there for a while, watching her sleep, my mind racing with all the ways I wanted to make Ahmad suffer.
Prime touched my shoulder. “Come outside. She’ll be out for hours.”
I didn’t want to leave her. But I also needed air. Needed space to process everything that was happening.
So I followed him out onto the beach.
The shore was empty.
December in Maryland meant nobody was out here except us. The water was gray and choppy, the wind cold enough to bite, but we’d bundled up in jackets from Prime’s closet beforecoming out. We walked along the sand in silence for a while, the waves crashing beside us, the sky heavy with clouds.
“Everything is falling apart,” I finally said. “Yusef is God knows where. My sister just showed up looking like she went ten rounds with Mike Tyson. I slapped the mayor of DC at a gala. And somewhere out there, Zoo is probably still trying to figure out who killed his son.” I laughed, but there was no humor in it. “When is it going to stop, Prime? When do we get to just… be normal?”
He was quiet for a moment. Then he chuckled—a low, rumbling sound that I felt more than heard.
“Normal.” He shook his head. “You know, when I walked away from that life—when I quit that previous life. I thought I’d run Banks Reserve with my brothers. Build something legitimate. Maybe find a woman. Settle down. Be boring.”
“And then I came along.”
“And then you came along.” He stopped walking and turned to face me. “You brought more chaos into my life in six months than I’d seen in the six years before. Bodies. Cover-ups. Family drama. Identity secrets. A nephew who could catch a case.” He reached out and tucked a strand of hair behind my ear. “And I wouldn’t change a single thing.”
“You’re insane.”
“Maybe.” His hand cupped my face, thumb tracing my cheekbone. “But I’m your kind of insane. And you’re mine.” His eyes were intense, holding me in place. “We were never meant to be normal, Goddess. We were meant to be this. Messy. Complicated. Fighting the world together.”
“That’s toxic as hell.”
“Probably.” He smirked. “But tell me you don’t love it.”
I couldn’t. Because I did.
He kissed me then—slow and deep, his arms wrapping around me, pulling me against his chest. The wind whippedaround us, the waves crashed, and for just a moment, everything else disappeared. Yusef. Mehar. Rashid. Zoo. All of it faded into the background, and there was only this. Only him. Only us.
When he finally pulled back, his forehead resting against mine, I was breathless.
“Take me inside,” I whispered.
He didn’t need to be told twice.
The beach house had a fireplace.
Prime lit it while I checked on Mehar—still sleeping, the pills doing their job—and when I came back to the living room, he’d laid out blankets on the floor in front of the flames.
“Lie down,” he said. “On your stomach.”
I raised an eyebrow but did as I was told. The blankets were soft beneath me, the fire warm against my skin. I heard him moving behind me, then felt his hands on my shoulders.
He started with a massage. Deep, slow pressure working out the knots I’d been carrying for days. His thumbs dug into the tension along my spine, and I groaned into the blanket.
“You carry everything here,” he murmured, working a particularly stubborn spot. “All that stress. All that worry. You hold it in your body.”
