I couldn’t stop myself. I reached across the slick leather seat separating us and pulled him into my arms with more force than finesse. Grabbed his soaked jacket, yanking him close until his weight collapsed against me. He stiffened for half a second before his arms came around me. Tight, desperate, trembling with something that wasn’t cold.
I held him there, squeezing hard, feeling his pulse slam through too many layers of wet fabric. Water dripped from his hair onto my neck. He smelled like rain and gunpowder and violence and underneath it all, something raw I couldn’t name.
After a breath that stretched too long, I pulled back just enough to meet his gaze. His forehead dropped to mine before I could decide if that’s what I wanted. The contact sent a shock through my system. His skin ice-cold, mine flushed with adrenaline heat.
I got you. The message was clear in the weight of his head pressing against mine, in the way his fingers still gripped my waist like I might disappear. I came back.
I found his wrist and wrapped around it tight. His pulse hammered wild and unsteady beneath my fingertips. Too fast, too hard. The rhythm of someone who’d just clawed their way back from somewhere dark.
“I know.” I whispered into the tiny space between our mouths, barely an inch of frozen air separating us. “But you almost didn’t.”
He pulled back just enough to look me in the eye. The intensity there hit like a physical blow. Green and possessive and so fucking present it hurt to hold his gaze. He took my palm fromhis wrist and pressed it flat against his ribs, right over his pulse where it beat against my skin.
Mine.
The silent word screamed louder than the gunfire still ringing in my ears. He wasn’t claiming me. He was telling me that I was the anchor. That when he drifted into whatever blank void had swallowed him whole back there, I was the thread that pulled him back to consciousness, to himself, to here.
My own pulse kicked into a frantic rhythm that had nothing to do with the bullets we’d just escaped. Terrifying. He was broken and glitching and deadly and completely, devastatingly mine to save. And I had no idea if I was strong enough to keep doing it.
From the driver’s seat, Havoc cut through the tension. “You know, this would be significantly more tolerable if you two could refrain from having a romantic moment while I’m actively trying to keep us alive.”
“Shut up and drive. Get us the hell out of Lyon.”
Chapter 15
Clare
The boarding school looked like something from a gothic novel, all stone and shadows and bare winter branches scratching at a sky the color of old bruises.
Havoc pulled the SUV through iron gates that groaned metal-on-metal protest, tires crunching up a gravel drive loud enough to announce our arrival to anyone within a half-mile radius. Through the windshield, École Pensionnat Henri Rousseau materialized from the winter darkness, stone buildings from 1897 hunched against the night like sleeping giants, a Gothic chapel spire reaching toward clouds so low they seemed to touch the rooftops. Bare trees lined the approach, skeletal branches clawing at nothing.
Every window was completely dark except one warm glow on the ground floor of the main building.
A boarding school. He was hiding us in a boarding school.
“Closed for Christmas holidays.” Havoc pulled around toward a side entrance. “Empty. The headmaster’s an old friend who owes me several lifetimes of favors.”
The campus felt like a ghost town, a place built for children, now abandoned to the silence. It was the kind of heavy quiet that pressed against your eardrums, making you hyperaware of your own breathing.
In the back seat, our clothes had mostly dried into us during the long drive, stiff, uncomfortable, salt-stained from sweat and rain water. Xavier’s hand had been on my thigh the entire time, grounding himself, anchoring to my presence. I’d been monitoring his pupils obsessively every time we passed under a streetlight.
One blown wide. One pinprick. Better since we left the city, but it raised every neurological red flag in my nurse brain.
Havoc stopped near a side entrance marked RÉSIDENCE DU DIRECTEUR in faded letters. Principal’s residence.
We followed him to the door. It opened before Havoc could knock.
The man standing in the doorway was backlit by warm interior light, creating a halo effect that should have been comforting but somehow wasn’t. My clinical assessment kicked in automatically: six-four at least, lean but powerfully built, with an eerie stillness that immediately reminded me of Xavier. The kind of stillness that came from being a predator waiting for the right moment to move.
Dark brown hair streaked with silver. Golden-hazel eyes too sharp, too knowing, scanning us with the same intensity Xavier used. A deep scar visible where his shirt collar didn’t quite cover skin, jagged, old, the kind that came from surviving something that should have killed you.
But his face held something softer than I expected. Weariness, almost. Something that might have been kindness if yousquinted hard enough and ignored the part of him that looked like he could kill you without breaking a sweat.
His voice came soft, deliberate, measured in a way that was unsettling in its calmness. Like every word was carefully weighed before being released.
“You must be the nurse who wouldn’t let him die.”
Not a question. A statement of fact delivered with something that sounded uncomfortably close to approval. Then he looked at Xavier.
