CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Kristen
The sheets are tangled around my legs, damp with sweat. My body still hums. Nico's chest rises and falls beneath my cheek, his heartbeat steady against my ear.
I just had the best sex of my life.
Twenty-six years old, and I didn't know it could feel like that. Didn't know my body could do those things, make those sounds, want so desperately that everything else disappeared.
Boring. You just lie there like a dead fish, Kristen.
My throat tightens. I squeeze my eyes shut, trying to hold onto the warmth spreading through my limbs, but Jack's voice slithers in anyway. His face. His threats.
The custody papers.
I bolt upright so fast the room spins.
"What?" Nico's hand shoots to my hip, steadying me. His voice is rough, alert. Ready for a threat.
"I forgot to tell you." The words tumble out in a rush. "Jack filed for custody. sole custody of Lily. My lawyer called this morning and I just—with everything happening, I didn't?—"
Nico sits up against the headboard, the sheet pooling at his waist. Moonlight cuts across his chest, highlighting the scars I traced with my tongue an hour ago. His expression doesn't change.
"When?"
"Yesterday. He's claiming I'm unstable." I laugh, but it sounds broken. "That I work for criminals."
Nico's jaw ticks. Just once. "He's not wrong about the second part."
"That's not funny."
"I'm not joking." He reaches for me, fingers wrapping around my wrist. His thumb finds my pulse point, presses gently. "Look at me."
I do. His dark eyes are calm. Too calm. The kind of calm that comes before violence, except this time it doesn't scare me.
"He won't win," Nico says.
"You don't know that. You don't know Jack. He's—" My voice cracks. "He's charming. Everyone loves him. My own mother thinks he hung the moon, and she's known me my whole life. A judge who's never met me? Jack will have them eating out of his hand in five minutes."
"Kristen." My name in his mouth stops my spiral. "He won't win."
"How can you possibly?—"
"My family has connections." Nico's thumb keeps stroking my pulse. Slow. Steady. Grounding. "No judge in this city will rule against us. Jack Walker can file whatever he wants. It won't matter."
The words hang in the air between us. I search his face for any sign of doubt, any crack in that granite certainty.
Nothing.
"Is that true?" I whisper. "Or are you just saying what I need to hear?"
Nico's hand slides from my wrist to my jaw, tilting my face up. His eyes bore into mine with an intensity that should terrify me.
"I don't like lying," he says. "I prefer the truth, even when it's ugly."
Nico just admitted his family bribes judges. He told me the truth about the Bratva, about the danger I'm in, about who he really is. Every ugly, dangerous piece of it.
He could have lied. Made himself seem better. Safer.
