She wraps her arms around my back, her hands stroking the damp hair at the nape of my neck, holding me as fiercely as I hold her.
We lie together for a long time. The blinding adrenaline fades. The heat between our bodies finally begins to settle.
I shift my weight off her, rolling to my uninjured right side, taking her with me. I tuck her back flush against my chest, so her head rests perfectly under my chin. I pull the duvet over us with my good arm, sealing us in a dark cocoon of warmth.
She’s quiet.
“He tried to destroy us,” she whispers into the dark. Her voice is incredibly calm. It’s devoid of fear, devoid of the daughterly devotion that chained her to a monster her entire life.
I tighten my arm around her waist, pulling her bare body tighter against mine.
“He made a mistake,” I reply, my voice going flat and lethal.
She shifts, turning her head on the pillow to look up at me in the dark. Her eyes are cold.
“Wewilldestroy him,” she vows.
“Yes,” I growl. “We will.”
27
IRIS
I wake with my right cheek pressed against Cassian’s bare chest.
My thighs ache with a deep, lingering soreness. My lips feel bruised. My throat is raw, scraped bloody from screaming my grief into the carpet of his office yesterday.
But the heaviest pain is gone. The paralyzing, suffocating weight that lived in my chest for twenty-four years has evaporated. The desperate need to be perfect. The terror of disappointing him. The fragile, pathetic illusion of a father’s love.
It’s all gone.
William Hale is dead to me.
I think about Leo, the college boy I loved who packed up his apartment in the middle of the night and blocked my number.
For years, I agonized over losing him, believing I was fundamentally unlovable. Now, the clarity of my father’s sociopathy snaps that memory into focus. Leo didn’t leave because of me; he left because my father systematically terrified him. Leo was a normal, safe guy, and he ran the second the water got rough.
I look at Cassian sleeping beside me—a man the rest of the world considers a monster—who took a bullet for me and didn’t even blink. Leo couldn’t stand up to a judge’s signature. Cassian stood up to an army.
I lift my head, realizing Cassian is already awake. He lies perfectly still, his left arm resting carefully at his side to protect the torn muscle in his shoulder. His right hand is tangled deep in my hair. His dark eyes trace the lines of my face.
“You’re quiet,” he murmurs.
“I’m thinking,” I say.
He studies my eyes. If he’s searching for the fractured, sobbing girl he carried out of his office, he doesn’t find her. I’m the woman forged in the wreckage.
“What do you want to do about him, Iris?” he asks quietly.
“He’s a target now,” I say, pushing myself up.
The duvet slips down to my waist, exposing the dark, blooming bruises his hands left on my hips. Cassian’s gaze drops to the marks. His jaw tightens.
“We need to get up,” I say.
I slide off the edge of the mattress, my bare feet hitting the cold hardwood. Ignoring the stiffness in my legs, I walk to the pile of clothes on the floor. I step over the dark jeans from yesterday, grabbing his spare cargo pants and an oversized T-shirt instead. I pull them on, securing the canvas belt tightly around my waist. Sitting on the edge of a velvet chair, I lace up my thick boots, pulling the strings until they bite into my ankles.
I twist my hair into a tight knot at the nape of my neck.
