“Now you outsmart him,” he said. “You show up to work. You act like you own the place. You make them chase you in daylight.”
He wiped bacon grease from his hands, then from mine, using a linen napkin so soft it almost made me laugh. I looked at his face, at the jaw that could cut glass, at the impossible green of his eyes.
“You don’t trust me,” he said, almost an accusation.
“I don’t trust anyone.”
He smiled again, wider this time, and I realized it was the first real smile I’d seen from him. “Good,” he said. “It means you might make it.”
For a moment, we just stood there, the sun painting both of us in the awkward hush. I wondered if he felt the charge in the room, or if I was just a rookie at this kind of closeness. I wanted to break the silence, but didn’t trust my own voice.
He moved first, gathering up the phones into a battered old ammo case. “I’ll have someone take this to Lexington. Might shake something loose.”
“You guys must do this a lot,” I said.
He nodded, pride in his smile. “More than I’d like to admit.”
“So what do I do? Stay in hiding?”
He paused in the doorway, silhouetted by the morning glare. “Be seen. Act alive. Make them work for it.”
“Good answer.”
I sat at the counter, the plate of food untouched, and let the morning wrap around me. For a moment, I let myself believe that I was safe, that the monsters outside were at bay. I closedmy eyes, savoring the warmth in my chest—the coffee, the bourbon, the echo of his fingers on my hand.
I didn’t know if I could outsmart Marcus Ellery. But for the first time since Daddy died, I wasn’t alone. And that was enough to make me finish my breakfast.
I worked the phones before the coffee’s caffeine even hit my veins, thumb dialing by muscle memory while I scanned the window for any sign of another siege. I told the team it was an emergency—no explanations, just “Everyone. Mansion. Now.” My voice was all iron and zero apology. I could hear the panic ripple down the line, a dark little joy that made me want to scream or laugh, maybe both.
Shivs never left the kitchen. He’d raided my pantry and set up an operations center on the butcher block: burner phones, broken earpieces, two laptops (both running off his own hotspot, not my Wi-Fi, which he said was “child’s play to hack”). He’d thrown on a white T-shirt, but it didn’t do shit to hide the tattoos crawling up his neck and arms, or the fact that the shirt was already spattered with grease and coffee.
I paced. There was no point pretending he wasn’t the gravity point in the room—every time I hit the end of my track, I found myself orbiting closer, pulled by the way his hands moved, by the strange composure that came off him in waves. He’d been a monster last night, pure violence and raw nerve, and now he was humming along to an old Stones song while decrypting text logs.
I poured myself a fresh cup of coffee, trying to ignore the fact that my hands still shook. I added too much cream, watched it bloom and dissolve into the black. “Anything?” I asked, not looking up.
“Some. They were professionals, like I said. But not smart enough to wipe everything,” Shivs said. “Here—take a look.”
I stepped to his side, barely an arm’s length between us, and looked at the screen. A list of incoming numbers scrolled by, allarea codes from three states away. “They never called local. No Kentucky numbers.”
“Don’t have to,” he said. “They were ghosts before they even got on the road. The best way to hide in this state is to never exist here in the first place.”
He leaned in, tapping a highlighted line on the screen. The movement brought his shoulder into me—a glancing, casual thing—but it might as well have been a cattle prod. My whole side lit up. I steadied myself against the counter, heart stuttering.
He must have noticed, because he stopped, eyes flicking to my face. “You good?”
“Fine,” I snapped. Too sharp, too fast. I tried to hide it behind a gulp of coffee, but spilled half down the front of my blouse.
He reached out and caught my wrist before I could pull away. His grip was hot, too sure, thumb landing on the pulse point below my palm. My skin went traitor under his touch, nerves buzzing, pulse thrumming so loud I was certain he could feel it.
We stood there, locked up, the kitchen and the world shrinking to just the two of us and the white tile beneath our feet. His eyes—the impossible green of last night—fixed on mine, steady and unreadable. For a beat, I didn’t want to move.
He let go first. “Sorry,” he said, voice low. “Didn’t mean to—”
“Don’t,” I said, voice ragged. “Just—don’t.”
I wiped my hand on a dish towel, face burning hotter than the coffee spill. “I have a meeting to run,” I said, like I needed to remind myself of my own job. “You’re coming with me. To the boardroom.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Not really my scene.”
