Kinda how my insides feel right now… tumultuous.
"It's not the same thing," he says. "Leverage is what you use and throw away. A witness is what you protect."
"Don't pretend there's a difference. The second I give you what I know, I become disposable."
"You're not disposable."
"Everyone is disposable, Claudio. Especially to men like you."
He sucks in a breath and his jaw flexes. One sharp movement. I've learned his tells over six days. The jaw is anger. The hands going still is calculation. The breath through his nose is frustration. Right now I'm getting all three.
"Men like me," he repeats.
"Men who deal with problems. Men who handle things. Men who decide what's useful and what isn't and make the rest disappear."
"You think I'd hurt you."
"I think you'd do whatever the job requires."
He pushes off the counter. One step toward me. The kitchen shrinks. He's a big man, and this close I can smell the wood smoke and the gun oil and the clean sweat underneath, and my body reacts before my brain can intervene. Pulse climbing. Skin prickling. The back of my neck tingling like someone's running a finger down my spine.
Oh fuck… fuck… fuuuuuck.
"I killed three men in a corridor to keep you breathing," he says. His voice is low. Not a whisper. Quieter than a whisper. The volume of a man who doesn't need to raise his voice because what he's saying does the work. "I left my brother. I left the compound. I left every system and structure that keeps me functional, and I drove you into the dark with nothing but cashand a gun and the address of a farmhouse in the mountains. And you think the job would require me to hurt you."
"I didn't say that."
"You implied it."
"I said everyone is disposable. That's not the same as saying you'd hurt me."
"It's close enough." Another step. He's in my space now. I can feel the heat coming off his body, can see the cut on his lip that still hasn't fully healed, can count the flecks of grey in those pale green eyes. My back is against the counter, my hands are gripping the edge and my knuckles are white.
"You don't know me," I say. "You don't know anything about me."
"I know you notice exits. I know you sleep with one hand under the pillow. I know you position your shoes for a fast escape every night. I know you press the back of your neck when you're scared, counting your vertebrae like they're prayer beads." His voice drops lower. "I know someone taught you a breathing technique for panic attacks, and I know you didn't learn it from a self-help book. I know Charlotte Richardson isn't your name. And I know that whoever you were before, someone broke you badly enough that you built an entire person to hide inside."
My breath catches as my anxiety spikes. Brutal. Every single one a piece of me that I thought was hidden, dug out by a man whowatches the way I breathe and counts the seconds between my exhales.
"Fuck you," I say. My voice breaks on the second word.
"I'm not trying to hurt you. I'm trying to show you that I see you. All of you. Not just the witness. Not just the asset. You."
"I didn't ask you to see me."
"No. You didn't."
He's too close. I can feel his breath on my face. My hands are shaking on the counter's edge, and the tremor is in my thighs again, the old shake, the one from before, and I hate it. I hate that he found it. I hate that he pulled it out of me with nothing but his voice and his proximity and those wrong-colored eyes that see through every wall I've built.
His hand comes up. Slow. I track it the way you track a weapon. It lands on the counter beside my hip. His other hand mirrors it on the opposite side. I'm caged. Not trapped. There's space between his arms and my body, enough to duck under, enough to step sideways, enough to leave.
But I don't leave.
His face is inches from mine. My eyes squeeze shut. I can smell him, and the smell is so close and so warm and so specificallyhimthat my brain goes white for a second, just static, just heat.
"Let go of the counter," he says.
"No."
