My hands are shaking.
Not from fear.
From need.
Chapter Seven: Claudio
Idon'tsleep.
This isn't new. I haven't slept more than three hours at a stretch since we left the compound, and before that, my record wasn't much better. But tonight the not-sleeping has a different texture. It's not tactical. It's not the hum of threat assessment running in the background, scanning for variables, calculating contingencies.
It's her. The fucking girl who turned my life on it’s head and is a thorn in my side.
And my cock.
She's in the bedroom. I'm on the couch in the living room, which is an improvement over six nights in motel chairs but doesn't matter because I could be lying on a king-sized mattress stuffedwith angel feathers and I still wouldn't sleep. Not with the taste of her in my mouth. Not with the phantom pressure of her fist in my shirt and her lips on mine and the sound she made when I bit her, that small sharp gasp that went straight through my chest and lodged somewhere I can't reach to pull it out.
I kissed her. She kissed me. Technically she kissed me first, but I was the one who cornered her, who put my hands on either side of her body and crowded her against the counter and said things I had no business saying. I told her I see her. I listed every tell, every habit, every piece of her armor I've memorized in six days of watching too closely. I laid her open in a kitchen and then she laid me open with her mouth, and now I'm lying on a couch in the dark with a hard-on that won't quit and the kind of clarity that only comes when you've fucked up badly enough that the path forward is illuminated by the fire you just started.
Not tonight,she said.
Not no. Not never. Not tonight.
Which means she's thinking about tomorrow the same way I am.
The wood stove has burned down to embers. The living room is cooling, the kind of mountain cold that creeps in through the floorboards and the window frames and settles into your bones. I should add a log.
But I don’t. I can’t will myself to move.
I stare at the ceiling and listen to her breathe through the wall.
At some point, the breathing changes. Shallow. Fast. A small sound, not a word, more like a whimper caught behind teeth. Then movement. The bed frame shifting, sheets rustling.
Nightmare.
I'm on my feet before I've decided to stand. At the bedroom door before I've decided to walk. My hand is on the knob and I'm listening, and she makes that sound again, and it's the sound of a woman fighting something in her sleep, and I've heard enough screaming in my life to know the difference between fear and pain and this is both.
I push open the door.
She's tangled in the sheets. One arm thrown over her face, the other gripping the mattress, her knees drawn up. Her hair is loose and spread across the pillow and her face is twisted into an expression I've never seen on her awake. Raw. Unguarded. The mask is gone and what's underneath is a woman trapped in a memory her body won't let go of.
"Charlotte."
She doesn't hear me. Her breathing is ragged and her fingers are clawing the sheet, and she makes a sound that's halfway between a sob and a growl, and I cross the room and sit on the edge of the bed and put my hand on her shoulder.
"Principessa. Wake up."
She comes awake swinging.
Her fist catches me in the jaw. Not hard enough to do real damage, but hard enough that I taste copper and my head snaps sideways. I grab her wrist. Not tight. Enough to stop the second swing.
"It's me. It's Claudio. You're in the farmhouse. You're safe."
Her eyes are open but she's not here yet. She's somewhere else, somewhere behind those blue irises where the woman before Charlotte Richardson still lives. Her chest is heaving. Her skin is damp with sweat. She's wearing my shirt because she ran out of clean clothes two days ago and I gave her one of mine without thinking about it, and now she's sitting in my shirt in the dark with her fist against my face and her pulse hammering so hard I can see it in her throat.
She blinks. Focuses. Sees me.
Her hand drops.
