She rolls onto her side. Faces me. Her hand comes up and touches my jaw again, the spot where she hit me earlier. Her thumb traces the bruise.
"You're shaking," she says.
I am. My hands, my arms, a fine tremor running through my whole body that I can't stop. Not from exertion. From the wall I just blew a hole through. The one I built the same year she built hers, for different reasons but with the same materials. Control. Distance. The careful architecture of a man who decided that wanting things was a vulnerability he couldn't afford.
"I know," I say.
"Is that a bad thing?"
"I don't know." The honesty surprises me. "I haven't done this in a long time."
"Me neither."
She moves closer. Tucks her head under my chin, her hair finding it’s way into my mouth. I put my arm around her and pull her against me, and her body fits into the space against my chest like it was designed just for me.
"If you tell Emilio about this," she murmurs against my collarbone, "I'll kill you myself."
"He already knows."
"How?"
"He's my twin. He knows everything."
She laughs. Soft and warm and real, vibrating against my skin.
I hold her in the dark and listen to her breathe, and her breathing slows, and for the first time in days, so does mine.
Chapter Eight: Charlotte
Iwakeupbeforehim.
This is not unusual. I've been waking up before every person I've slept near for three years, because sleeping means unconscious, and unconscious means vulnerable, and vulnerable is a state of being I've trained my body to exit as quickly as possible. Four hours is my maximum. After four hours, my nervous system boots up like a computer running a virus scan, checking for threats before the rest of me comes online.
The threat check this morning is different.
No noisy cars. No motel. No chair in the corner with a man and a gun. Instead: a farmhouse bedroom, sunlight through the window, pine trees outside, and a beast of a man asleep beside me with his arm across my waist and his face buried in the back of my neck and his breathing slow and deep and even.
My body goes rigid before my brain catches up.
Arm. Weight. Warmth. Breath on my neck. The position is so familiar that for three, maybe four seconds, I'm not in a farmhouse in the mountains. I'm in a bedroom in a town I haven't been to in three years, and the arm across my waist belongs to someone else, and the breath on my neck is a warning, not a comfort, and I can't move because moving wakes him up and waking him up is how the bad mornings start.
Then I smell cedar. And gun oil. And the faint musk onlyhehas.
Not him. Not that apartment. Notthatman.
Claudio.
I exhale. Slow. Counted. In for four, hold for four, out for four. I do it three times before my heart rate drops and my vision clears and the room reassembles itself around me. Farmhouse. Mountains. Safe.
Safe is relative, Charlotte. You're in bed with a mafia enforcer who killed men for you and fucked you six hours ago.
I slide out from under his arm. Careful. He doesn't stir, which surprises me because Claudio doesn't sleep. He catnaps. He rests in shifts with one eye metaphorically open and his hand within reach of whatever weapon is closest. But right now he's out. Actually, fully unconscious. His face is slack against the pillow and his mouth is slightly open, and his arm is stillextended into the space where my body was, fingers curled against the warm sheet like he's holding a ghost.
I stand in the doorway and watch him for ten seconds. Five more than I should.
He looks younger asleep. The jaw unclenches. The lines between his eyebrows smooth out. Without the constant scanning, the cataloguing, the mechanical attention that makes his waking face look like a surveillance camera in a suit, he looks like a man in his early thirties who got enough sleep for once in his goddamn life.
I did that. I am the reason he’s sleeping like a man-baby. Or rather, whatever happened between us last night put it there, and I was the central variable, and the math of that makes my chest do something inconvenient that I don't have time for.
