“Tell me about the nightmare.”
“Brother Matthias was already dead when she entered,” he said after a while, voice flat, stripped of anything unnecessary, reduced to facts. “Sister Mary Agnes activated the collars on entry. Full compliance response. Gabriel engaged at close range with a knife. There was a struggle. Sister Mary Agnes severed Patrick’s carotid artery during the exchange. He bled out in seconds. Gabriel, Raphael, and I were restrained by the collars until the control unit was destroyed. Then Gabriel attacked me, always wanted to hurt me, and I strangled him unconscious. I should have finished the job.” He stared at me. “But I’m glad I didn’t then, because I might have done now.”
“So, you managed to get away from the convent,” I said with caution.
“No.”
“What happened?”
“Then the military arrived,” Novak said.
“Novak—”
“Right now, shower, then coffee, food.” He rolled out of bed and headed for the bathroom. I should’ve gotten up and walked away but instead I watched him leave. Somewhere along the way, I’d stopped fighting whatever this was. I couldn’t remember when. Only that Novak had shifted from problem to priority, and to someone I couldn’t walk away from. That should have been a problem. It wasn’t.
Compassion and affection flooded me.
My psychopathic teddy bear had needed help, and I hated he’d been in that kind of pain, and I hadn’t been there to stop it.
Jesus Christ. I dragged a hand over my face, exhaled hard. Did that make my brain broken? Probably. Didn’t change the fact that it was true.
Any sane version of me would take the out he’d handed me, and tell myself this was temporary insanity, but that felt less true every time he revealed another part of himself.
And fuck, I understood what that meant.
This wouldn’t be normal. No balance, no half-in. If I chose him, it was all of it—the control, the obsession, the way he’d fold me into his world until there wasn’t a clean edge between where I ended and he began. I dragged a hand over my face, exhaled hard, and considered that I could still leave.
That was the thing. He’d let me.
Not because he didn’t want me—but because somewhere in that wired, ruthless head of his, my choice mattered enough to factor in.
That should have made it easier, but it didn’t.
Because even knowing exactly what I was stepping into, every sharp edge of it, every way this could go wrong?—
I didn’t want out.
I didn’t wantsafe. I wanted him.
I should have ended this already.
Instead, I wanted more.
I was falling for him. I could even picture a life with him.
Tell him.
He came out of the shower, and I was so damn tempted to drag him back to bed and explain that somehow, he’d hooked himself into my heart, but I didn’t know how to say it. I sat up and stretched as he dressed, then waited until he faced me so I could carry on this conversation.
A klaxon cut through the room, my phone buzzing hard on the bedside table with a proximity alert that jolted me.
I grabbed for the gun, fingers closing around it even as my balance caught up with me.
Novak was already in motion, and I followed, heart still pounding, throat still raw, adrenaline burning through what was left of sleep as we hit the stairs, Novak already ahead of me, already first down, already handling whatever was coming before I could even process it.
I caught Novak at the door.
“Wait!” He had a gun in each hand and a ferocious expression.
