She responded in kind, fingers curling into his shirt, pulling him closer as if she had finally decided to stop holding back.
He lifted her and carried her toward the bedroom, not with urgency or a care about the others nearby. He wanted her, needed her.
Craved her.
Inside, he locked the door and eased her down on the bed as though she were something fragile and powerful at the same time. He kissed her again, deeper this time, letting fifteen years of silence unravel between them.
There was no rush, no fear that she would vanish in the morning. He fell into the steady rhythm of breath and skin and rediscovered trust. He roamed his hands over her body, his lips over her heated flesh, and learned her all over again.
Not the girl in the blue dress, but the woman who had survived the chaos of a criminal world and came back to him.
And when they finally came together, it wasn’t a collision but an alignment of souls and bodies and hearts. It was a healing that they both needed.
Afterward, she rested against him, her head on his chest, fingers tracing the scar near his shoulder. “You’re different,” she whispered.
He kissed the side of her head. “I think we both are.”
“Do you regret who you became?”
He stared at the ceiling, mulling over her question. “No,” he said after a moment. “But I’m done living like I don’t have something to lose.”
She lifted her head. “You don’t.”
He cupped her cheek. “But I do,” he corrected with a soft whisper.
She nodded, her lips pressed into a soft smile, and he knew she understood, could see it in her eyes.
And in that quiet room, as the wind moved through the trees and Blaze’s keyboard clicked faintly in the other room, Elvis realized something he hadn’t allowed himself to admit before.
He had become a man built for war, but he was willing to build a life now. A softer life. For her. For the two of them.
And if Matteo thought he could reach into that life and take it?—
He would learn exactly what kind of man Elvis Jenkins had become.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
THE MOMENT SHE DECIDED to resurface as Julia Moretti once more, she could feel the shift in the air inside the cabin. No one else noticed it, of course, at least not that she could tell, but she felt it. Deep inside something shifted, almost as if for the first time since she left Tupelo fifteen years ago.
They had erased her overnight, deleting school records and any mention of her earlier achievements. Blending into the background, she had turned invisibility into a craft, perfecting it until she could build a successful business with no one knowing it was actually her behind the scenes pulling all the strings.
Now she was about to undo everything they had crammed into her to teach her to survive.
Corey Masterson, the one Bobby kept calling Blaze, sat across from her at the dining table, three laptops open and cables snaking across the wood surface like veins. He worked the keyboard with quiet confidence, building a new digital skeleton of Julia Moretti’s return, one that looked as if she had never disappeared, merely hid for a while.
“You understand,” the younger man said without looking up, “once I put this out there, there’s no reining it back in like it never happened. We can’t undo this.”
“That’s the point,” she told him.
Bobby stood near the window, watching the tree line. He hadn’t said a word since she told him she was ready to do this. Hadn’t even tried to talk her out of it, which she thought for sure he would do.
She appreciated that, because if he had, she probably wouldn’t have gone through with it, and she knew she needed to do this to end it.
Blaze rotated a computer screen toward her. “This will look like a consulting bid request tied to a shell entity in Savannah. We’ve set you up as if you’ve been using another name as the front of the company, keeping your real name off all forms. But this will look too big to keep it that way.”
She inhaled, placing her arms over her chest. “And this won’t touch Obsidian?”
He shook his head. “Won’t even come close. I made it look like Delaney Rhodes and Julia Moretti are two different people with completely different backgrounds, showing that your family moved to Savannah when you were sixteen.” He leaned back in his chair, stretching his arms out at his sides before clasping his hands together and placing them behind his head. “I made a light trail from Tupelo to Savannah, making it look like you had slipped up here and there but not blatantly. It won’t look like it suddenly appeared, but more like it was overlooked.”
