I opened my eyes.
He was still there, waiting.
Watching.
Mine, some terrible part of my mind supplied, and I didn’t know if the thought belonged to him or to me.
Above us, Ben cleared his throat.
Neither of us moved.
I had no idea whether I was trapped behind the glass or whether I had finally pressed my hand through it.
27
Cove
Three Days Later
The vacation house was smaller than Tobias’s main estate. Which meant, in Tobias terms, that it was still larger than any normal person’s house had a right to be.
I sat in the back of the car beside him, watching the ocean appear and disappear between stretches of scrub as Ben drove us along the road leading toward the property. The late afternoon sun hung low over the water, turning everything gold at the edges.
Tobias’s hand rested in the space between us, not touching me, but close enough that I could feel the warmth of his skin radiating toward me.
I even had my phone.
Tobias still watched me when I had it, and I was painfully aware that certain calls would not go through withoutconsequences I was not ready to test, but it sat in my pocket like a small, fragile piece of the world had been returned to me.
I should have hated that I was grateful, and I did, but I was also grateful enough that I didn’t put much energy towards that hatred.
“You’ve been quiet,” Tobias said.
I looked away from the window. He was watching me with that severe, controlled tenderness that still made my stomach pull tight in a way I did not know how to name without making everything worse. He looked like he always did; his hair and beard neatly styled, glasses spotless, shirt immaculate despite the long drive. There was something different in him, too, though, something that had shifted since he kissed me beneath the sea snake tank and told me he loved me with Mark’s body still cooling somewhere above us.
God.
That was my life now.
A man had died, and my brain had filed the moment under bothtraumaandfirst love confession.
I was probably going to need therapy for the rest of my life, assuming Tobias ever let me near an actual therapist who wasn’t vetted, monitored, bribed, or secretly on his payroll.
“I’m just thinking,” I hummed, gazing at the sea passing us by again.
I wanted to be in it.
That want had been there since the moment Tobias told me where we were going, bright and painful and impossible to separate from everything else.
He had promised me this.
A trip up the coast with open water and free-diving. A weekend outside the main estate, away from everything that house represented.
He had said I could have anything I wanted if I proved myself.
I had proven myself by watching someone die.
That should have ruined my desire, but I still wanted to go into the water more than I wanted to sit with the moral consequences of how I had earned it.
