"You're not a guest here, Callie. You're not earning a stay. You're here because your brother trusted me to take care of you if you needed it. You don't owe us anything."
The words landed somewhere in my chest and just sat there, heavy and warm. I'd been trying to keep myself busy for so long that hearing someone saystopfelt like being told to breathe underwater. I didn't know how. I didn't know what I was supposed to do with myself if I wasn't doing something.
"Okay," I said. Because I didn't trust myself to say anything else.
He held my eyes for a second longer than he needed to, then pushed off the doorframe and left. I stood there with a wet cloth in my hand and a feeling in my ribs I was trying very hard to ignore.
That night,I couldn't sleep.
I'd been managing four hours a night since I got here, which was better than the car but still not enough. The nightmares were the problem. The alley, the cop, the sound of the shot. Sometimes my brain remixed it, put Ryan in the alley instead, put me on the ground, put Angel standing twenty feet away unable to move. The variations were creative and none of them were fun.
I gave up around midnight and went downstairs. The lodge was quiet, the kind of deep silence that only happens when you're miles from anywhere. I padded into the kitchen in bare feet and an oversized t-shirt, planning to make tea, or maybe just sit somewhere that wasn't the room where I kept having nightmares.
Angel was there.
Just sitting at the kitchen table in the near-dark, just the light above the stove casting a low glow. A glass of something amber in front of him, barely touched. He looked up when I came in and for a second, before he had time to arrange his face, I saw something unguarded in his expression. Tired. Sad. Human, in a way he never let himself be during the day.
"Couldn't sleep?" he asked.
"Bad dreams."
He nodded. Like that was a language he spoke fluently. He tipped his chin toward the chair across from him and I sat down, pulling my knees up to my chest and my t-shirt over them to keep my legs warm. Somehow his presence felt warm. It shouldn't have been comforting, sitting in the dark with a man I barely knew, but for some reason it was.
We sat in silence for a while. He didn't try to fill it and neither did I. That was the thing about Angel. His silences weren't empty. They were full, deliberate, spaces he held open for you to fill or not as you chose.
"Ryan used to do this," I said. The words came out before I could stop them. "Sit up in the middle of the night when he couldn't sleep. He'd make coffee at two in the morning and sit at the kitchen table in our parents' house and just... be there. I'd come down and find him and we'd sit together. He never talked about what woke him up. I never asked."
Angel didn't say anything. But I felt the change in him, the way the air shifted when I said my brother's name. Like something tightened in the room.
"I miss him." My voice was quieter now. "I miss him all the time, but it's worse here. Because he sent me here. He should be here too, but he's not, and I keep thinking... I keep thinking about how alone I've been since he died. How I just kept moving and working and staying busy so I didn't have to feel it. And now I'm here, in this place, with some people who actually knew him, and I can't run anymore. I can't keep busy enough to outrun it."
My throat was tight. My eyes were burning. I blinked hard because I was not going to cry in front of this man, I wasnot, but the words had opened something up and I couldn't shove it back down.
Angel was looking at me. And in the low light of the kitchen, with his face stripped of the armor he wore during the day, I saw something that made me forget to breathe.
It wasn't duty. It wasn't obligation. It wasn't the steady, protective watchfulness I'd been reading asyou are my dead friend's sister and I will keep you safe.
It was hunger.
Raw, undisguised, furious hunger. He was looking at me like I was something he wanted so badly it was tearing him apart,and the horror of that wanting was written right beside it on his face. He was appalled at himself, and right now he couldn't hide it. He hadn't expected me to walk into his kitchen and start bleeding out the truth when he was least expecting it.
It was more than I could bear and I kissed him.
I didn't decide to. There was no thought involved, no calculation, no weighing of consequences. I just moved. Closed the space between us, put my hands on his jaw, and pressed my mouth to his.
For a fraction of a second, he didn't move. Every muscle in his body locked. I could feel the tension in his jaw under my palms, the rigidity of a man fighting himself with everything he had.
Then he broke.
His hands came up to my waist and pulled me into him, and he kissed me back with a force that made my head swim. His mouth was hot, demanding, nothing like the careful, controlled man I'd been watching for four days. His hands were enormous on my waist, fingers digging in, holding me against him like I might disappear if he let go. I could feel the strength in them, and how deliberately gentle he was being. He held me tight and kissed me like he'd been starving for weeks and I was the only thing that could fill him. The contradiction between the gentleness of his grip and the ferocity of his mouth made me dizzy.
I was small against him. The sheer size of him surrounded me, the width of his chest, the span of his shoulders, the heat pouring off his body. I could feel his heartbeat under my palm, hard and fast, completely at odds with the controlled man who ran this compound and commanded these men. He wasn't controlled now. He was unravelling, right here, right against my mouth.
He pulled away.
One second his mouth was on mine, his hands on my waist, his whole body angled into me. The next he was pulling back, putting space between us, and I could see the war on his face as clearly as if he'd spoken it out loud.
His breath was ragged. His hands were shaking. And his eyes, those dark, steady eyes that never gave anything away, were giving away everything.
