"Come here," he says quietly.
I move into him and he pulls me close and for a while that's enough, just the warmth of him and the sound of his heart. But then his hand moves in my hair and I lift my face and his mouth finds mine, and the kiss is soft at first.
The answer I give him is not soft.
I push him onto his back. His hands find my hips and stay there, not directing, just holding, because he understands what I need without me having to say it. This is what I need right now. To be the one choosing the pace and the pressure and the angle, to feel the kind of power that exists in this. This is the one thing in my life that hasn't been taken out of my hands.
I lower myself onto him slowly, watching his face as I do. His fingers press harder into my hips. He keeps his eyes open and on mine, which is something I've come to depend on, that eye contact, the way it anchors me inside my body and keeps me from disappearing into my own head.
I start to move.
It's different from the other times. There's no tenderness in it, or there is tenderness but it's under something else, something rawer. Fear channeled through skin. The need to be alive in a way that overwrites everything. His breath goes ragged and his hands slide up my back and I lean down and press my lips to his, tasting salt and warmth and the faint cedar of his soap.
"If anything happens to me," I breathe against his skin. The sentence barely makes it out.
"Nothing is going to happen to you." His voice is strained and certain.
I lift my head and look at him. "Promise me."
He holds my gaze and his hands come up to frame my face, thumbs against my cheekbones, and he looks at me the way he looks at things he has decided are his to protect regardless of what it costs him.
"I promise."
I kiss him hard and he pulls me down and I stop thinking about Dominic Webb and recording files and men in dark jackets watching from clifftops. There is only this. His hands and his voice and the weight of a promise pressed into my skin like something that might hold.
Afterward I stay where I am, my cheek against his chest, listening to his heartbeat slow. His hand moves through my hair. The ceiling shadows shift and settle.
CHAPTER 27- JADE
Phoenix doesn't want me to go alone.
He says it carefully, the way he says things now when he's trying not to sound like he's giving me orders, framing it as a preference rather than a command. He has people who can go for me. He can send Torres. It will take twenty minutes, less if Torres takes the freeway.
"I need an hour to myself," I tell him. "Just the grocery store."
"Torres can go with you. You won't even notice him."
"I'll notice him. I always notice him." I set down my keys and turn to face him fully. "Phoenix, I have been inside this house for days. I haven't driven a car or walked into a store or done a single thing by myself since Dominic grabbed me on the sidewalk. I understand why. I'm not angry about it. But I need to feel like a person again, not just something being protected."
He looks at me for a long moment. I can see him turning it over, weighing the variables the way he weighs everything, and I can see the moment he identifies the one he can't argue past.
"One hour," he says finally. "Text me when you get there. Text me when you're leaving."
"I will."
"And take the route with the cameras on PCH, not the back road."
"Phoenix."
"I know." He exhales. "I know. Go.”
As I walk toward the door I hear him pick up his phone behind me. I don't turn around.
I text him from the parking lot. The grocery store is bright and cold and smells like refrigerated produce. I take a basket instead of a cart, moving through the aisles slowly, letting myself be a person who is just buying groceries. Olive oil. The good pasta Phoenix likes. A bunch of basil that smells green and clean when I press it between my fingers.
For forty minutes I am just a woman in a grocery store, and it is the most normal I have felt in weeks.
The parking lot is half empty when I come out. Late afternoon light, the sun already dropping toward the water, painting the asphalt gold and long-shadowed. My car is near the back where I always park out of habit, away from the clusters near the entrance. I'm thinking about what to make for dinner, whether Phoenix will be off his call by the time I get home, when I hear footsteps behind me closing the distance too fast.
