Chapter Fourteen: Bullet and Blood

The jet touched down just before dawn, wheels kissing a private runway ringed by dark hills and the first silver hint of morning over the water. Eve hadn't slept. She'd spent the whole flight with Alex's head heavy against her shoulder, his breathing shallow from the pain medication Lila had pushed on him somewhere over the Atlantic, his bandaged shoulder rising and falling in a rhythm she'd counted like a rosary.

Alive. Alive. Alive.

The villa waited at the end of a cypress-lined drive, pale stone against the blue-black lake, shutters closed like sleeping eyes. Alex insisted on walking in under his own power, waving off the two security men who moved to flank him, though his jaw tightened with every step and a fine sheen of sweat broke across his forehead by the time they reached the door.

"You should be lying down," Eve said, looping his good arm over her shoulders anyway, taking more of his weight than he'd admit to needing.

"I should be a lot of things," he muttered. "Alive isn't usually one of the options people put money on, after a shooter puts a bullet in you."

"Don't joke about it."

"I'm not joking." His golden eyes found hers, stripped of their usual careful control. "That bullet had your name on it, Sophia Not mine."

She flinched. He didn't miss it — he missed nothing anymore, not since the locket, not since Marcus's shadow had started falling across every room they stood in — but he let it go, too exhausted to chase the flicker of guilt across her face to its source.

Lila got him settled in a ground-floor bedroom with lake views and blackout curtains, redressed his wound with the brisk efficiency of someone who'd clearly done this before, for him or for someone else, and then disappeared to secure the perimeter with the two remaining guards, leaving Eve alone with him for the first time since the gunfire had torn the dining room apart.

The silence that followed was worse than the noise had been.

"Come here," Alex said, patting the mattress beside him.

"You need to rest."

"I need you. Preferably before I fall asleep and start seeing that man's face every time I close my eyes." His voice cracked on the last word, just slightly — the first crack she'd heard in it since the fire had left him this careful, controlled architecture of a man. "Please, Sophia."

The name landed the way it always did. A hook under her ribs. She crossed the room anyway and lay down beside him, careful of his shoulder, and let him gather her against his good side.

"Talk to me," she said softly, tracing the edge of the fresh bandage. "Really talk. Not the version you give the board."

He was quiet for a long moment, staring at the ceiling. "I've spent two years building walls so thick nothing could get through them again. Money. Security. Control. I told myself if I controlled everything hard enough, nothing could burn twice." A humorless huff of breath. "Then a man in a mask puts a gun on you in my own house, and I understand for the first time that none of it — the money, the walls — none of it can actually keep you safe. It never could. I just needed to believe it could, because the alternative is unbearable."

"You did keep me safe," Eve whispered. "You took the bullet."

"I'd take a hundred more." He turned his head, gold eyes burning into hers with an intensity that had nothing to do with pain medication. "That's the terrifying part, sophia. I'm not scared of dying. I'm scared of a world that has you in it and doesn't have me in it to stand between you and everything that wants to hurt you."

Something in her chest cracked wide open — grief and guilt and a love she'd stopped being able to call fake months ago, all tangled together until she couldn't separate one thread from the next. She thought of the envelope hidden back home. Of Sophia, alive somewhere, pulling strings like a puppeteer who'd never actually died. Of Marcus's threats and KJ's greed and the Russians circling like they'd scented blood in the water. She thought of how easy it would be to tell him everything right now, in this dim room with the lake breathing outside the window, and how it would end them both instantly and completely.

His good hand found the chain at her throat instead — the locket, the one he'd taken back from her in the library all those weeks ago, the one she'd stolen back out of his drawer the night she went to meet the figure in the ruins. She'd started wearing it openly again days ago, a small, deliberate act of faith she hadn't been sure he'd noticed.

"You still have it," he said, thumb brushing the warm gold.

"I never wanted to give it up." She held very still, waiting.

"Do you remember what it says now? The back." His voice was quiet, careful — not an accusation, not this time. Just a man wanting, badly, to hear his wife say it.

Eve reached up and covered his hand with hers, and let the answer come the way she'd drilled it into herself a hundred nights since he'd caught her without it. "The day we met," she said softly. "Not our anniversary. You always said that was the day your life actually started." She lifted her eyes to his. "Mine too."

Something in Alex's face gave way completely — the last guarded corner of it, the part that had been quietly, silently testing her since the night he'd pulled the locket from her hand. He exhaled like a man setting down a weight he'd carried so long he'd forgotten it was there.

"I'm sorry," he murmured. "For doubting, even for a second. After everything tonight — I just needed to hear you say it."

"I know." The lie tasted like copper. "I'm not going anywhere."

She kissed him then, both to seal it and to stop herself from saying anything more.

It started soft — an apology disguised as tenderness, her lips brushing his like she could somehow undo the last twenty-four hours through sheer gentleness. But Alex made a low sound against her mouth, something wounded and hungry at once, and his good hand slid into her hair, angling her closer, deepening the kiss until soft became something else entirely.

"Your shoulder," she breathed, pulling back an inch.

"Forget my shoulder." His voice had gone rough, low, the golden eyes darkened to something molten. "I nearly lost you tonight. I need to feel you're real. I need it more than I need to be careful."

"Alex—"

"Let me have this," he said, and it wasn't quite a command and wasn't quite a plea — it was both, wound together the way everything about him always was. "One thing in this entire nightmare that isn't a lie."

If only he knew how much of it was.

But her body had stopped listening to her guilt weeks ago. She kissed him again, harder this time, and felt him groan into her mouth as her hands found the buttons of his shirt, careful around the bandage, pushing the fabric back from shoulders that had run into fire for a woman who'd never even been in the house. She pressed her lips to the old scars first, then the new dressing, reverent, before Alex tugged her up to meet his mouth again.

"Careful," she warned, even as she straddled his hips, mindful of his injured side.

"I don't want careful." His good hand slid beneath the hem of her shirt, splaying wide and possessive against her spine. "I want you so close I can't tell where the fear ends and you begin."

She undressed slowly this time, aware of his injury, guiding his hand rather than being pulled — a reversal that seemed to undo him more than any urgency could have. He watched her like a man memorizing something he was afraid he might not get to see twice, gold eyes tracing every line of her in the grey pre-dawn light, and when she finally lowered herself over him, taking care not to jostle the bandage, his breath left him in a broken, reverent rush.

"Sophia," he whispered — and for once the name didn't scrape. It just ached, the way an old wound does when something warm finally touches it.

I'm not her,Eve thought, moving slow and deliberate above him, watching pain and pleasure war across his face in equal measure. I never was. But God help me, I love you as if I could be anyone you needed.

He held her hips with his good hand, guiding rather than driving, letting her set a rhythm gentle enough not to reopen his wound but deep enough to unravel them both completely. Every gasp he made against her throat felt like confession. Every roll of her body against his felt like penance. When she finally came apart above him, his name — his real name, not Sophia's ghost of a memory — tore from her mouth without permission, and he followed a moment later with a groan that sounded torn from somewhere far beneath the boardrooms and the empire and the careful control, somewhere raw and simply, achingly human.

Afterward, she lay curled against his uninjured side, listening to his heartbeat slow, his fingers tracing idle patterns against her bare shoulder.

"Stay like this a while," he murmured, already half asleep. "Just a while. Before the world finds us again."

She didn't answer. She just listened to the lake outside the window, and the quiet, and the sound of a man finally letting himself believe, even briefly, that he was safe — and hated herself a little more for how badly she wanted to believe it too.

Down the hall, Lila stood at a window overlooking the dark water, arms wrapped tight around herself, watching the first grey light climb over the hills. She hadn't slept either. Every time she closed her eyes she saw the masked man's gun swinging toward Eve, heard the words he'd shouted before he vanished through the glass — your wife isn't who you think she is— and felt them settle into a place in her chest she'd been guarding for months now, ever since a woman who called herself Sophia had walked back through her brother's door with a stranger's eyes.

She thought of the birthmark that had never once come up when the doctors examined her. The strawberries Sophia used to swell up from just looking at, gone from the woman upstairs like they'd never mattered.

Something is wrong with her. Something has always been wrong with her.

But she'd also watched her brother laugh again — really laugh, unguarded, the way he hadn't since before the fire — and she'd watched Eve throw herself between him and a bullet without a second's hesitation. Whatever the woman upstairs was hiding, it didn't look like it wanted him dead.

Not yet, anyway.

Lila pressed her forehead to the cool glass and made herself a quiet promise: she would find out the truth herself, before she said a single word to Alex. He'd already lost too much to a woman wearing that face once. She wouldn't let him lose himself to a second lie without proof.

Behind her, the house slept on, unaware of how closely it was being watched from the inside.