Let him hear it

Chapter 4: Let Him Hear It

The rain came down harder.

It beat on the tall windows in silver sheets. The fire popped. I sat in that borrowed robe with my hands knotted in my lap, and something in me stopped bending.

He knew.

All the while I lay in that bed being fed orange slices and lies, Daniel had known who put me there. He had looked at the deleted footage, then looked at me, then picked up a pen and called a lawyer.

I waited for the tears. They didn't come.

What came instead was stillness, like the hush after a storm.

"Nora." Adrian's voice was low. "Say something."

"Give me a minute."

He gave me ten. He stood at the window with his arms folded and didn't fill the silence with comfort I didn't want. In anyone else, I'd have found that strange. In him it felt like respect.

I stood. My legs were steadier than I expected. I crossed the rug in bare feet and stopped in front of him.

"How much do you hate him?"

His brows rose a fraction. "Daniel?"

"Yes."

He thought about it. I liked that he didn't rush. "Four years ago, his company undercut a small supplier I worked with. He ran a smear campaign, then bought their assets for pennies. Eleven families lost their jobs." His voice stayed flat. "I've been waiting for a reason to stop him ever since."

"And now you have one."

"Now I have you. That isn't the same thing."

I looked at him properly. The sharp jaw. The shadows under his eyes. The steadiness I'd taken for coldness on the first day. He could have used me as a weapon. He hadn't.

"I want him to feel it," I said. "What I felt in that bed, smiling at a man who'd already buried me. I want him to think he's won. And then I want every piece of it to fall out from under him."

"That takes months. It will get ugly."

"It's already ugly." I tilted my head up. "If he can lie to me, then you and I can lie right back."

The fire cracked. The rain whispered. Neither of us breathed.

"I'm not asking you to be my weapon," I said, quieter. "I'm asking you to be my partner. For the first time in seven years, I want something for myself."

His control slipped. It was small. A tightening at the corner of his mouth. A slow exhale. He took one step toward me and stopped, hands fisted at his sides, like a man holding himself back from a ledge.

"If I touch you," he said, rough, "it won't be about revenge."

My heart hammered.

"Then don't make it about revenge."

"Nora."

"I'm not asking you to rescue me. I'm asking you to stay."

He closed the distance in one stride.

His hands came up to my face, careful, as if I might break. His forehead dropped to mine. For a long moment, we just breathed the same air.

"Tell me to stop," he said.

"I don't want you to."

He kissed me.

It wasn't rough. It was slow and deliberate. Seven years of being someone's convenience, someone's quiet Nora, and this man kissed me as if I were worth the effort.

I made a sound against his mouth that I didn't recognize. My hands fisted in his shirt. He lifted me off the floor, and the robe slipped from my shoulder, and the whole house disappeared. There was no hospital. No Vivian. No cut brake line. No small boy swallowing rocks.

Only heat, and rain, and a man saying my name.

He carried me upstairs. In the dim of the upper hall, I whispered against his ear, "Don't be careful with me tonight."

He stopped mid-step.

"I've been careful since the day we met," he said. "I don't know that I can be anymore."

"Good."

The bedroom door swung shut behind us.

~

I don't know how long it was before I surfaced.

The room was dark and warm. The rain had softened to a steady patter. One lamp glowed on the far side of the bed, and I lay against Adrian's chest with his arm heavy around my waist, my pulse slowly settling.

I felt wrecked. And whole. Both at once.

His fingers drew slow lines along my spine. "You're thinking too loudly."

"I'm thinking I should feel guilty."

"Do you?"

I reached for the old reflex, the voice that said good wives don't. I found nothing there but dust.

"No," I said, smiling against his skin. "That's the strange part."

He huffed a quiet laugh and kissed my temple.

That was when the phone buzzed.

Not his. Mine. The cheap black handset Daniel had slipped into my hospital bag, so I can always reach you. I'd thanked him like a puppy. It lay on the nightstand, screen lit.

DANIEL.

Adrian propped himself on one elbow. He didn't look alarmed. He looked thoughtful.

"Your choice. Ignore it, or answer."

"If I ignore it, he panics."

"Yes."

"If I answer..." I sat up, drawing the sheet around me. My mouth curved, slow and sharp. "He suffers."

Something wicked lit his face.

I took a breath and smoothed my voice into the soft, foggy tone I'd perfected in a hospital bed.

"Hello?"

"Nora."

It cracked like a whip. No warmth. No patience. No oranges. Daniel in his true form, furious and breathless.

"Where are you? I've been calling for forty minutes. I came back and your bed was empty. A note on the table, a nurse telling me you walked out on your own. What is wrong with you? You have a head injury. You could have collapsed in a ditch."

"I'm sorry," I said meekly. "I needed air. I got a little turned around."

"You don't know the city. You don't know anyone. Where are you?"

Adrian's hand slid up my bare back. I bit the inside of my cheek.

"Somewhere quiet. I'm safe."

"That's not an answer."

"I couldn't stay in that room, Daniel." I let my voice thin and waver. "The walls were closing in."

Adrian's mouth found my shoulder. I inhaled sharply.

"What was that?" Daniel snapped.

"Nothing."

"It didn't sound like nothing."

Adrian's lips traveled to my collarbone. His gray eyes held mine in the lamplight, and his expression was so shamelessly wicked that I nearly dropped the phone.

You wanted him to hear it, that look said. So let him.

"I'm resting," I managed. "I'm very tired."

A pause. A silence thick with something I couldn't read.

"Nora." His voice had gone low and cold. "Are you alone?"

Adrian's hand spread across my hip.

A soft, helpless sound escaped me before I could stop it. It lasted barely a second.

The silence on the other end turned to ice.

I counted. One. Two. Three. Four. I could hear his breathing, rapid and rough. The sound of a man who had just understood something he could not unhear.

"Who is with you?" he said, very softly.

I smiled into the dark.

"No one, Daniel," I whispered. "Just a dream."

I ended the call.

The phone slid from my fingers. For a beat, neither of us spoke. Then Adrian laughed, a real laugh, short and startled. He fell back onto the pillows with one arm over his eyes.

"You," he said, "are terrifying."

I laughed too. It bubbled out of me, giddy and breathless, and I pressed my face into his shoulder, shaking.

"Who is with you," I gasped. "Did you hear him?"

"I heard." He wiped his eyes. "That was cruel."

"A little."

"I don't feel bad."

"You shouldn't. He did something crueler, with less reason."

I closed my eyes. His warmth seeped into every cold place. For the first time in eleven days, I thought I might actually sleep.

The phone buzzed again.

I stiffened. A text. I reached for it, expecting another furious demand.

It wasn't. One line, from Daniel's number.

You think you're clever. But I just pulled the hospital's security footage.

My stomach tightened. A second text landed before I could breathe.

A man in a navy sweater walked you out the front door.

Beside me, Adrian had gone absolutely still.

A third.

I know who he is, Nora.

My fingers turned to ice.

A fourth, just as headlights swept across the bedroom ceiling, white and sudden. Below us, gravel crunched under tires. An engine cut off at the foot of the front steps.

The phone lit one last time in my palm.

Open the door.