LOGINEris never wanted trouble. As someone cast out of her pack and forced to live as a doctor, she saves lives—not ruins them. But when she stumbles upon her cold, enigmatic roommate, Dante, murdering someone in the dead of night, she knows she’s next. In a desperate bid to survive, she pushes him off a cliff. She should have walked away. Instead, guilt drags her back. She saves him, hides the truth, and when he wakes up months later with no memory, she tells the biggest lie of her life, “I’m your wife.” Now, Dante looks at her with devotion, hunger, and complete obsession. The man who once terrified her is utterly hers. But the past never stays buried, and when Dante remembers, he won’t just want answers, He’ll want revenge.
View MoreFIVE YEARS LATERGerald is on the counter again.I know this before I even come downstairs because I can hear Dante saying “get down” in the voice he uses when he has already said it four times and is now simply saying it for the record, knowing full well it will accomplish nothing.Gerald has never once in five years gotten down from anywhere voluntarily.I come into the kitchen.Gerald is on the counter.Dante is at the stove. He’s in a grey shirt—always a grey shirt, I have stopped questioning this, I believe he has forty of them—and he is making breakfast with one hand and gesturing at the cat with the other, and Gerald is sitting directly next to the chopping board with the supreme unbothered energy of a cat who knows he is untouchable.He is untouchable because Daxton will riot if anyone moves him.“Morning,” I say.Dante looks at me over his shoulder. The look he gives me every morning, the one that still does something to my central nervous system even after all this time, war
“Say that again,” I say.Dante doesn’t answer. He’s looking at the phone like it’s something that bit him, and for a man who walked out of a warehouse full of people who wanted him dead approximately four minutes ago looking completely unbothered, the fact that a phone call is doing this to his face tells me everything.“Dante.” I put my hand on his arm. “Say that again.”“Judge Callum Sorin,” he says. “My father.”I stare at him.“Your father,” I repeat. “Is a corrupt judge. Who was working with the people who tried to have you killed. Who is now calling you directly after we just sent evidence of his crimes to a journalist.”“Yes.”“And he’s Daxton’s grandfather.”“Biologically.”“Dante.”“I know.”The phone is still ringing.“Are you going to answer it?” I ask.He looks at me. Then he picks up.He doesn’t say anything. He just waits.A voice comes through the speaker, older, clipped, the voice of a man who has spent decades being the most important person in every room he enters. “
“How is that possible?” I say. “Your people aren’t in position yet. You said seven.”“I know what I said.” Dante is already texting. Both thumbs, fast, the phone Rafe handed over replaced with his own. “They moved because Rafe’s call spooked them. They think we’re onto the location.”“We are onto the location.”“They don’t know that yet. They just know something shifted.” He looks up. “My people can be there in forty. The Kavris will be set up in twenty.”I do that math. “That’s a twenty minute gap.”“Yes.”“Dante—”“I know.”“That’s twenty minutes of you walking into a room full of people who want you dead with no backup and a hard drive they’re going to take the second they see it.”“They won’t see it,” he says. “Because you’re not bringing it in.”I stare at him. “What?”“The drive stays with you. Outside.” He holds my eyes. “You are my backup. If I’m not out in twenty minutes, you send it. I set up a journalist contact years ago, a dead drop, it auto-submits if I trigger it from m
I stare at him for another full minute.He doesn’t move. His sides rise and fall, the bandaging still clean and pale against all that black fur. The early light through the cabin’s one window cuts across the floor and lands just short of him, like even the sun is a little bit wary.You need to leave, I tell myself. Right now. Before he wakes up.But I grab the old wool blanket from the cot in the corner anyway and I spread it over him. As carefully as I can. He shifts once and I freeze, but he doesn’t wake.I back out of the cabin.Then I run.I run as far as I can* * *My father is already yelling before I get the door open.I slip into the kitchen, tie my hair back up from where it’d fallen loose, and get the pan on before he gets to the part of the yelling where he starts throwing things. Eggs. He likes his eggs over easy. If I break the yolk he makes me do it again. I’ve learned not to break the yolk.“Where were you?”“Out early.” I keep my back to him. “Sit down Sir, it’s
The cabin hums like it’s breathing. A steady, low vibration that crawls up my spine and won’t let go. Everyone else is asleep—rows of heads tilted, eyes shut, mouths slightly open. The air smells like recycled air and burnt coffee of the first class aisle, but all I can taste is him.Dante.He’s si
Dante sees the text before I can turn the phone over.I watch his face close. Everything that was open in it thirty seconds ago, the fractured warmth, the forehead against mine, the hands that were gentle in a way I was not prepared for, all of it locks shut in one clean motion, like a house going
I play it three more times.Not because I didn’t hear it correctly. I heard it correctly. Every word landed exactly where it was aimed, clean and precise, the way a knife lands when thrown by someone who has done it before. I play it three more times because I am a person who needs information to
He doesn’t answer me.That’s the first thing. He just sits there with both hands on the wheel and the engine still running and his knuckles slowly returning to their normal color, and he breathes, and I watch his face do things that faces shouldn’t have to do, cycling through something private and
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