Semua Bab CRAVING THE BAD BOY: Bab 301 - Bab 310

The next wave hit harder.Victor’s remaining men stopped testing and committed. Gunfire hammered the front of the ranger station in controlled bursts, chewing splinters from the old wood. Nick stayed low beside the doorway, returning fire only when he had a clear angle. Every movement pulled at the wound on his arm, but the pain never reached his eyes. Those stayed locked on the clearing, cold and absolute.Ariana pressed herself against the wall just behind him, weapon ready, breath shallow. She could feel the heat of his body even with the space between them. Every time a bullet struck near the door he shifted instinctively, angling himself to keep her covered.Daniel’s rifle spoke from the upper floor—measured, lethal. One of the flankers went down and did not get up. The other scrambled deeper into the trees.Victor’s voice cut through the noise again, closer than before.“You’re outnumbered and outgunned, Nick. Spare her the trauma of watching you die. Send her out.”Nick’s reply

The retrieval team arrived just after full dark.Three unmarked vehicles rolled into the clearing without headlights. Men and women in plain clothes stepped out, efficient and silent. They secured Victor without ceremony, checked his injuries, and loaded him into the middle vehicle. No questions were asked in front of Ariana or Evelyn. Daniel spoke quietly with the team leader for several minutes, then returned with a simple nod.“They’ll extract every name he has. After that, he disappears into a system that doesn’t lose people.”Nick stood with one arm around Ariana’s shoulders, watching the vehicles turn and disappear back down the access road. Only when the last taillights vanished between the trees did the tension in his body begin to ease.“It’s done,” he said.Ariana leaned into him. “Part of it.”“The worst part.” He pressed a kiss to her temple. “The rest we handle together.”They spent one final night at the station. Daniel and Evelyn took the ground floor. Nick and Ariana r

The second day at the lake passed without a single siren, gunshot, or raised voice.Ariana woke to the sound of water lapping against the dock and the warmer weight of Nick’s arm across her waist. For a long minute she did not move. She simply catalogued the absence of danger the way she had once catalogued exits. No blood. No radio static. No one sleeping with a weapon within reach.Nick’s breathing changed. He pressed his mouth to the back of her shoulder.“You’re thinking loud.”“I’m trying to remember what people do when nothing is hunting them.”He made a low sound that might have been a laugh and rolled her onto her back. Morning light cut across the bed in clean lines. There were no bandages to change, no bruises to check with careful fingers. Only skin and the slower curiosity of two people who no longer needed to prove they had survived the night.They stayed in bed until the sun cleared the trees.Later, Nick made coffee with the focus of a man performing an unfamiliar ritua

A week changed the shape of the days.The lake cabin stopped feeling like a place they were borrowing and started collecting small evidence of permanence. Ariana’s shampoo beside the bathroom sink. Nick’s second mug left upside down on the drying rack. A grocery list stuck to the refrigerator with a magnet that had nothing to do with survival. They still woke reaching for each other, but the reaching had changed. It was no longer a check for injuries or the confirmation of continued breathing. It was simply want.On the eighth morning Nick stood at the window with a cup of coffee and said, without turning around, “I think we should put a real name on the lease.”Ariana looked up from the book she had been pretending to read. “Which name?”“Mine. Or yours. Or something we choose together. I don’t care which. I just don’t want this place to exist under another alias.” He finally glanced at her. “I’m tired of living like we’re already preparing to run.”The words hung between them, heavi

The days after the words felt different in small, irreversible ways.Nick said I love you the way other men said ordinary things—while passing her a coffee mug, while checking the weather on his phone, while standing behind her at the bathroom sink with toothpaste still in his mouth. Not as a performance. Not as a shield against fear. Just as fact. Ariana found herself answering the same way, the phrase settling into their language until it no longer arrived like a revelation and started arriving like breath.It should have made everything lighter.Instead it made the quiet more dangerous.On a gray morning nearly two weeks into the lease, Ariana stood at the cabin’s wide window and watched rain stitch the lake into a single sheet of silver. Behind her, Nick moved through the kitchen with the unselfconscious ease of a man who had stopped calculating exits. The sound of him—drawer opening, kettle setting down, the low hum he made without realizing—filled the space where vigilance used