Tous les chapitres de : Chapitre 1 - Chapitre 10

The front door opened before I could breathe. Heavy footsteps. Not Maya's. Not my roommate's. The kind of footsteps that didn't apologise for themselves, deliberate, unhurried, belonging to someone who had never once in his life walked into a room and wondered if he was welcome. Bryan heard it too. His jaw went tight. "Natalie. Whose car is that?" I couldn't answer. My throat had closed up completely, because I knew exactly whose car it was. I knew whose footsteps those were. I knew, before he even appeared at the bottom of the stairs, what I was about to be standing in the middle of, and there was absolutely nothing I could do to stop it. Luca Wolfe didn't knock. He never knocked. He stepped into the hallway like he owned it, the building, the air, and me, wearing a black shirt and dark jeans with the kind of effortless danger that made every other man in the vicinity look like they were playing dress-up. His eyes moved once across the space: stairs, me frozen at the to

I heard it before I understood what I was hearing. Luca's voice first, low, controlled, with that particular edge underneath it that I had learned meant something had interrupted a plan he'd already made, and he was deciding how much it was going to cost whoever was responsible. Then another voice answered him, and the moment I heard it every single nerve in my body went completely still, because I knew that voice. I had known that voice for six years. I would have recognised it through walls, through sleep, through the end of everything, it was wired into me in a way I had never examined too closely because examining it would have meant admitting things I wasn't ready to admit. Bryan. Bryan Rollins was in this house. I was off the bed before I even made the decision to move, across the room in four steps, hands on the door handle, locked, still locked, of course it was locked, it was always going to be locked, I pressed my ear flat against the wood and held my breath and li

The clinic was nothing like I expected. I don't know what I had been imagining something cold, maybe, something that matched the house and the gun on the counter and the general aesthetic of Luca Wolfe's life, all steel surfaces and the absence of warmth. Instead it was a private practice forty minutes from the compound, small and quiet and decorated in the kind of muted colours that were designed to make people feel calm, which was doing absolutely nothing for me personally. A receptionist who didn't look up when we walked in. A waiting room with two other people in it who didn't look at us either. Luca had called ahead. Of course he had. We were seen within four minutes of arriving. I changed into the gown they gave me and sat on the edge of the examination table and looked at the ultrasound machine in the corner and thought about the fact that in approximately five minutes I was going to see, on a screen, the two lives that had detonated mine. That they were going to stop b

The car did not come in. It sat at the gate for exactly three minutes, engine running, and then it left the same way it had arrived, slowly, deliberately, without hurry, in the way of things that want to be remembered. Luca stood at the window and watched it go and none of us said anything because the silence he was radiating was the kind that discouraged words. Then he turned around and said, very calmly, that we needed to go inside and that everything was fine, and I had now known him long enough to understand that when Luca Wolfe said everything was fine he meant that everything was under control, which was not the same thing and never had been. My mom had had enough. I watched it happen in real time, the moment her patience with being in a house she didn't understand, in a situation nobody had explained to her properly, with a man who answered direct questions with technically accurate non answers, finally ran out completely. She set her glass down on the counter and looked a

Bryan called for eleven minutes. I know because my phone showed me afterward, when I was sitting in the dark holding it against my chest and trying to locate the part of myself that had always known exactly how she felt about Bryan Rollins and figure out why it was suddenly harder to find than it used to be. He had called to check in. That was what he said, right at the start, his voice doing that thing it did when he was being careful, steady and warm and not asking for anything directly because Bryan never asked for things directly, he just made himself available and waited and trusted that you would find your way to him eventually. He asked if I was okay. I said yes and meant it more than I had expected to. He asked if I was eating. I almost laughed, because Luca had asked me the same thing three hours ago and the fact that the two men in my life led with food when they were worried about me was either very funny or very telling and I had not decided which yet. He asked about