I imagine it. The steel of one world colliding with the fire of another. “And now you run both?”
“I keep them balanced,” he says. “My father’s gone, so I handle the Orlov business, the shipping, the trade, the alliances. My brother who you saw when we arrived, Killian, oversees our eastern routes. My mother manages what’s left of her family’s network from here. Iris stays out of it, mostly. I have three other brothers who dabble in the parts that they can’t fuck up too much. Then my cousins do the rest.”
“And that makes you the head of the family.”
“This side of it, yes.” The word lands heavy. “Which means anyone under my protection becomes part of that world. Whether they like it or not.”
I shift closer, searching his face. “You mean me.”
He nods once.
It shouldn’t make me shiver, the idea of belonging to something so dark, so permanent, but it does. “I never planned to end up in your world, Liam.”
“No one ever does,” he says quietly. “But they tend to stay.”
“Why?” I ask.
“Because there’s an honestly in criminality that you don’t get elsewhere. The transparency. The terms. The expectations.”
I lie back against the pillow, staring up at the ceiling. “Maybe that’s what scares me. That I could start to like it here. Start to forget what normal felt like.”
He reaches for me then, his hand sliding across the space between us until his fingers brush my wrist. “Normal’s overrated.”
“You really believe that?”
“I stopped believing in normal when I watched my father die in a room full of men who called him brother.”
The admission catches me off guard. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be,” he says. “It taught me what loyalty costs. And what it’s worth.”
I turn my head to look at him, the tension between us humming again, softer this time. “And what’s loyalty worth to you now?”
He leans in, voice barely above a whisper. “Everything.”
The air thickens. The distance between us disappears by degrees. His fingers trace the inside of my wrist, the slow drag of skin against skin.
“You don’t have to be afraid,” he murmurs.
“I’m not afraid of you,” I say, and I mean it. “I’m afraid of what this is.”
He studies me for a long moment, then reaches up to cup my face, his thumb brushing my cheekbone. “Then stop thinking.”
His lips find mine. The kiss starts as a question and ends as a promise.
I melt into it, my hand sliding to his chest, feeling the solid thud of his heartbeat beneath my palm. Maybe I was never meant to survive alone. Maybe the only way out of the fire was to fall into someone who could walk through it with me.
His phone buzzes from the pocket of his trousers that are still strewn on the bedroom floor. He groans when he breaks the kiss.
“I need to check this.”
I watch him stand, all strong lines of muscle and ink and scars. Every bit of him, every movement, could tell a story of its own.
Once he has checked the message, he looks up at me and grins.
“That’s itmilost, the news has begun to break.” He pulls me up into his arms and leads me through to his office, grabbing the television remote and putting on the TV.
Breaking news banners scroll across the top of the screen, the news casters voice serious and flat. Video footage of Edward being handcuffed and lead away from his family home plays beside her as she reports what’s happened.
