Chapter 31

TW: 🌶️🌶️🌶️

AVERY –

It’s been almost seven days.

Seven days since the world shrank down to the four walls of this safehouse by the lake. The silence out here is a living thing, broken only by the cry of gulls and the crackle of the fireplace. We’ve settled into a strange, quiet rhythm, a temporary life where the biggest decision is what to make for dinner.

Darius has called the burner phone a few times. The updates are always the same: Jason is nowhere to be found. The general theory is he felt the heat rising and vanished before he could be caught. Jennifer and her family, as far as Victoria knows, are safe, tucked away in a location nobody knows, a secret to keep them safe from him.

It’s late afternoon now, and the fading light paints the room in shades of gold and grey. Victoria is pacing in front of the large window, the burner phone pressed to her ear. Her posture is a rigid line of tension, her free arm crossed tightly over her chest. By the grim set of her jaw and the way she stares unseeingly at the pine trees outside, I know there’s no positive update.

“Okay. Keep me posted,” is all she says, her voice low and flat before she ends the call.

She doesn’t move immediately, just stands perfectly still in the kitchenette, her back to me, a statue of contained frustration.

I shift on the couch, the book in my lap forgotten. “Still no news?”

She turns her head halfway toward me, and a small, reassuring smile touches her lips the moment she hears my voice. It doesn’t reach her eyes. She shakes her head. “No. Jason just vanished.”

I hum softly, a non-committal sound. I’m not sure what to say to the bad news anymore. The words “It’ll be okay” feel hollow when the man who tried to destroy her life has simply disappeared into thin air.

So I don’t speak. I stand and walk to her, closing the space between us. I wrap my arms around her waist from behind, pressing my cheek against the strong plane of her back. Even though I’m shorter, she fits perfectly against me. I inhale her scent — soap, clean skin, and something uniquely, intoxicatingly her – and feel some of the day’s tension ease from my own shoulders.

“You want me to read you a chapter?” I ask, my voice muffled against her sweater. I’ve been reading to her from The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo since our first night here. I found it on a shelf, and it’s become our ritual. For someone as composed and in control as Victoria, she has an incredibly soft heart, and she lets me see it in these moments. The story soothes her. The simple act of listening, of letting someone else take the lead, allows her to finally still her racing mind.

She nods, her body relaxing incrementally in my arms. “Please.”

We lower ourselves onto the thick rug in front of the fireplace. As usual, she lies down and settles her head in my lap, her eyes already closing. I open the book, find my place, and begin to read aloud, my voice a quiet steady rhythm against the whisper of the flames.

***

I don’t know what woke me.

Maybe it was the slow, deliberate glide of her fingertips tracing the line of my spine. Or the way her hand settled on the curve of my hip, her touch possessive and reverent all at once, as if she needed the physical proof that I was still here, solid and warm beside her. Even after a week in this secluded world, her hands still seek me out in the dark, a silent question and a quiet apology woven into every touch.

She didn’t mean to wake me. I know that. She was just… feeling me. Reassuring herself.

And God, do I love when she does that.

I shift against her naked, warm body, turning in her arms to look up. Her eyes are already on me, gleaming in the faint moonlight filtering through the window. A soft, almost shy smile touches her lips, as if I’ve caught her in a private moment she never wanted to end.

I smile back, and she closes the small distance between us, her lips meeting mine.

At first, the kiss is gentle – a tender, sleepy exploration. But it deepens fast, fueled by a shared hunger that seems to live just beneath our skin. Our mouths move together with a familiar desperation, as if we’ve been starving for this all night, even though we fell asleep tangled together. The need is a constant, low hum between us.

She rolls onto her back, her hands guiding me with her, and I follow willingly. My thighs slide against the sheets, settling on either side of her hips as I straddle her. The air in the room shifts, growing thick with heat and a barely-contained urgency.

But we’re not rushing this time.

No.

This time, her hands roam my body with a new kind of patience, mapping every curve and hollow as if committing me to memory. This time, we are savoring it.

I shift my hips until we align perfectly – center to center. The contact is electric. We are both slick and swollen, our bodies reacting with a primal familiarity, as if they’ve been waiting for this exact moment all over again. I roll down against her in a slow, deliberate circle, and her hands clamp onto my thighs, her grip tight, as if she’s trying to keep herself grounded.

“Fuck…” she breathes, the word low and broken, a raw admission of feeling.

And then we move together.

It’s a slow, steady grind. A building rhythm that is all our own. It’s not wild, but it’s not soft either. It exists in the space between – something sharp and beautiful and utterly ours. My hands find her shoulders, pressing down for balance as I rock harder into her, the need for more becoming a desperate, physical demand. She matches me perfectly, her hips lifting to meet every one of my thrusts, meeting my hunger with her own.

The friction is everything. It’s a focused, consuming fire.

Our skin grows damp. Our breaths turn harsh and ragged. I swear my heart is trying to beat its way out of my chest, its frantic rhythm syncing with the roll of our bodies.

She lifts her head, her chest pressing flush against mine, and I bury my face in the curve of her neck, inhaling her scent as we keep moving – riding the wave, riding each other, deeper and deeper until the world blurs at the edges and I can barely see straight.

And then she rises up, her arms wrapping tight around me, binding us together. Her mouth finds mine – not kissing now, just open and close, her breath hot and mingling with my own. We are gasping into each other’s mouths, moaning into the same shared, stolen air.

She whispers my name like a plea, a sacred sound in the dark.

And I shatter.

I come, my body seizing around the intense, overwhelming pleasure. She follows an instant later, her own release crashing over her. Our bodies lock, hips twitching, muscles clenched tight. It’s overwhelming – not just a physical release, but an emotional one. The kind that breaks something open inside you and fills the cracks with pure, radiant light all at once.

It’s soft. It’s hard.

It’s everything.

We collapse into each other, sticky and shaking and silent, save for the wild, syncopated rhythm of our breaths slowly beginning to calm.

And as I lay there, tangled with her in every possible way – limbs, sheets, souls—one thought echoes so loudly in the quiet of my mind that I can no longer ignore it:

This is what I want for the rest of my life.

Her. Like this. Always.

***

We’re tangled together, skin to skin, her fingers tracing lazy circles on my hip. My head rests against her shoulder, and there’s something sacred in the silence – like the world outside doesn’t exist for a little while. Just us. Our breaths. Our warmth. The slow rhythm of fingertips exploring soft skin.

Then she breaks the silence, voice low and warm against the crown of my head. “Tell me something real.”

I glance up at her, brow arched. “What would you like to hear?”

“Anything,” she says, almost shyly. “Everything. Where did you grow up? Who’s your favorite artist? What’s your favorite color? Anything.”

I smile. There’s something so damn cute about this dangerous woman – this powerful, composed killer – lying here beside me like an open book she wants me to help her read.

So I answer.

“I grew up in foster care,” I say quietly, fingers brushing over her collarbone. “Bounced around from place to place. Had a few families take me in, but… I never felt at home. Nowhere. Not until Eli.”

I feel her arm tighten gently around me. She doesn’t speak. Just listens.

“He and I met in one of those places. We were twelve, I think. Both weird and quiet and kind of angry at the world. We stuck together. Still do.” I shrug a little, eyes still on her skin instead of her eyes. “I didn’t mind growing up without a family, really. I never fit in anywhere. I think I just stopped trying.”

“I’m sorry,” she whispers, and I can hear the weight behind those words.

I shake my head. “Don’t be. I think I turned out better than most of the kids who grew up there.”

She gives me a small smile. A proud one. And I know she agrees.

“And as far as favorite music goes…” I grin now. “I love The Cure and The Smiths. I worship KORN.”

That earns a full, genuine and surprised laugh from her – real and low and God, I want to bottle that sound.

“KORN,” she echoes with a smirk. “Right. You look like a KORN girl.”

We both laugh, and it feels so good to laugh with her. It feels real.

We keep talking – about everything and nothing. Her voice softens when she tells me she once wanted to be a ballet dancer. I nearly choke on a laugh, and she throws a pillow at me. I tell her I wanted to be a mortician when I was sixteen. That one stuns her for a beat, and then she asks why – and I say, “Because I thought dead people made more sense than living ones.”

She doesn’t laugh at that. She just nods. And I know she gets it.

We talk about fears. She tells me hers without flinching: being powerless. Being cornered. Losing someone she cares about.

I tell her mine: being abandoned. Being not enough.

She doesn’t say anything to that. She just pulls me closer, like that’s her answer. And maybe it is.

Somehow, somewhere between the laughter and the bruised truths and the quiet, wandering hands, I realize something I probably already knew:

We’re nothing alike on the surface. She’s all steel and silence and control. I’m messy and loud and constantly feeling too much.

But underneath all that? We’ve both known loneliness. We’ve both carried pain that doesn’t show.

And now, somehow, we have each other.

And for the first time in my life, I feel whole. Not just wanted. Not just desired.

But seen.

And nothing – no danger, no darkness, no past – can take that away from me.