Page 41 of Heat Unwritten
"I learned," I said, my voice dropping an octave. "I don't follow the rules anymore. I weaponize them. I can't read you a bedtime story like Daniel. I can't draw you like a goddess, like Simon. But I can make sure that no one ever gets close enough to hurt you again unless you invite them in."
I pointed to the encrypted drive on the desk.
"Your digital life is now Fort Knox," I said. "You are invisible, Tessa. Truly invisible. Until you decide you don't want to be."
She stared at me. Her lips parted slightly.
For a moment, I thought she was going to scream at me again. I thought she was going to tell me I had overstepped, that I was controlling her life just like everyone else.
But then she exhaled, a long, shuddering breath that seemed to deflate the tension in her shoulders.
"You killed the ghosts," she murmured.
"I evicted them," I corrected. "There's a difference."
She looked at the screen again, then back at me. There was a new light in her eyes. It wasn't the heat or the panic. It was respect. And beneath that, a flicker of something that heated the blood in my veins.
"And if I want to be seen?" she asked, her voice gaining a fraction of strength.
I held her gaze, my blue eyes locking onto hers.
"Then I will make the world look," I promised. "And I will make them applaud."
The silence stretched, charged and electric.
"Okay," she whispered. She reached out and closed the laptop, a definitive snap. "Okay, Anders."
She didn't say thank you. She didn't have to. She stepped back from the counter, squaring her shoulders.
"I'm hungry," she announced, looking at the three of us. "And since you raided my pantry, Daniel, you're cooking."
Daniel let out a breath he seemed to have been holding for an hour, a massive grin breaking across his face. "Yes, ma'am. Protein scramble, coming up."
As I watched her walk toward the living room, moving with a grace that belied the trauma of the last twenty-four hours, I unbuttoned my cuffs and rolled them up higher, exposing my forearms. For the first time since we got there, I felt useful, lethal.
I looked at Simon, who was staring at me with his mouth ajar.
"Close your mouth, Bradlee," I muttered, picking up the router. "And pass me the screwdriver. I missed a port."
I didn't need to touch her skin to claim her. I had just wrapped her entire existence in my protection. And for the first time in years, the guilt in my chest was quiet.
FOURTEEN
Tessa
The silence in the kitchen wasn't empty; it was calibrated. It hung heavy and thick, smelling of roasted red peppers, spinach, and the rich, savory scent of eggs scrambling in butter.
It was the most domestic smell in the world, and it had absolutely no business existing inside a glass trauma tank on the edge of a cliff.
"Micha was very specific about the macros," Daniel rumbled, his back to the room as he plated the food. He was Facetiming with someone named Micha, apparently a nutritionist with the bedside manner of a drill sergeant, who had walked him through raiding my pantry. "If we don't get enough protein into you within the hour, the shakes come back. That’s just science."
He turned, placing a steaming plate onto the small, round bistro table that sat near the glass wall. It was a table meant for one person and a manuscript. Maybe two people and a bottle of wine.
It was definitely not designed for three massive Alphas and the woman they had historically destroyed.
"Eat," Daniel said gentler this time. He pulled out the chair for me.
I sat. My legs were still jelly, my muscles twitching with the phantom echoes of cramps, but the hunger was a wild, clawing thing in my stomach.
