Page 34 of The Rook’s Obsession

We stay tangled, breathing hard. She lifts her head, looking back at me with hooded eyes and a ghost of a smile that’s edged with danger.

“Still think I’m fragile?” she asks.

I tighten my arms around her. “I think whatever you are… you’re mine,” I say, meaning every damn word.

IVY

There’s a girl sitting on a dock with her feet in the water.

She’s young. Fifteen, maybe sixteen. Her hair is dark, her shoulders are bare, sunburned across the tops. The lake stretches out in front of her, flat and golden in the late afternoon light. Behind her, someone is calling from the porch of a cabin. A woman’s voice, warm and familiar. She’s saying something about dinner.

The girl doesn’t turn around. She’s waiting for someone. I feel it. Anticipation sits in her chest, like she’s holding her breath. She’s watching the tree line on the far side of the lake. When a figure appears on the path, she smiles. A real smile. The kind that starts deep inside a girl who has been looking for one person and one person only, and he’s finally shown up.

The figure gets closer. It’s a boy with dark hair and pale eyes. He has a grin on his face as he jogs down to the dock and drops into place beside her, close enough that their shoulders touch. She leans into him. He puts an arm around her.

When the woman calls from the porch again, neither of them moves.

The light changes. The lake goes from gold to silver, and the girl’s face blurs. No, not yet. I’m still watching. But it’s all starting to dissolve—the shape of the boy’s jaw, the sound of the woman’s voice, the smell of the water. It all slips through my fingers the harder I try to hold on.

When I wake up, my face is pressed against Nick’s chest.

I don’t move at first. His arm is around me, heavy and warm. My hand rests against his ribs, and I can feel his heartbeat under my palm. Slow, steady. Our legs are tangled under the sheets. My body slid across the bed at some point during the night and found his. He didn’t push me away, but then why would he?

I’m the one who should pull away. Untangle myself, put distance between us, and pretend none of this happened. That’s what I would normally do. It’s what my training demands. Never show vulnerability. Never let your guard down. Never wake up in someone’s arms, because arms can become restraints.

But I don’t move. Not yet. Because it feels nice, and I don’t know what to do about it.

No, it’s more than nice. It’s familiar. The weight of his arm. The warmth of his skin. None of it feels new. It feels like something I’ve done before, a long time ago, in a life I can’t reach. The way those French fries tasted right with mayonnaise. The way the cabin smelled like something I’d forgotten I knew. This is another one of those times when my body remembers what my mind won’t give me.

The dream is already fading, lingering at the edges of my consciousness. I can’t shake the residue from it. Was it a memory? Was it my brain stitching together details from those photos back at the cabin, or from the things Nick has told me? Building a scene from borrowed information, presenting it as something real?

Is what Nick has been saying true, or am I imagining things because I want this to be true?

I don’t know. Not knowing is its own kind of torture.

Lying here, with his arm around me and his heartbeat under my hand, something else surfaces. Something older. A feeling I haven’t thought about in years, because I trained myself not to. Back in Italy, in the early days. Everything was cloudy and fragmented as I was recovering from my injuries. The bandages, the pain. Long stretches of medicated sleep.

I used to dream about a boy. I could never see his face clearly—it was always blurred, like looking through frosted glass. Still, I knew the feeling he carried with him.

Safety. Warmth. The sense that nothing bad could happen as long as he was close.

I told Vincenzo about the dreams once, in the early days. He dismissed them, of course. Meaningless noise resulting from trauma. The brain’s way of processing pain. He told me to focus on what was real, on what was in front of me, so I did. I buried those dreams so deep, I forgot they existed.

Now I’m lying in the arms of a man with dark hair and pale blue eyes, and the dreams are clawing their way back to the surface.

His breathing changes. He’s waking up. I close my eyes and slow my own breathing, pretending to still be asleep, because I’m not ready for this conversation. Not yet.

He doesn’t move either. His arm stays where it is. His heartbeat remains steady. If he’s surprised to find us wrapped around each other, he doesn’t show it. He just lies there, holding me, and the silence—the lack of explanation, the lack of apology or anything else—might be the most complicated thing I’ve ever experienced.

At least, in this lifetime. Maybe not in the one that came before.

Eventually, I need to stop pretending. When I open my eyes, I pull back slowly, untangling my legs from his before sitting up on the edge of the bed. The hotel room is filled with pale, early morning light. According to the clock on the nightstand, it’s seven fifteen.

“Morning,” he mumbles behind me.

“Good morning.” I don’t look at him. I’m not ready for those eyes. Not yet.

We get dressed in silence and pack what little we have. He makes coffee with the sad machine on the dresser, and I drink it without complaining, even though it tastes like hot water that once heard a rumor there was such a thing as a coffee bean. Within thirty minutes, we’re on the road, heading south on a highway that looks like every other stretch of highway.