Page 41 of The Rook’s Obsession

I push back, wanting it harder, wanting the pain and the pleasure to work together until I can’t tell the difference. His hand slides into my hair, grabbing at the roots, anchoring me as he drives into me again and again.

“Don’t stop.” The words tear from my throat. “Don’t you dare fucking stop.”

He doesn’t.

He pounds into me, the sound of skin against skin filling the room, his breathing ragged and desperate. I feel him swell, then the moment he loses control. He comes inside me with a feral groan that sounds like my name, his hips stuttering through the aftershocks.

“Fuck, Ivy,” he manages, collapsing over me, his weight pressing me into the mattress, feeling his heart hammering against my back. We’re both sweating, both breathing hard, and for a long moment neither of us moves.

He finally rolls off, pulling out of me slowly, and I feel the wetness between my thighs. He wraps an arm around my waist and pulls me back against his chest, his lips finding my shoulder, my neck, the shell of my ear.

“Stay,” he whispers, and I don’t know if he means tonight or forever.

I don’t say anything. But I don’t pull away either.

His breathing is deep and slow against my neck. One arm is draped over my hip, heavy with sleep, and his heartbeat has settled into a steady, unhurried rhythm. He’s out cold. Whatever tension he carried into this room left his body somewhere between the second and third time I pushed him back down when he tried to take control. He eventually got the message. This was for me.

I lie in the dark, staring at the ceiling, and take stock of things.

My body is wrung out. Loose in a way it hasn’t been in days, maybe even weeks. The anger is still there—not that I expected it to go anywhere—but it’s been banked for now. Turned down to a low simmer instead of the rolling boil it was at an hour ago. The whiskey helped, but this helped more, though I would rather eat glass than ever admit that out loud.

Nick shifts in his sleep, his arm tightening around me before relaxing again. A reflex. Even when he’s unconscious, he reaches for me. I wonder if he knows he does it, or if it’s the kind of muscle memory that bypasses the brain. The same way my body slid across the bed toward him last night without my permission.

I turn my head to look at him. In sleep, with the tension drained from his face and his guard completely down, he looks peaceful. Softer. The hard lines around his mouth have smoothed out. The furrow he usually wears between his brows is nowhere to be seen. He doesn’t look like someone who’s spent the last four months searching for a ghost. He’s not a man who’s been shot, sprayed, kicked, and chased across two continents either by or because of a woman he claims to love.

He looks like a man who trusts me.

Which is when I notice the obvious. He didn’t cuff me.

No handcuffs. No restraints. No chain linking our wrists. My hands are free, my legs are free. The door is twelve feet away, and the car keys are on the dresser where he left them.

I could leave. I could be really free.

The realization moves through me like cold water. I could get up right now, pull on my clothes, take the keys, and walk out. He’s asleep, genuinely, deeply asleep, the heavy kind that comes after physical exhaustion and days of running on fumes. I could be miles away by the time he wakes up. I could disappear the way I’ve been trained to disappear, and he would never find me again. Not without knowing where I was headed, because I don’t know that myself.

I could start over. I could find a new city, a new name. A new life that doesn’t belong to Vincenzo or Liam or to Nick or to a dead girl named Laura. I have the skills and the instincts. I’ve survived worse than this with less.

My eyes move to the door. Then to the keys. And back to Nick.

Either he forgot to restrain me, or he chose not to. The fact is, I’m not sure which possibility unsettles me more—that he made a mistake, or that he trusts me enough to sleep beside me with nothing holding me in place.

I lie in the dark for a long time, turning it over.

The highway is outside, stretching in every direction, and nobody in the world knows where I am.

So what do I do now?

NICK

She’s gone.

I don’t know how I was able to sleep through her leaving but I know she left before I open my eyes. It’s the way the weight on the mattress has shifted. The lack of warmth on her side of the bed. It’s cool over there, where her body should be. The room is quiet in the wrong way. It’s not the quiet of someone sleeping, but the quiet of absence.

My thigh screams when I suddenly sit up, head snapping around. The bathroom door is open, the light’s off. I can see from here the room is empty.

My eyes go to the dresser, because of course, that’s where I left the keys to the car.

Keys that are now gone.