Absolute clarity settles in my bones.
This is it.
Not the chase. Not the competition. Not the blood on our hands.
Just her.
How could I ever give this up for anything?
Silence settles between us, but her tears dry up as my thumb brushes over her hip. “You’re not planning to kill me the moment I let my guard down, are you?”
“Who knows? Sounds like fun,” I tease, knowing she needs it to build her back up. “After those sloppy moves back at the penthouse, Ithink I might just be able to pull it off.”
Kiara scoffs, and I feel her soft smile against my chest. “Please. Says the man who sent three rounds directly into the wall.”
I groan and let out a huff. “Not my fault. I’d just been shot and was using my non-dominant hand.”
She lets out a soft, breathy laugh and lifts her head from my chest, pushing up onto her elbow. Her gaze rises to mine, and something softer than I’ve ever seen flickers there. Not weakness. Not surrender. Something warmer. Something steady.
“There’s not a non-dominant bone in your body, Raiden Kane,” Kiara whispers, a teasing smile curving her full lips. “And for the record, I don’t have a non-dominant hand. When I shoot, I have absolute precision whether it comes from my left or my right.”
My brow arches. “Is that so?”
“Mm-hmm,” she murmurs, her gaze sailing across my face, lingering on something. She lifts her hand off my chest and brushes her fingertips over the cuts and bruises that mark my skin. A hollowness appears in her eyes, and along with it comes a heaviness I wasn’t expecting.
Reaching up, I cup her hand over my skin, forcing her gaze back to mine. “What is it, Kiara?”
“You,” she whispers. “You scare the shit out of me. I don’t know what this is or why it feels like this. Why do I always need to be around you? Why do you drive me crazy the way you do? It terrifies me—and has since the moment I met you. But then you grabbed my hand andforced me to jump. You used yourself as a human shield, Raiden. You could have died just to save me, and that . . . I don’t know what to make of that.”
I nod. I know exactly what to make of that, but I’m not about to scare her by admitting what went through my head when the flames swallowed us whole. In that split second, with the world detonating behind us and the ground rushing up to meet us, something inside me settled with brutal clarity.
I would have taken the full force of it. Every shard of glass. Every burn. Every broken bone.
I would have died before I let that fall take her from me.
So I keep that to myself, locked up deep within me, never to see the light of day. Kiara doesn’t need a truth that heavy right now, and maybe I’m not ready to say it out loud. In my heart, I know that my soul tethered itself to hers in the middle of that explosion.
“You don’t need to overthink this,” I tell her. “I don’t want you feeling conflicted because I chose to protect you.”
She shakes her head, helplessness brimming in her eyes as they fill with fresh tears, and I realize that she knows exactly what this is. At least, on my side. She sees it in my actions, how I hold her, seek her out. “We can’t do this,” she tells me, as though I haven’t already agonized over every little reason. “It’s too dangerous. We’re compromised.”
“I know,” I tell her, not willing to sugarcoat something as important as that.
“We fucked up,” she continues, dropping herhead back to my chest, her fingers shifting in my hand until they’re laced through mine and resting against my stomach. “We allowed this rivalry to get in the way of the job, and because of that, the target slipped away. We allowed ourselves to be vulnerable, and that’s not okay with me. I’m better than that, and this past month, while it’s been the craziest month of my life, it’s been reckless. We’ve taken too many jobs. We’re drawing attention, and sooner or later, other contractors are going to get pissed. By taking every single little job, we’re not just stealing contracts from each other, we’re taking them away from those who would have usually accepted them, and that’s bound to piss someone off eventually.”
I nod, having more than considered this.
“You’re right,” I murmur, my hand slipping inside the back of her hospital gown and resting over her hip. “It’s reckless. We’ve gotten carried away, and I’m just as angry as you are. I hold myself to a high standard. I don’t allow targets to slip away, especially the way he did. It was foolish. My mind was locked only on you, but I don’t know how to make that stop.”
“What are we supposed to do?”
“That’s your call, Firecracker. We could admit that there’s something much bigger here, something neither of us has been willing to say, and risk it all. We accept that in doing so, we paint targets on our backs. We could become the biggest threat in the industry and spend the rest of our days together, while also constantly faced with threats, always looking over our shoulders, unable to live with the freedoms we have now.Or—”
“Or?” she questions, sadness thick in her tone.
“Or we walk away.”
She lets out a sigh, her body going limp against mine. “I don’t like either of those options,” she says. “In a perfect world, nothing has to change.”
