Page 1 of Her Angel: Elias

Samara

“Baby girl.” His lips touched my bare shoulder, and then he open-mouth kissed my neck, his beard rubbing deliciously against my skin. That callus-roughened hand flattened on my belly, slowly trailing down to where I was soaked for him.

Elias nuzzled his nose against my ear, his breathing already heavy. Tears stung my eyes, so I kept them closed, not fully trusting that he was actually here. It could so easily be my broken mind playing tricks, comforting me, pretending like I’d had to do in the past.

My husband had been gone for a week. Seven full days without him in our bed. Where I could touch him. Double-check that he was alive and healthy—and still mine. Hear his heart beating, feel the warmth of his body, wrap myself so tightly around him he couldn’t ever untangle himself.

Where he fucking belonged.

Two in the morning was never a good time to get a phone call, and I’d known from the moment the damned thing rang he was going to have to go. I understood. Deep, deep down, I didn’t begrudge the club for pulling my husband’s focus every now and then. Being a patched Angel’s Halo member had helped shape him into the man he was. I’d fallen in love with him because of it.

It was when they took him away from me for more than a day that things got noisy in my head.

He had been out the door within an hour of that call, his motorcycle turned east before the sun came up. No one would tell me where he’d gone, not even him. It was club business. I didn’t need anyone to give me his location, though. He knew about the trackers I had on him—not all of them, but most. The rules were he couldn’t tell me about who, what, or when. There was no rule about not being able to keep my own tabs on him.

When he was away from me, I knew exactly where he went, what he did, when he did it, and with whom. Everyone more or less understood all that. Maybe they even considered it one of their backup plans in case business turned particularly ugly. My ability to keep tabs on Elias gave me the exact GPS locations of the others who traveled with him as well.

That was one of the perks of having a brother who was a powerful dark web king. Vaughn had fun little toys that gave me things like Elias’s heart rate and blood oxygen levels, all on one little app. I had trackers on his bike, the soles of his shoes, sewn into his cut, and a teeny-tiny one in his right arm that I upgraded every year when he got his flu shot. Each and every one of them gave me his coordinates to within a half mile.

While he was gone, I tried to stay busy. There was always work to do. Even though we employed more construction crews than any company in the region, we still had an eighteen-month waiting list. Our clients accepted that if they wanted to work with the best, they had to wait. My workload was never-ending, not that I was pushing myself to keep up. One did not rush perfection, and I didn’t do anything half-assed.

But it still meant long days at the office, and without Elias beneath the same roof as me, I’d been growing steadily…unstable. Jos and Nishia tried to keep me distracted at the office. Each morning after my run with Abi, we’d have breakfast at her house with my nieces and brother. Then at the end of the workday, I’d have dinner with them. Before I climbed into our empty bed every night, I took another run, to try to burn off a bit of the excess energy. Attempt to tire myself out so I might sleep without the noise in my head getting louder.

On Wednesday, Abi had brought my nieces to have lunch with me at the office, burgers from Aggie’s with a slice of cake for all four of us. A solid hour with three of my favorite people, eating my favorite meal, watching them laugh, enjoying the knowledge that two of them got to live with the freedom only the truly innocent could feel.

Free from having blood on their hands.

Free from the darkest parts of the human psyche.

Free from the knowledge of how terrifying their aunt really was, because that side of myself would never be something I willingly showed them.

That time with them helped until they left, and I began to miss my husband once again. Then the noise would come back, like a tsunami crashing against my mind, torturing me.

What if, while he was gone, he realized I was too much?

Too clingy.

Too dramatic.

Too…unstable.

In those moments when the quiet was too loud and all I could hear was the noise in my head, my greatest fear was that he would finally realize it. I’d thought that once I had the one person I’d always wanted, everything would simply click into place as it should. What I’d failed to realize was that finally getting didn’t diminish the fear of losing, and that was something that never faded. It lingered in the background, trying to spoil the happiness I’d found.

No matter how much Elias showered me with attention, adoration, and his insatiable need for my body, I would always have that doubt.

One day, he’d get tired of how extra I was.

And the most terrifying part of it was, I didn’t know what would happen if that became an actuality. I couldn’t allow myself to think about that part, because just imagining it made cold sweat bead along my entire body. My heart would race like I’d just run the fastest five miles of my life, and that part of myself that was still able to feel human emotion, the tiny part that my mother didn’t completely break, would go silent.

No one was safe when that happened. Not Abi, nor my nieces. Not Vaughn. And worst of all, if that part went quiet, if it was turned off once and for all, not even Elias would be safe.

Rationally, I knew that would never happen. My husband—my daddy—loved me. He wasn’t ever going to leave me. I was all he wanted. Always.

It was just when I was left alone to think for too long, irrationality tried to squeeze into my head and poison my thoughts.

Feeling his hardness flex against my hip, I shoved all that noise down hard, locking it away where it belonged. His teeth sank into the tender spot beneath my ear as he thrust two fingers into my dripping core. That small pain was enough proof that I wasn’t dreaming or pretending.

Elias was home.