Page 178 of What We Become

“Still here?” he asks, brushing his mouth against my shin.

I nod. My body feels wrung out, heavy and sweet, but the sharp edge of the scare is still there, just beneath the surface. “Keep fucking me.”

He leans forward with my leg over his shoulder and drives into me hard enough to slam the headboard against the wall. I claw at his back, using the weight of him to hold me inside my body whenever my mind reaches for the face across the street.

“Eyes on me,” he commands, and I obey, locking onto the ice-blue of his gaze. “You’re here. You’re safe. I’ve got you.”

I come again, harder this time, my cry tearing out raw and broken, and he follows, spilling inside me with a groan that sounds almost like pain. We collapse together, his weight pressing me into the mattress, his heart thundering against my chest where our skin meets.

For long minutes, neither of us moves. His hand finds my hair, fingers threading through the tangled strands, and I feel him breathe—long, deliberate inhales that match the rhythm he’s trying to settle me into.

“Tell me again,” I whisper against his shoulder.

“What?”

“That I’m safe.”

He lifts his head, eyes finding mine as his thumb traces my jaw. “You’re safe with me. Whatever was across that street—real or not—we handle it together. You don’t face him alone again.”

The fear doesn’t disappear. It just gets smaller than he is.

“Stay with me.”

“Always.”

He rolls off me carefully, avoiding my wounded leg, and gathers me against his chest. The blood has dried tacky on my thigh and his chest, smeared between us like evidence. Neither of us moves to clean it yet. For a moment, I don’t want us to.

“Don’t move,” he says finally, and I almost laugh because this man says that to me more than anyone else in my life, and I almost never listen.

But I do this time.

He disappears into the bathroom for a warm washcloth, then retrieves the first-aid kit from downstairs. When he returns, he has that look on his face that means the detective has dragged the possessive animal back inside himself. He kneels on the bed and starts with my ankle, wiping away the mess so he can clean the cuts properly.

I watch his hands.

That’s maybe the thing about Holden that gets me the most. Not the violence. Not the command. The care. The big, dangerous hands doing something precise and necessary because I need it.

“Enjoying the show?” he asks.

“You’re hot when you’re clinically repressed.”

His mouth twitches, barely. “Hold still.”

He cleans both cuts thoroughly, the antiseptic sting making me hiss through my teeth. He doesn’t apologize. Just puts one hand on my knee, firm and grounding, while he works. Then he smooths ointment over each cut and wraps them separately in fresh gauze, each bandage neat and secure without being too tight.

“There,” he says, pressing the tape down and dropping onto the bed beside me. “You good?”

“Yeah.”

The house is quiet. Eli is still checking the block, and the others haven’t come home yet.

“It wasn’t him,” I murmur, more to convince myself than anything. “Just my head screwing with me.”

Holden pulls me closer, his arm a band around my waist. “Milo will go through the footage anyway.”

I burrow into his warmth, but one question refuses to settle.

If today was only a ghost, what happens when he’s really standing there?