I didn't sleep until 4:15 a.m.
And even then, I wasn't sure if what I got counted as sleep or just my body shutting down out of spite.
The pain didn't help.
Every time I shifted, even slightly, the wound along my side throbbed like a living thing — hot, sharp, pulsing under the bandages like it was reminding me it had every right to still be there. I had been stabbed, shot, slashed, and broken in enough ways over the years to know pain by type, by depth, by personality. This one was bad. Deep enough to matter. Nasty enough to slow me down. The kind of injury that made men weaker than me beg for morphine and prayer.
I wasn't weaker than me.
So I lay there in the dark, jaw tight, one hand behind my head, the other resting too close to the bandage, staring up at the ceiling while every thought I didn't want kept circling back like vultures.
Not the shipment.
Not the men.
Not even the blood.
Her.
Kiera.
The entire night played back in my head like a fucking videotape I couldn't eject.
The look in her eyes when she saw the blood.
The way fear had struck her first — real, visible fear — and then been forced back by something steadier.
The stubbornness in her voice when I told her to leave it alone.
The way she ignored me.
Actually ignored me.
Most people would have panicked. Staff would have run for someone else. Some of my own men, trained men, would have fumbled worse than she did, especially with that little amount of supplies and under that kind of pressure. But she hadn't. She'd looked at the wound, assessed it fast, and moved like instinct and knowledge had met somewhere in the middle.
That alone had unsettled me.
But what bothered me more was the care.
That part made no sense.
It was foolish. Completely irrational. The kind of softness that got people used, ruined, buried. I had taken her from her father's house as collateral. I was the face of the debt that swallowed her life whole. Logic said she should fear me, hate me, avoid me where she could.
And yet when I was bleeding through my shirt, she'd stayed.
Not because she had to.
Not because anyone told her to.
Because she chose to.
That kind of thing didn't happen to men like me.
Not without motive.
Not without calculation.
Not without someone expecting something back.
But there had been no manipulation in her face. No cleverness. No performance. Just nerves, stubbornness... and care.
Care so strange it pissed me off.
Because if it was real, I didn't know what the hell to do with it.
I dragged a hand over my face and exhaled sharply into the dark.
Sleep still didn't come.
At 3:27, I decided I'd had enough.
I pushed myself upright.
The pain hit instantly.
A violent, white-hot slice through my side that made me suck in a hard breath and immediately brace one hand on the mattress.
"Fuck."
For one ugly second, I had to lie back down again.
My whole body locked around the pain, muscles tightening, jaw clenching so hard I felt it in my teeth. It was the kind of pain that made weak men negotiate with themselves.
I wasn't negotiating with a bullet wound.
I shut my eyes, breathed once, then muttered to myself, "You're stronger than this."
It sounded stupid in the silence.
But the truth was, I had been through worse.
I was the same man who had made older, more powerful men shake in rooms they owned. The same man who had once used a traitor's blood to paint a warning across a warehouse wall. The same man who had pulled gold teeth from a body and left them on a table as a message because words were too kind for what I meant. Pain had never had the authority to pin me down.
So I stood.
Slowly.
Carefully.
And when the room tilted for half a second, I waited for it to settle before walking to the door.
The house was quiet.
That deep, expensive kind of quiet old houses only ever seem to have at night — when the wood settles, the air turns colder, and every sound feels like it's trespassing.
I moved through the hallway one step at a time.
Past Bridget's room first.
Then hers.
Kiera's door.
I stopped without meaning to.
Stood there in the dark, listening.
At first I heard nothing. Then, faintly, soft and even through the door — the rhythm of sleep.
I don't know why I opened it.
Maybe because she had spent the last hour in my head and I was tired of imagining her.
Maybe because pain makes people reckless in strange, quiet ways.
Maybe because I wanted proof she existed outside of memory.
The room was dark, but not fully. Moonlight spilled through the gap in the curtains, tracing silver over the edge of her bed.
She was asleep.
Curled slightly on her side, one arm tucked beneath the pillow, hair spread messy against the sheets. The sound I'd heard was real — not loud, just the softest trace of a snore, so quiet it almost didn't count. The kind of sound that belonged to someone sleeping deeply. Safely.
Peacefully.
I stood in the doorway and looked at her for longer than I should have.
She looked younger asleep.
Smaller too.
All the cautiousness she carried during the day — the way she watched everything, measured everything, made herself careful before she made herself comfortable — was gone. Here, in sleep, there was no fear on her face. No tension. No survival in her posture.
Just softness.
That did something ugly and quiet to my chest.
I shut the door again before I could identify what.
Then I kept walking.
Downstairs, the television was still on.
Muted, flickering silently across the dark walls of the living room, washing everything in cold blue light. She must have forgotten it. Or maybe she'd fallen asleep too quickly to remember. Either way, the sight of it made the room feel lived in for the first time in years.
I crossed to the bar and poured myself whiskey.
No ice.
Then changed my mind halfway through and added a splash of juice because the bitterness in my mouth was already bad enough.
I drank half of it in one swallow.
The burn hit my throat, warm and familiar.
Then I set the glass down and reached for the remote to switch off the television.
That was when I noticed the chair.
The one she'd made me sit in while she worked on the wound.
Clean.
Perfectly clean.
If I hadn't been there, if I hadn't felt the blood soaking through fabric and skin and patience, I wouldn't have guessed anyone had nearly bled out in that exact spot an hour earlier. She had scrubbed it down so thoroughly there wasn't even a stain left behind.
My eyes narrowed.
Then something on the floor caught the light.
A small glint beneath the chair.
I bent down, ignoring the way my side protested, and picked it up.
The bullet.
Sleek. Platinum-silver. Small enough to underestimate at a glance, deadly enough to matter. There was still blood on it — dried darker now, clinging to the edges. Mine.
I turned it over once between my fingers.
And immediately, without permission, memory snapped back into place.
Her hands.
Steadier than they had any right to be.
Her voice trying to sound firm even when it shook.
The way she had warned me before she touched the wound. The way she'd looked at me like she knew it was going to hurt and hated that it had to.
The way she had done it anyway.
I slid the bullet into my pocket.
Then I switched off the television and the lights and went back upstairs in the dark.
When sleep finally came, it was ugly and shallow.
I woke late.
Not because I wanted to, but because pain and exhaustion had apparently agreed to negotiate with my body after all. The room was bright enough that it annoyed me, sunlight forcing its way through the edges of the curtains, and I was halfway between sleep and waking when someone knocked.
Once.
Then again.
I knew, somehow, before I spoke.
"Come in."
The door opened.
And there she was.
Kiera.
The first thing I saw that morning was her face.
That should not have mattered.
But it did.
She had on a hoodie and jeans today, simple clothes, loose enough to hide how small she really was. Her hair was packed up, a few strands slipping free around her face in a way that made her look softer than usual. Younger. Prettier. More dangerous for reasons I didn't care to examine.
For one quiet second, I just looked at her.
At the shape of her in the doorway.
At the hesitation in the way she stood.
At the fact that she had come to check on me.
Not a nurse. Not one of the staff. Not my men. Her.
That strange soft thing settled in my chest again — unfamiliar and unwelcome and impossible to deny.
Most people didn't check on me.
They medicated me and left me alone with it. Or they assumed I would survive because I always did. Doctors gave instructions and distance. Men obeyed. Women wanted things. Everyone moved around me in relation to what I could do for them or to them.
But she had come to ask if I was alright.
She had school in minutes and still came.
It shouldn't have affected me.
It did.
So I looked at her longer than necessary.
At the strands of hair against her cheek. At the color in her face. At the way her hoodie swallowed the outline of her body while still somehow making it more obvious that there was a body there to notice.
I shouldn't have been seeing her that way.
I knew that.
Didn't matter.
I saw it anyway.
And when she turned to leave, something in me reacted before I could stop it.
"Stop."
Then, "Come here."
She obeyed.
That was worse.
Because when she stood in front of me — close, too close, close enough that I could see the fine shift in her breathing and the slight uncertainty in her eyes — I realized how little space there actually was between us, and how easily I could erase even that.
So I thanked her instead.
For last night.
For staying.
For not letting me bleed all over my own fucking floor.
The shock on her face almost made me smile.
Almost.
Then I told her not to tell Bridget.
That part mattered. Bridget would lose her mind, and once she started, the entire house would know by lunch. Chiara promised she wouldn't say anything, and the certainty in her voice made me believe her instantly. That was the thing about her — when she said something, it didn't sound manufactured. It sounded meant.
Then she left.
And the room felt different after.
Not emptier.
Just... altered.
As if she'd taken the shape of her presence with her and left some quieter version of it behind.
By the time my phone rang, I was still in bed staring at the ceiling like a man with too much time and not enough discipline.
Raphael.
Of course.
I answered without enthusiasm. "What."
"Wow," he said immediately. "Good morning to you too, sunshine."
I shut my eyes. "What do you want?"
"I was thinking of coming over."
"No."
There was a pause. "That was fast."
"I'm busy."
"With what? Brooding? Bleeding artistically? Reorganizing your emotional damage by color?"
I said nothing.
Raphael clicked his tongue over the line. "See, this is why no one writes poetry about you."
"Good."
"So that's a no?"
"Yes."
Another pause. Then his tone shifted slightly — still light, but with more attention under it. "You alright?"
"I'm fine."
"You sound terrible."
"I always sound terrible."
"Fair point." He sighed. "I can still come over, you know. Bring coffee. Insult your life choices. Be the support system you pretend not to need."
For half a second, I almost told him.
Almost told him about the wound, the pain, the fact that I'd spent half the night awake thinking about a girl sleeping three doors down like that was a normal use of time.
I didn't.
If Raphael knew I was injured, he'd come over anyway. If he came over, he'd see it. If he saw it, Bridget would hear about it within the hour, and then I'd have two people hovering instead of one girl quietly knocking on my door before school.
No.
"Not today," I said.
He was silent for a moment, reading the tone beneath the words like he always did.
Then, "Alright."
No argument.
Just that.
"I'll leave you to your suffering, then."
"How generous."
"I know." I could hear the grin in his voice again now. "See "
I ended the call without saying goodbye.
He was probably still smiling when the line went dead.
The room was quiet again after that.
Too quiet.
I turned my head slightly and looked toward the chair near the wall where I'd dropped my trousers earlier. Toward the pocket with the bullet still in it.
Then back to the ceiling.
Then nowhere at all.
Images replayed whether I wanted them to or not.
Her face in the doorway.
Her voice saying good morning.
The way she looked down when she realized I'd caught her staring.
The promise not to tell Bridget.
The softness in her expression when she said I'd needed help, so she helped.
How the hell does someone like that end up in a house like mine?
How does someone that gentle get handed over as collateral like an object?
How does a girl with that kind of careful kindness survive people hard enough to make her look at comfort like it's a trick?
I knew what cruelty could build inside a person.
I wore enough of the result to recognize it on sight.
But she didn't wear cruelty.
She wore damage.
Quietly. Elegantly. Hidden so deep that most people probably wouldn't notice it at all unless they knew where to look.
I knew where to look.
And maybe that was the problem.
I dragged a hand over my face and muttered into the silence, "Fuck."
Because this was dangerous.
Not in the usual way. Not the easy, violent, measurable way I understood.
This was dangerous because it was soft.
Because it slipped in under thought.
Because for the first time in a very long time, I found myself caring about whether someone had eaten, slept, gotten to school safely, come back without fresh hurt in their eyes.
I shouldn't have been thinking about her hair.
About the way those loose strands framed her face.
About how small she looked in the hoodie.
About how close she stood between my knees before she stepped back like she'd remembered I was still me.
I shouldn't have wanted her to come back later just so I could hear her say good morning again.
But I did.
And that was exactly why I needed distance.
I stared at the ceiling a while longer.
Then finally turned my head and looked toward the window, where morning light had started pushing harder into the room.
Somewhere in the house, life was moving.
Staff. Doors. Footsteps. Breakfast being cleared. Cars leaving.
And all I could think was—
She's different.
Different enough to stay in my head.
Different enough to make pain feel secondary for whole stretches of thought.
Different enough to make me lie here injured and thinking about softness like I hadn't spent half my life killing it out of myself.
That wasn't good.
That wasn't safe.
That wasn't smart.
Too bad.
Because no matter how many times I told myself otherwise, I already knew one thing with absolute certainty:
I was going to keep thinking about her.