She felt me.
She wanted this.
My mouth brushes close to her ear, the heat of her skin radiating against me as I murmur low, the words heavy with memory and blame. “Berk… where the hell have you been hiding?” My voice comes out rough, scraped raw by years of grief and fury. “You know they told us you were dead. That you burned with the house.”
She shifts against me, hips moving just enough to press back—not in protest, not in panic, but with deliberate intent. A distraction. She knows exactly how to use her body, how to find that sharp edge that gets under my skin. The contact, the friction, the temptation sparks something deep in my chest—raw and volatile. Primal. Furious.
She’s trying to take control. To unbalance me.
It won’t work.
Because now that I have her in my arms again—reallyhave her—I’m not letting go. Not until I get answers. Not until I pull the truth from her lips, breath by breath.
“Ronan…”
She breathes my name like a prayer—soft, shaky, reverent. And itwrecksme.
Her voice wakes something feral inside me, something that’s been buried and starving for far too long. I press my face into the curve of her neck, breathing her in, letting the scent of smoke, sweat, and something unmistakablyBerkflood my lungs like air I didn’t realize I’d been choking without for years.
She shivers beneath me, her breath catching as I drag my nose along the sensitive spot just beneath her jaw. Andfuck, I’m hard as steel just from the sound of her panting. From her body pressing back into mine like she’s never left.
“I missed you,” I whisper, voice rough with everything I haven’t said. “I never stopped looking, Berk. Not once.”
The words linger between us—too exposed, too real—but I don’t pull them back. I can’t. Because beneath the anger, beneath the years of silence and betrayal, one truth remains unbroken and sharp: I never let her go. Not once. Not even when the world insisted I should.
She freezes at the confession. I feel her go quiet, like she’s weighing what I just gave her, and maybe trying to figure out if it changes anything. Then, in that quiet voice I remember too well, she says the one thing I never expected.
“Can we just have one night?” she whispers. “No questions. No lies. No ghosts between us. Just… us.”
It damn near guts me.
Because I want it too. Badly. More than I should. Not with everything still fractured between us, not with the wreckage we haven’t touched yet. But I’ve never been good at denying her. Never once.
Still… I’m not handing her the reins.
“One night,” I say, my voice like gravel. “But on my terms.” I kiss her hard—fierce and unrelenting—with all the years of aching, missing, and silent rage that I’ve poured into every swing I’ve thrown in the ring. Every fight was a substitute for this. Forher.And now that she’s in my arms again, I let it all pour out in that kiss—hungry, desperate, real.
Before she can argue—or smile in that way that makes me weak—I hook my arm around her waist and toss her over my shoulder like she weighs nothing. Her breath escapes in a surprised laugh, but she doesn’t fight it. No kicking, no screaming.
Instead, her hands settle on my lower back… then slide down to cup my ass.
She’s bouncing over my shoulder, smug and sweet and dangerous, like she planned this. Like she knew exactly what would happen when she whispered my name like that.
I carry her to my car in silence, fire smoldering beneath my skin, knowing full well this night won’t fix anything. But it just might be the only thing that holds me together.
We drive back to my place without a word, the city streaking past in bands of shadow and light. There’s nothing thatneeds saying. The weight of what just happened—the fire, the kiss, the truth written in her eyes—still hangs thick between us. But it isn’t heavy. It’s electric. Like we’re both holding our breath, balanced on the edge of something neither of us is ready to name yet.
With all the chaos burning across town, I don’t doubt that Dean and Bryce already have Rowen and Emerson running damage control. They’ll be out there, investigating the blast sites, trying to piece together a puzzle they don’t realize I’ve already solved. I could call them. Could check in, pretend I’m still playing my part in the cleanup. But what’s the point?
I already know what happened.
And more importantly, I knowwhodid it.
She’s sitting right next to me.
And I’m not about to let her out of my sight.
My little Pixie—the storm in combat boots, with fire in her veins and secrets still bleeding through her skin. She’s always had her hooks in me, even when she wasn’t around to pull the strings. No woman has ever made me feel the way she does—like I’m one wrong word away from worship or destruction.