The road hummed beneath us.Michael’s voice echoed in my memory, a ghost I could not escape.
We have the same father.
I watched you have everything I deserved.
I loved you.I have always loved you.
My father had abandoned a child.Had taken a mistress, gotten her pregnant, paid her off, and pretended their son did not exist.Had built his legitimate family on a foundation of lies while Michael grew up in poverty and bitterness, watching from the outside, learning to hate everything I represented.
Richard Hughes had been a beloved father, a respected businessman, and a monster in a different way than Michael, but a monster nonetheless.
The grief hit me in waves, layered over terror, tangled with a horror that had no clean edges.I had mourned my father for months.I had cried at his funeral, had sorted through his belongings, had inherited his hotel and his debts and his complications.Now I had to mourn the man I thought he was, the illusion that had shattered when Michael forced the truth into the light.
Tears leaked from beneath my closed lids, hot and silent.Raphael’s hand came up to cup my face, his thumb brushing the moisture away with a tenderness that made my throat ache.
“I have you,” he said quietly.“Whatever you need.However long it takes.I have you.”
I believed him.That was the strange thing.After everything, after the Apex manipulation and the forced marriage and all the lies between us, I believed he would protect me.Would burn the world down to keep me safe.Would defy his pack and his Alpha and everything he had ever known because I mattered more.
The bond told me his love was real, his devotion absolute.
But it also told me he was hiding something.And after surviving Michael’s twisted confession, I was done with secrets.
The car rolled on through the darkness.I drifted in and out, consciousness fragmenting into disjointed images.Michael’s face when I called his love obsession, the hope curdling into rage in his eyes.The way his mask had finally fallen, revealing the wounded boy underneath the predator.The moment Raphael burst through that door, amber eyes blazing, fury rolling off him like heat from a furnace, and I had known with absolute certainty that I was not going to die in that chair.
He had come for me.He had chosen me over the prey escaping into the woods, had let Michael vanish rather than leave me alone for one more second.
But before Michael took me, before the basement and the chloroform and the chair, I had felt something through the bond.Pain.Raphael’s pain, sharp and measured, accompanied by a submission that tasted like ash in my mouth.A punishment.
What had the Pakhan done to him?And why was the guilt bleeding through our connection far heavier than “I left you” should warrant?
The questions circled as the miles passed, vultures waiting for me to have the strength to face them.
Eventually the car slowed and turned onto a gravel road.Trees pressed close on either side, their branches skeletal in the headlights.The air changed as we drove deeper into the woods, growing colder and damper.We drove for another ten minutes before a structure emerged from the darkness.A small cabin, weathered wood and dark windows, isolated enough that no neighbors would hear anything.
The safe house looked like a place built for hiding, for disappearing.
Dmitri killed the engine.The silence rushed in, broken only by the ticking of cooling metal and the whisper of wind through bare branches.“I will check the perimeter.Stay with her.”
Raphael nodded once, and Dmitri slipped out into the night.I heard his footsteps crunch through dead leaves, then silence.
“Can you walk?”
I tested my legs, flexing against his hold.Everything ached, but the chloroform haze had finally cleared.“I think so.”
He did not let me try.He lifted me from the car and carried me toward the cabin like I weighed nothing, his steps steady on the uneven ground.The cold air bit at my exposed skin, and I pressed closer to his warmth, feeling his arms tighten in response.
The door was unlocked.Inside, the air was stale and cold, carrying the smell of dust and disuse.He found a light switch and the room flooded with harsh fluorescent illumination that made me wince.
The furnishings were sparse.A couch that had seen better decades, upholstery worn thin and faded to an indeterminate gray.A kitchenette in one corner with a small refrigerator that hummed loudly in the silence.A door that probably led to a bedroom.Everything functional, nothing comfortable.This was a place for survival, not living.
Raphael settled me on the couch and knelt in front of me, his eyes scanning my face with an intensity that made my breath catch.His fingers brushed my jaw, tracing the bruises Michael had left, and his rage spiked through the bond.Hot and violent and barely contained.
“Let me see your wrists.”
I held them out, and he took them gently, turning my hands to examine the damage.The zip ties had left raw furrows, crusted with dried blood, angry red lines circling both wrists like bracelets of pain.His expression hardened at the sight.
“There should be a first aid kit in the bathroom.”He rose and disappeared through a door, returning moments later with a white plastic case.He knelt again, opening the kit and pulling out supplies with practiced efficiency.Antiseptic.Gauze.Medical tape.He had done this before, I realized.Tended wounds in safe houses while the world hunted him.