His hand dropped from behind me—gone in an instant, like the moment had never happened.A quiet curse slipped under his breath as he reached for the phone, every line of him snapping back into the man he was.Colder.Harder.Untouchable.
I watched it happen.
The shift in his jaw.The way his shoulders squared.The way whatever had been in his eyes vanished behind something controlled—and dangerous.
He answered.Listened.Said nothing at first.
“Yeah,” he said finally, voice flat.Controlled in a way that set something uneasy loose in my chest.“Send it through.”
The call ended.Silence followed—thick, pressing in from all sides.
He looked at me.And just like that, it was gone.Whatever had been building between us—burning, tightening, pulling—it disappeared like it had never existed.
“The men weren’t random,” he said.
My stomach dropped before he finished.
“They’re Spanish.”
A beat.
“And they work for Michalo Machado.”
The name sat like a boulder between us.It knocked the air clean out of my lungs.
Spain.Machado.I knew exactly who he was.
The dinners I refused.The gifts I never accepted.Flowers that kept coming anyway—more expensive, more insistent, like no wasn’t a word he recognized.
He hadn’t courted.He’d circled.Closing in.Watching.Waiting.And when I didn’t give him what he wanted, he didn’t stop.He tightened.Until leaving had been the only option left.
Archie was still watching me.Taking in every shift.Every crack I didn’t mean to show.
“I take it you know him,” he said quietly.
Not a question.
I swallowed, fingers tightening in the fabric at my thighs.
“Yes.”
The word came out thin.It didn’t sound like my voice.
“I know exactly who he is.”
13
Archie
Iwanted to break something.
The urge sat under my skin from the moment the sun came up—hot, violent, coiled tight in my chest like it was waiting for an excuse.Cold water didn’t touch it.Silence didn’t dull it.It had been there the second I heard Michalo Machado’s name the night before, and it had only sharpened with every passing hour.
Because now I knew.
The men I’d put in the ground hadn’t been random.Not hired hands drifting toward easy money.They belonged to someone.They’d been sent with direction.With intent.
With her name behind it.