Chapter 4 - THE CONFESSION
The storm peaked at three in the morning.
The wind shrieked through the eaves of the cabin, threatening to peel the cedar shingles from the roof. Inside, the fire I had built in the hearth threw long, leaping shadows against the timber walls, painting the room in deep hues of amber, bronze, and ash.
Nora couldn't sleep. The fever had set in—not severe, but enough to make her skin burn beneath my fingers and her eyes over-bright with delirium and pain.
I sat beside her on the sofa, a bowl of cold water between my knees, using a torn linen handkerchief to bathe her temples and the hot, flushed curve of her throat.
"You should sleep," she murmured, her head lolling back against the cushions. "You have to drive back to the city tomorrow. You have to face them."
"I don't need sleep," I replied, wringing out the cloth. "I need you to stay alive."
She laughed—a dry, self-deprecating sound that caught in her chest. "I’m not going to die from a five-stitch laceration, Desmond. I’m tougher than that."
"I know how tough you are. That’s what terrifies me."
I pressed the cool cloth to the hollow of her collarbone. Her breath hitched. Her hand reached out, catching my fingers, her grip surprisingly strong despite the fever.
"Why didn't you ever ask me?" she whispered, her gaze locking onto mine with an intensity that made the breath stick in my throat.
"Ask you what?"
"Why I stayed."
The fire crackled, a pocket of sap popping with the sound of a pistol shot.
"You stayed because I paid you three times the corporate market rate," I said, trying to retreat behind the armor of the ledger. "Because you had full authority over the maritime accounts."
"Don't do that," she said, her voice dropping, thick with unshed tears. "Don't hide behind the numbers. Not tonight. Not after Canton."
She pulled my hand closer, pressing my palm against the rapid, fluttering heat of her chest.
"I had offers, Desmond. Maersk offered me a vice presidency in Rotterdam three years ago. The Port Authority tried to recruit me twice. I could have lived in London. I could have had an apartment in Manhattan with an expense account and a life that didn't involve checking the back seat of my car for garrotes."
"Why didn't you take them?" I asked, my voice barely audible above the wind.
"Because you were drowning," she said, her eyes searching mine with a terrifying, unvarnished honesty. "From the day Ethan died, you stopped eating. You stopped sleeping. You bought three identical charcoal suits and wore them like armor. You turned yourself into a machine because you thought if you felt anything—grief, fear, loneliness—the Bellandis would see the crack and tear your throat out."
She touched my face, her fever-hot fingers tracing the hard line of my jaw, the scar near my temple, the permanent tension carved between my eyebrows.
"I stayed because I couldn't bear the thought of you bleeding to death in an empty room with no one to hand you a needle."
Something ancient, dark, and heavy broke open inside my chest.
For five years, I had believed I was protecting her by maintaining an icy, professional distance. I had convinced myself that keeping her behind a desk was my one act of grace in a life defined by extortion, violence, and dynastic duty.
I had been a fool.
She had not been my employee; she had been my sanctuary. She had stood in the rain while I built my fortress, absorbing the cold so I wouldn't have to freeze.
"Nora," I breathed, leaning down until our lips were inches apart.
"If you marry her," she whispered, her eyes fluttering shut as my breath touched her skin, "she will kill you, Desmond. Not with a gun. She will hollow you out until there is nothing left of the man who used to look out the window at the harbor and dream of building ships instead of buying politicians."
"I am not marrying her," I said.
My mouth found hers.
It was not a gentle kiss. It was the desperate, bruising collision of two people who had spent half a decade pretending they were made of stone while the world burned around them.
She tasted of salt, whiskey, and raw defiance. Her good arm hooked behind my neck, pulling me down into the narrow sofa, her fingers burying themselves in my hair with a ferocity that matched my own. A soft moan escaped her throat as I shifted my weight, careful of her wounded arm, my hand sliding under the hem of her wool sweater to find the hot, smooth curve of her waist.
Her skin was burning, but so was mine.
Every lie I had told myself—about duty, about the Bellandi alliance, about my brother's legacy—evaporated in the heat of her mouth. There was no Hale Maritime. There was no Pier Twelve. There was only the sound of her ragged breathing, the rain hammering the cedar roof, and the undeniable truth that I would burn Baltimore to the waterline before I let anyone lay a finger on her again.
When I finally pulled back, our foreheads resting together, her chest was heaving, her lips swollen and pink in the firelight.
"Desmond," she breathed, her fingers tracing the back of my neck.
May you like
"Sleep now," I whispered, kissing the bruise beneath her eye, then the bridge of her nose, then the corner of her trembling mouth. "Sleep, Nora. Tomorrow, we finish this."
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