Page 26 of Dagger’s Shield

For a while, neither of us spoke, and it wasn’t uncomfortable, which was new. I’d spent a lifetime filling silences with charm because it was the tool that fit every job. With her, in the dark, I didn’t need or want to.

She was the one who broke it.

“Your sister,” she said. “You told me she’s in the business. Is she why you are?”

“Other way around. Alena’s a year younger than me. Whatever I did, she did harder, out of spite.” Her smile showed in the dim light, and I continued. “When our parents died, we only had each other, and we made a mess of it. She grieved by working. I grieved by working somewhere else. Two people in the same trade can go years without a real conversation, and we managed it. Birthdays. The odd voicemail. I told myself that was what she wanted.”

“What changed?”

“Dubai,” I blurted. “Two years ago. An op went wrong, and I got a call that my sister had been shot and I should come now. I was on the ground before she was out of the first surgery. The bullet caught her under the arm and did its worst on the way through. Her spine. They operated three times. There was a stretch where the surgeons stopped saying when she’d walk again and started saying if she ever did.”

Maëlle’s only response was to put her hand on my arm, so I kept talking.

“I stayed two months. Through the surgeries, the first steps, all of it. Somewhere in the middle, she stopped being someone I was connected to by blood and became my sister again. Nearly losing her brought us closer together. I don’t recommend the method.”

“Does she walk?”

“With a limp.” I stared up at the ceiling. “You should hear how she talks about it. Like it’s a battle on the ground she won single-handedly.”

Before Maëlle, I’d never told a woman about Alena: not her name, not what she did, not Dubai, not one word of it. Tonight, I’d wanted to badly enough that I couldn’t have stopped myself.

Every instinct I had said to toss the ridiculous pillow to the floor, gather her in my arms, and kiss her. I kept my hands where they were.

This wasn’t about tonight. For the first time in my life, I wanted a woman for good—next year, ten years on, the whole of it—and that idea didn’t send me looking for the door. What scared me was the other part. What if it wore off? What if I did the work, earned her trust, then I hurt her? It wouldn’t only be us I’d wrecked. She’d never trust another man for as long as she lived.

So I stayed on my side of the pillow.

“Killian?” Her voice was soft, and she sounded half asleep already.

“Yes?”

“Your sister is lucky to have you. To have someone who doesn’t give up.”

I lay awake a long while after that.

I jolted awake when Maëlle’s body jerked, and she grabbed her right thigh and swore.

I shoved the pillow off the bed and moved the duvet. I pressed her knee flat with one hand and drove the heel of the other into the muscle above it.

“It’s only a cramp. I can manage it.”

“You can’t.”

Her chemise had ridden up past her hip, exposing knickers that were cut high and made of the same pink silk. Once I saw them, I couldn’t look away.

She swore again when I pushed harder. “Sorry,” she muttered.

“It’s okay. It won’t hurt any less if you’re quiet.”

“You’re enjoying this.”

“What I’m enjoying has nothing to do with your cramp.”

She followed my line of sight, flushed, then gritted her teeth.

I held her knee down and worked upward. The muscle was rigid under my hand and hardest near the top of the scar from her surgery.

She stared at the ceiling and remained silent as I continued pressing until the muscle finally let go.