Page 182 of Pucked Around and Found Out

I stay.

CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

TOREN

The silence isn't heavy with tension like it once was.

I sit on the sofa with my mug pressed between my hands and watch him attempt to build our baby's crib. It's well after dark and this man who can dismantle an empire, who has made grown men weep and beg, who runs one of the most feared criminal organizations in four states, completely and utterly defeated by flat pack furniture and a single sheet of instructions.

I roll my lips over my teeth to keep from smiling.

For the sixth time in twenty minutes he drags a hand through his hair in frustration, the instructions crumpled slightly in his other fist from where he's been gripping them too hard. I offered to help earlier. The look he sent me in response was so withering I raised both hands in surrender and retreated to the sofa without another word.

I don't actually mind.

I could watch this forever.

Not the crib building specifically, though there is a particular and entirely private joy in watching Xaden Devlin meet something he cannot intimidate into submission. I mean this. The domesticity of it. The ordinariness. Him in my living room, in the dark, with his hood down and his sleeves pushed up and a furrow between his brows that has nothing to do with threat assessment or territorial strategy, but everything to do with whether part C connects to part D before or after the base panel.

I take him in quietly, the way I do when he's not looking.

I know what the world sees when it looks at him. Cold. Cruel. A man who was born in darkness and never found a reason to leave it. And some of that is true, I won't pretend it isn't, I won't sand down the edges of what he is to make him easier to hold. But that's not all of it. It's not even most of it, if you know where to look.

Xaden isn't a monster. He's a man who had his heart broken so completely and so young that he built the monster as a replacement, something that couldn't feel the way he felt, couldn't lose the way he lost, couldn't be brought to its knees by grief the way the boy underneath was brought to his. He lost his anchor. He lost his voice of reason. He lost three people in one night and the version of himself that existed before that night went with them, and everything that came after was just him trying to survive the wreckage.

He's been drowning for years.

And he clawed his way out of it, not gracefully, not cleanly, not in ways that anyone watching could call anything other than what they were but he clawed his way out. And he's here. In my living room. Building a crib badly and refusing help with a ferocity that makes me want to kiss him and throw something at him in equal measure.

Tears blur my vision before I'm ready for them.

The love that moves through me in that moment is so overwhelming it's almost physical, a wave that hits without warning and pulls at everything. I set my mug down before my hands shake enough to spill it.

I cross the small space without making a conscious decision to.

He looks up at me with a frown. “Tink⁠—”

“Shut up.” I lower myself onto his lap. He drops the instructions immediately, grips my waist and stares up at me with those gray eyes that are doing that thing they do, reading me, cataloguing me, running through every possible interpretation of what I'm doing and why. His brows are pulled together and I can see the war happening behind his eyes. Every instinct he has built over a lifetime of self-preservation is telling him to create distance. To put space between himself and something that has the capacity to hurt him.

I reach up and cup his face between both hands.

I lean forward and rest my forehead against his.

The tension moves through him like a current finding ground. I feel it in the set of his jaw, in the rigidity of his shoulders and then, slowly, it eases. And then he does something so entirely unlike him that it steals the breath from my lungs.

He wraps his arms around me and pulls me close.

He's hugging me.

Not the controlled, strategic touch he usually permits himself. Not the deliberate, purposeful contact of a man who has decided that physical proximity serves a specific function. He's holding me the way someone holds something they were afraid they were never going to get back.

We sit like that for a long time.

No walls between us. No barriers or masks or the careful managed distance he has always kept in place like a second skin. He's letting me look at him, actually look, past everything he shows the world and what I find there is something I don't have a name for. The fear is there. The terror of it, raw and present and entirely undefended. The grief underneath that. The years of it, accumulated and dense, sitting in his eyes like weather that has never found anywhere to break.

He's not hiding any of it.

I don't have the right words. I know better than to make promises I can't guarantee, he wouldn't believe them anyway, and he shouldn't, because the only promises worth making are the ones made with actions across time and not with words in a warm room on a good night. He's terrified of losing me the way he lost Emery, Neave, Miles, the particular terror of someone who has learned from experience that loving something is the fastest way to have it taken. He's terrified of being a father because the only blueprint he has for what that looks like is a man he has spent years trying not to become.