Chapter 134: You’re my Home
The vibration of Damien’s phone was a mundane punctuation to his thoughts about hearths and horses. He expected another logistical update, maybe a photo of the biting mare from the ranch. He did not expect the three words that glowed on the screen.
How about tonight.
He stared at it. His mind, usually four steps ahead, stumbled. It was barely six. His reply about the architect was still marked delivered. He hadn’t even heard a jet.
He typed a single question mark.
The response was immediate. Look up.
A cold thrill, entirely separate from danger, shot down his spine. He pushed back from the desk, the blueprints rustling. His eyes scanned the room—empty, silent. He moved to the door of his suite, pulled it open, and looked down the long, dimly lit corridor. Nothing.
Then he turned back inside, his gaze sweeping toward the bedroom entrance. The door was ajar.
He crossed the living area, his shoes soundless on the rug. He pushed the bedroom door open.
She was there.
Perched on the edge of his vast bed, backlit by the single lamp on his nightstand. She was curled into herself, knees drawn up, dwarfed by one of his simple black dress shirts. The cuffs swallowed her hands. Her wavey black hair was a messy cascade over her shoulders, and in the soft light, she looked younger, stripped of all her mogul armor. Her face was bare, and her sharp green eyes were not calculating or icy. They were just tired. A little lost. A faint pout touched her bottom lip, not an affectation, but the quiet downturn of someone who’d reached their limit.
The air left his lungs. “Bethany.”
“Hey.” Her voice was soft, a little rough. From the flight, or from something else.
He stepped into the room, letting the door swing shut behind him. The quiet was profound. He could smell her—her shampoo, the faint, clean scent of jet fuel clinging to her skin, and underneath it, him. His soap, his cologne from the shirt.
“You’re here,” he said, the statement absurdly obvious.
“I was in the city for a meeting. It wrapped early.” She didn’t move. “Didn’t feel like flying back to Texas. Didn’t feel like… anything, really.”
He understood then. This wasn’t a surprise visit. This was a retreat. A tactical withdrawal to the only position she deemed secure.
“Your cousins?” he asked, coming closer.
A flicker of tension crossed her face. “Let’s just say the Montgomery family boardroom currently has several new holes in the drywall. My left hook is still decent.” She said it flatly, no pride in it. “I didn’t want to talk to Uncle Dimitri. I didn’t want to manage anything. I threw my phone at my pilot and told him to point the plane east.”
She uncurled slightly, looking down at the shirt. “I walked in. Marco at the gate almost had a coronary. I told him to forget he saw me. Your housekeeper was in here turning down the bed. I think I scared her ten years off her life. I just… needed to not be somewhere I had to perform.”
Damien sat on the bed beside her, the mattress dipping. He didn’t touch her yet. “You don’t have to perform here. Never.”
“I know.” She finally looked at him, and the wall she kept so high, the one made of sarcasm and strategy and sheer will, was just gone. In its place was a raw, weary openness that hit him harder than any threat ever had. “You were right. About needing more family. And then I had mine, and it was a minefield, and I just… I wanted my home.”
Her breath hitched, just once. “You’re my home, Damien. The only one that’s ever made sense.”
The admission, so quiet, shattered the last of his reserve. He reached out, his hand sliding gently around the back of her neck, his thumb brushing her jaw. Her skin was cool.
“You flew all this way to sit in the dark in my stolen shirt?” he murmured, his voice thick.
“I flew all this way,” she whispered, leaning into his touch, her eyes closing, “because this is the one place I can completely fall apart and know, in my bones, that everything will still be okay. That you’ll put it all back together. Even the pieces I don’t like.”
He pulled her to him then. She came willingly, folding against his chest with a sigh that seemed to come from the marrow. He held her, one arm around her shoulders, the other banding across her back, his face buried in her hair. She felt small. Breakable. Which was the greatest illusion of all, because she was the strongest person he knew.
“You don’t have to fall apart,” he said into her hair. “But you can. Every time.”
They stayed like that for long minutes. He felt the minute tremors in her shoulders slowly still. Felt her breathing deepen and match his. The distant hum of the compound’s security systems was the only sound.
“I saw the blueprints on your desk,” she said finally, her voice muffled against his shirt. “The fireplace is obnoxiously big.”
A laugh rumbled in his chest. “Told you.”
She pulled back just enough to look at him. Her eyes were clearer now. “Show me?”
Later, they were tangled in the dark, the sheets a mess around them. The shirt was gone, discarded on the floor. The world, with its boardroom fights and family treachery, was locked outside the door.
Her head was on his chest, her fingers tracing the lines of a tattoo over his heart. “My mother called today,” she said, apropos of nothing.
Damien went still. Elena Novak’s calls were never casual. “And?”
“She asked if your security on the new build included seismic sensors. She knows a guy in Belarus who makes them.” Beth’s tone was dry, but it lacked its usual edge. “I told her we’d consider it. For the wine cellar.”
He smiled in the darkness. “Of course she did.”
“It was… almost normal. In a terrifying, my-mother-the-assassin kind of way.” She paused. “It felt like family. The messy, complicated, armed-to-the-teeth kind I actually understand.”
He tightened his arm around her. “You’ve got the Rossi messy, complicated kind, too. For what it’s worth.”
“I know.” She was silent for a moment. “I got a letter today, too. From a Florentine banker’s daughter. No polish. Just truth.”
Damien’s heart skipped. He didn’t ask what it said. He just waited.
“It was a good start,” Beth whispered finally.
That was all. It was enough.
She slept then, truly slept, her body going heavy and pliant against his. Damien lay awake, listening to her breathe, one hand stroking her hair. The blueprints were just paper. This—the weight of her trust, the quiet surrender of her exhaustion, the way she’d crossed half a country to seek shelter in him—this was the architecture that mattered.
He pressed his lips to her forehead. Outside, the fortress stood guard, all marble and menace. In here, they were just a man and his wife, building something new from the rubble of everything they’d broken. And for tonight, it was more than enough.