Chapter 13: Skin and Saltwater
The sand was so white it hurt to look at, blazing under a sun that felt closer here, more vicious. It was sugar-fine and hot, instantly scalding the soles of Ela’s feet as she stepped from the villa’s shaded terrace. She gasped, hopping from one foot to the other, the world a stunning overdose of turquoise sea and blinding sky.
Marco’s laughter was low and close behind her. His hands circled her waist before she could adjust, pulling her back against the solid, familiar heat of his chest. His skin was already warm from the sun.
“Mi promesa, princesa,” he murmured, his lips brushing the shell of her ear. A shiver, entirely separate from the heat, raced down her spine. “No clothes means no clothes.”
His voice held that particular blend of command and velvet that turned her bones to liquid. The ocean breeze tugged at the hem of her simple yellow sundress, fluttering the thin cotton against her thighs. She felt his hands tighten, possessive, on the fabric.
She twisted in his grasp, just enough to see his face. His eyes were shaded by aviators, but his smile was all wicked promise. The fatigue from the city was gone, burned away by the island air, replaced by a predatory ease.
“You’ll have to catch me first,” she breathed, and before he could tighten his grip, she ducked, slipping free.
She took off running toward the water, the hot sand shifting under her feet. The laughter that burst from her was pure, unburdened, a sound she hadn’t heard from herself in years. She heard his surprised curse, then the pound of his feet chasing her.
Her fingers fumbled with the tie at her neck. She got it loose, shrugged the straps down her arms, and let the dress fly free. It caught the wind for a moment, a yellow flag, before settling on the sand like a fallen petal. She didn’t look back.
The water was a shock—cool, then instantly perfect. She plunged into a wave, letting it lift her, the salt stinging her eyes and filling her mouth. She surfaced, pushing her soaked hair back, gasping for air and laughing again.
He was standing waist-deep a few feet away, having given up the chase. He’d pulled his shirt off, tossed somewhere behind him. He just watched her, his expression unreadable behind the glasses. The water lapped at the hard lines of his stomach.
“Cheating,” he called out over the rush of the waves.
“Strategy!” she shouted back, floating on her back. The sun was a dazzling white coin above her. She closed her eyes, letting the water hold her. For a minute, there was no Christian, no lawyers, no blood under fingernails. There was only the float and the heat and the sound of his breathing getting closer.
His shadow fell over her. She opened her eyes. He was there, looking down, water dripping from his chin.
“You’re supposed to be running,” he said.
“I got tired.”
“Liar.” He reached down, his hands sliding under her back, and lifted her as if she weighed nothing. She wrapped her legs around his waist, her arms around his neck, her skin slick against his. He carried her back toward the shore until the water was just at his thighs, then he stopped, holding her there. “You wanted me to catch you.”
She rested her forehead against his. “Maybe.”
He kissed her. It was slow and deep, tasting of salt and the promise of the day ahead. His hands were firm on her back, anchoring her in the sway of the ocean. When he pulled back, he nudged his glasses up onto his head. His eyes were the warm brown of old whiskey here, in the light.
“No shadows,” he said quietly, as if confirming it for himself.
“Not here,” she agreed.
They stayed like that for a long time, wrapped together in the water, saying nothing. The only sounds were the waves and the distant cry of a gull. The villa, a low-slung masterpiece of white stone and glass, watched them from the cliff, empty and waiting.
Later, they lay on oversized loungers under a thatched palapa, the shade a merciful relief. Ela was on her stomach, the damp towel beneath her, tracing the patterns in the teak wood. Marco sat on the edge of his chair, smoking a cigarette, looking out at the sea. A bottle of sparkling water sweated between them.
“I used to hate the beach,” he said, his voice conversational, almost idle.
She turned her head to look at him. “Why?”
“Too open. Too exposed. You can’t control the sightlines. Anyone could be out there.” He gestured with his chin toward the endless horizon. “My father would have security posted in the tree line, in boats offshore. It felt like a prison with a better view.”
“And now?”
He took a drag, exhaling slowly. “Now I look at it, and I just see… water. And you, with sand in your hair.” He flicked ash into a shell he was using as an ashtray. “Perspective shifts.”
She rolled onto her side, propping her head on her hand. The movement made her necklace—a simple gold chain—shift against her skin. “What was your mother like?”
He was silent for so long she thought he hadn’t heard her, or that she’d crossed a line. Then he spoke, his voice softer.
“She was like sunlight on water. Beautiful, constantly moving. You could never quite hold her. She loved music. She’d play the guitar on this very terrace.” He nodded toward the villa. “Flamenco, mostly. It sounded like… heartbreak and fury all at once. My father hated it. He said it was common.”
Ela tried to picture a young Marco, listening to his mother play, surrounded by hidden guards. “Do you play?”
“I tried. After she died. I wanted to keep the sound. But my hands…” He held one up, flexing the fingers. They were long, elegant, but they were fighter’s hands, builder’s hands. “They’re not made for that. They’re made for other things.”
The memory of those hands, stained and cleaning a gun just yesterday, flashed in her mind. She pushed the thought away. Here, they were just hands. They had carried her from the water.
“I’m glad you brought me here,” she said.
He stubbed out his cigarette and lay back on his lounger, closing his eyes against the dappled sun coming through the thatch. “So am I.”
The peace was so complete it felt like a tangible thing, another element in the air. She must have dozed off, because the next thing she knew, the angle of the sun had changed, painting the sea in deeper blues and golds. Marco’s hand was on her back, drawing slow, absent circles on her skin.
“Hungry?” he asked.
“Starving.”
They ate on the terrace—simple, perfect food: grilled fish, tomatoes that burst with flavor, bread still warm from the oven. He poured her a glass of local white wine. They talked about nothing. The taste of the wine, the color of the sunset, a stupid movie they’d both seen. It was breathtakingly normal.
As dusk bled into indigo night, the air cooled. Marco built a fire in the outdoor pit. The flames carved his face into angles of light and shadow. He handed her a sweater he’d brought out, one of his, soft and oversized. She pulled it on, enveloped in his scent.
She was staring into the fire when she felt his gaze. She looked over.
“What?” she asked.
“I keep thinking,” he said, swirling the whiskey in his glass, “that you’ll vanish. That I’ll wake up and this will have been a very elaborate, very cruel dream.”
The raw honesty of it stole her breath. “I’m not going anywhere.”
“You said that before.” The words weren’t an accusation. Just a fact. “The last time we were… close. You gave me everything. And then you were gone by morning.”
She remembered. The fear, suffocating and cold, that had crept in after the heat of their lovemaking. The terror that this beautiful, dangerous boy was just another cage, prettier than her parents’ but a cage all the same. So she’d run, back to a world she thought she could control.
“I was a child,” she whispered. “And I was scared.”
“Of me.”
“Of what you represented. Of the… finality of it.” She drew her knees up, wrapping the sweater tighter. “Choosing you felt like choosing a life sentence. I wanted to believe I had other options.”
“And now?”
She looked at him across the fire. The man, not the boy. The man who killed for her, who plotted for her, who remembered how she took her coffee and brought her to a place with no shadows just so she could breathe.
“Now I know the options were illusions.” Her voice was steady. “Christian was the cage. A gilded one, but a cage. You… you’re the storm outside. Terrifying, uncontrollable. But free.”
He put his glass down slowly. The fire crackled, sending a shower of sparks toward the star-smeared sky. He came over to her lounger, easing down beside her. He didn’t touch her, just looked at her face, studying it as if memorizing a map.
“Stay this time,” he said, the words a low plea in the dark.
She reached out, taking his hand. She brought it to her lips, kissing the knuckles, the place where the blood had been. “I’m staying.”
He pulled her into him then, his mouth finding hers with a hunger that had nothing to do with sex and everything to do with confirmation. The fire warmed one side of her body; he warmed the other. The taste of whiskey and ocean and him filled her senses.
Later, much later, they left the dying fire and walked back inside. The villa was cool and silent. In the master bedroom, the sea-facing wall was all glass, the moon painting a silver road across the water.
He stood behind her, his arms around her, both of them looking out. His chin rested on top of her head.
“Tomorrow,” he said, “we do nothing. Absolutely nothing.”
She leaned back into him, a perfect fit. “I think I remember how to do nothing.”
He laughed softly into her hair. “We’ll relearn it together.”
As they stood there, a movement on the periphery of the beach, near the tree line, caught her eye—a brief, dark flicker, then gone. Probably an animal, a trick of the moonlight on the palms.
But a cold thread, fine as spider silk, slipped down her spine. She dismissed it, burying her face against his chest, inhaling the safe, familiar scent of his skin. It was nothing. Here, there were no shadows.
Outside, the wind shifted, carrying the faint, fading smell of cigar smoke down from the cliffs.
Marco’s body went still against hers. His chin lifted from her head. He’d smelled it too.
“Stay here,” he said, his voice dropping into a register she recognized—cool, flat, all business. The man from the penthouse with blood under his nails was back, just beneath the skin.
He detached himself and moved to the glass wall, his silhouette a dark cut-out against the moonlit sea. He peered into the darkness, his head tilted, listening. The wind rustled the palms again, but the cigar scent was gone, swallowed by salt and night-blooming jasmine.
“Probably nothing,” he muttered, more to himself than to her. “A neighbor. A fisherman.”
But he didn’t relax. She saw his shoulders stay taut, his hand unconsciously drift to where a weapon would normally sit on his hip. He was unarmed here. He’d promised her a place with no shadows.
“You’re worrying,” she said, joining him at the glass. She pressed her side against his arm, a solid anchor.
“I’m assessing.” He finally looked down at her, the professional mask softening only at the edges. “It’s what I do. This is my island, Ela. No one is on that beach without my knowing.”
“Except us.”
A faint smile touched his lips. “Except us.” He turned from the window, pulling her with him away from the view. “And we have better things to do than stare at empty sand.”
His kiss then was different from the one by the fire. It was deliberate, a reclamation. His hands framed her face, thumbs stroking her cheekbones. The cool tension from a moment ago began to melt, replaced by a different, warmer kind of urgency.
He walked her backward toward the bed, his mouth leaving hers only to trail along her jaw, her throat. The oversized sweater she wore was his, and he peeled it off her shoulders with a possessive slowness that made her breath catch.
Later, the moon was higher, a sharp silver coin in the sky. The room was quiet except for their slowing breaths and the distant, rhythmic sigh of the waves. She lay with her head on his chest, her leg hooked over his, her fingers tracing idle paths through the fine hair on his stomach.
His arm was around her, his hand a heavy, warm weight on the small of her back. He was playing with a strand of her hair.
“You’re thinking about the cigar,” she said, her voice soft in the dark.
His chest rose and fell beneath her cheek. “I’m thinking about this. How your leg feels over mine. How your hair smells like the sea now.”
She lifted her head to look at him. His eyes were open, watching the ceiling. “Liar.”
He smiled, a quick, genuine flash. “Okay. For a second, I thought about the cigar. Then I thought about the way you just said my name. And I decided the cigar wasn’t important.”
She settled back down, nestling into him. She dragged her fingertips lightly up the long line of his spine, feeling the muscles shift under his skin. He made a low, pleased sound in his chest.
“I like that,” he said.
“What?”
“Your hands there. On my back. It’s… grounding.” He swallowed, his next words coming quieter. “I like the weight of your thighs around my waist, too. Makes me feel held. Anchored.”
She shifted, rising up on one elbow to look down at him. She kissed the center of his chest, just over his heart. His skin was warm and tasted faintly of salt. “I like your weight on me. That solidness. And your hand on my throat, but not squeezing. Just… there.”
He turned his head to look at her. In the dim light, his eyes were dark pools, unreadable and deep. “It’s a dangerous thing to like.”
“I know.” She kissed his chest again, then rested her chin where her lips had been. “You’re a dangerous thing to like. But you’re gentle with me. That’s the difference.”
He was silent for a long moment. His hand came up to cradle the back of her head, his fingers threading through her hair. “I have to be,” he said finally, the words rough. “With everything else… what I have to be out there… this has to be soft. You have to be soft. Or I’ll lose the plot entirely.”
She understood. In a world of hard edges and harder choices, she was the only place he allowed himself to be pliant. The responsibility of it was terrifying. The privilege of it was immense.
She began to say something else, but a new sound cut through the night—a low, mechanical drone, distant but growing.
Marco sat up in bed, swift and silent. Ela froze beside him.
It wasn’t the putter of a fishing boat. It was the distinct, throttled hum of an aircraft engine. And it was getting closer.
He was out of bed in one fluid motion, a phantom against the moonlit glass. He stared out, his body rigid. The drone grew louder, morphing into a roar that vibrated the windows.
Searchlights suddenly split the darkness, twin beams stabbing down from the sky and sweeping across the water, painting the white sand in stark, blinding stripes.
“Ela.” His voice was a crack of ice. “Get dressed. Now.”
The beams swept inward, searching, until they locked onto the villa. The light flooded the bedroom, bleaching everything in a harsh, clinical white. The plane was coming in low, preparing to land on the long, flat stretch of beach where they had run just hours before.
He turned from the window. In the garish light, his face was all sharp planes and grim determination. The vacation was over.
“It seems,” he said, pulling on his jeans, his movements efficient and deadly calm, “our message wasn’t received.”