Chapter 1: Carnations and Gunpowder
Consciousness returned in a slow, sick wave.
First, the smell. Damp earth. Crushed greenery. The cloying sweetness of ruined roses undercut by something sharper, metallic, that sat at the back of her throat. Then, the cold. A deep, seeping chill that started at her spine and radiated outwards, telling her she was lying on the concrete path, not in her bed.
Poppy Sinclair opened her eyes.
Her world was jagged glass and looming, broken shapes. The great panes of her greenhouse were shattered, hanging like jagged teeth in their frames. A single bulb swung on its cord, casting a dizzying pendulum of sickly yellow light over the carnage. Her beloved orchids were strewn across the benches, pots shattered. A shelf of succulents had been swept clean, their fleshy leaves trampled into the soil.
Her head throbbed, a deep, insistent drumming behind her left temple. She tried to move, and a wave of nausea rolled through her. Something wet and sticky matted her copper curls against her neck. Blood. Her blood.
A shadow moved, blocking the swinging light.
Elias.
He was crouched over her, his posture not one of concern but of containment, a shield between her and the rest of the ruined room. The usual lazy calm she associated with him was gone. Every line of him was wire-tight, humming with a lethal energy she had never seen. His eyes, usually so still and watchful, darted from her face to the shadows and back, wild and unfamiliar.
“Don’t move,” he said, his voice low, stripped of all its usual easy warmth. It was flat. A command.
“Elias?” Her own voice was a cracked whisper. “What… what happened? A storm?”
He didn’t answer. His right hand came up, and the swinging light glinted dully off the metal he held. It was a pistol, sleek and ugly, with a long, cylindrical attachment on the end she somehow knew was a silencer. It was still warm; she could see a faint wisp of vapor or smoke curling from its tip.
Her gaze, dragging against the pain in her skull, followed the direction the barrel had just been pointing.
A man. A stranger in dark clothes, sprawled like a discarded rag doll by the greenhouse door. His eyes were open, staring at the shattered glass ceiling. There was a dark, blooming stain on his chest.
Poppy’s breath hitched, a tiny, trapped sound.
Elias saw her see. A muscle jumped in his jaw. He lowered the gun, placing it carefully on the ground beside him, as if it were something fragile. Then his hands, those capable hands that had helped her repot ferns and open stubborn jam jars, came to her face. They were trembling. She’d never seen him tremble.
“Poppy.” Her name was a rough exhale.
He didn’t check her wounds. He didn’t ask if she was okay. He simply bent his head until his forehead rested against hers, his eyes squeezing shut. His skin was cold, clammy. He smelled of cordite and night air and the coppery tang of blood.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered, the words vibrating into her skin. “I am so, so sorry. This is my fault. I brought this to your door.”
“What are you talking about?” she managed, confusion cutting through the fog of pain. “Who is that? Elias, what did you do?”
He leaned back, just enough to look at her. The wildness was still there, but it was being forced down, submerged beneath a wave of something worse: a gut-deep agony. “His name doesn’t matter. He worked for a man named Hector. They were coming for me. They found you instead.”
“For you? Why? What did you do?” The questions were automatic, logical. Her friend was a security consultant. He traveled. He was vague about his work. He was calm, steady Elias.
He let out a short, hollow breath that wasn’t a laugh. “What did I do?” His scarred knuckle brushed a curl from her bloody forehead, a gesture so tender it clashed violently with the scene around them. “For ten years, Poppy, I’ve kept you in the light. In this beautiful, green world you built. And I have lived in the dark so the things there wouldn’t touch you.”
He glanced at the dead man by the door, his gaze clinical for a split second before returning to her, full of torment. “Tonight, the dark followed me home. To you.”
The pieces didn’t fit. Her Elias, her best friend who hated action movies and made terrible coffee and remembered her mother’s birthday every year, talking about light and dark. Holding a gun. With a dead man at his feet.
“You’re not making sense,” she said, pushing against his chest weakly. The movement sent a fresh spike of pain through her head. “You install security systems.”
“I dismantle cartels,” he corrected, his voice quiet, final. “I find people they’ve taken. And sometimes, to do that, I have to… remove obstacles. Hector is an obstacle who figured out my one weakness.”
His eyes held hers. The truth was there, absolute and horrifying.
“Me,” Poppy breathed.
He nodded, just once. “I should have stayed away years ago. The first time I realized… the first time I knew what you were becoming to me. I should have walked and never looked back. It would have been the kindest thing.” He spoke with a brutal certainty that stole the air from her lungs. “Instead, I was selfish. I wanted the light. I wanted your voice on the phone. I wanted to see your stupid, beautiful flowers. And I told myself I could keep the worlds separate.”
The swinging bulb flickered, casting his face into stark, shifting relief. The gentle friend was gone, shed like a skin. What remained was someone older, harder, carved from a different material entirely. A man who looked at death and understood its mechanics.
“Are you… are you going to kill me?” The question left her in a child’s whisper, born of pure, instinctual fear.
His reaction was instantaneous. A flinch so profound it was like she’d struck him. His hands tightened on her face, not to hurt, but as if to anchor her to the earth. “Poppy. No. Never. Look at me.” He waited until her swimming vision focused on his eyes. “The only thing I will ever kill for you is the thing that tries to hurt you. Do you understand that? It’s the only truth that matters now.”
Sirens sounded in the distance, faint but growing. His head snapped up, tracking the sound. The predator listening. The moment of raw confession snapped shut.
“We have to go. Now.” He stood in one fluid motion, all lethal efficiency, and scooped her up from the cold ground. She cried out at the movement, the world tilting.
“The police are coming,” she gasped. “We should wait—”
“The first responders won’t be police,” he said, striding over the broken glass and ruined plants, stepping around the body without a second glance. He shouldered open the mangled greenhouse door into the cool night. “Hector sends them in waves. The first to do the job. The second to clean up the mess. We are currently the mess.”
He carried her across the dew-soaked grass toward his car, an anonymous dark sedan parked under the oak tree. Not his usual Jeep. He’d been driving this. He’d been prepared.
He bundled her into the passenger seat, his movements swift but careful as he fastened her seatbelt. From the back seat, he grabbed a plain gray hoodie and pressed it against the bleeding wound on her head. “Hold this. Keep pressure.”
“My plants,” she said stupidly, looking back at the glowing, broken jewel of her greenhouse.
“I’ll build you another,” he said, sliding into the driver’s seat. The engine purred to life. “I’ll build you ten. But I have to keep you alive first.”
He reversed down her long driveway, lights off, navigating by moonlight. At the road, he paused, scanning in both directions. The sirens were louder now, closing in. He turned away from them, toward the back roads leading to the mountains.
Poppy held the hoodie to her head, the soft fabric absorbing her blood. She watched his profile in the dashboard glow. The man she knew was gone. This stranger’s hands were steady on the wheel now, his gaze fixed on the dark ribbon of asphalt. The quiet was no longer comfortable. It was dense, loaded with everything unsaid, with the image of that still body on her greenhouse floor.
After ten miles of silence, broken only by the hum of tires, she spoke, her voice small in the dark cabin.
“You loved me? All this time?”
His grip on the wheel tightened until the leather creaked. He didn’t look at her.
“Yeah,” he said, the word raw. “All this time.”
She stared out at the rushing dark, the familiar world rendered strange and threatening. The ache in her head was nothing compared to the fissure cracking through the foundation of her life. She reached into the pocket of her dirt-streaked cardigan, her fingers finding the familiar shape of her lucky thing—a smooth, worry-worn river stone.
Next to it, her fingers brushed something else. Cold. Cylindrical. Metallic.
She pulled it out.
It was a spent brass bullet casing, still faintly warm.
It must have fallen from his clothes when he carried her. She closed her fist around it, the sharp edges biting into her palm, a tiny, hard truth she could not un-hold. In her other hand, the smooth stone felt like a relic from a past that had ended an hour ago, when the glass first broke.
In her other hand, the smooth stone felt like a relic from a past that had ended an hour ago, when the glass first broke.
The car ate up the dark miles. Poppy’s mind, usually so orderly—cataloging soil pH and pollination schedules—spun in useless, terrified circles. She stared at the bullet casing in her palm. Its warmth had faded. It was just a small, brass hollow now, a tiny manufactured void.
“Where are we going?” Her voice sounded strange to her, detached.
“Somewhere safe.” Elias’s eyes flicked to the rearview mirror again. It was a constant, rhythmic tic. Scan the road, scan the mirrors, scan her. “A place I set up a long time ago. Just in case.”
“You have a just in case place.” It wasn’t a question.
“I have several.” He downshifted as the road began to climb into the foothills. “I didn’t want to need this one.”
The casual admission of a whole hidden life, one with contingency plans and safe houses, made her stomach clench. She thought of the easy evenings on her porch, him drinking a beer while she deadheaded petunias. Had he been thinking about escape routes then? Had he been assessing the sightlines?
“Who’s Hector?” she asked.
A muscle in his jaw tightened. “A businessman. His business is people. Mostly women and children. He moves them across borders like cargo. Very profitable, low overhead if you don’t mind the screaming.” The clinical, brutal description was so at odds with his usual gentle teasing that she felt another piece of her old reality slough away. “My team intercepted a major shipment of his six months ago. Freed twenty-seven people. Cost him about five million dollars and a key corridor. He’s been… irate.”
“And he found you through me.”
“He found a pattern. Ten years of my financials, phone records, satellite time. A good analyst can find a ghost in the data if they look hard enough. They found a recurring quiet spot. A place I always returned to. A clean, green place with no connection to the trade.” He finally looked at her, a quick, searing glance. “You. They were watching your greenhouse for a week.”
The nausea returned, sour and hot. A week. Strangers watching her water the geraniums, talking to the ferns, humming off-key. She’d felt safe.
“The man tonight…”
“Was supposed to grab you. Use you to pull me into the open. Standard leverage.” His knuckles were white on the steering wheel. “He won’t be reporting in.”
She remembered the wildness in Elias’s eyes when she’d first seen him crouched over her. It hadn’t been fear. It had been fury. A pure, unadulterated rage that had already been spent. She looked at the casing again.
“Did you…” She couldn’t finish.
“Yes.” No hesitation. No euphemism.
Silence flooded the car again, thick and suffocating. The word hung between them. Yes. He had killed a man. In her greenhouse. Among the scattered petals of her Peace roses.
She let her head fall back against the seat, the pressure of the hoodie a dull throb. “I don’t know you at all.”
He didn’t argue. “The person you know is real. He’s just… a part. The best part. The only part worth saving.” He cleared his throat, the sound rough. “You’re shivering.”
She was. A deep, bone-level tremor that had nothing to do with the cool night air leaking through the vents. He reached across the console with his right hand, not taking his eyes from the road, and turned up the heat. His sleeve rode up slightly, revealing the stark black lines of a tattoo on his forearm she’d never seen—intricate, geometric, like a technical schematic or a cage.
He saw her looking and adjusted his sleeve down.
“What is that?” she asked.
“Nothing.”
“It’s not nothing. Is it a… gang tattoo?”
A short, humorless burst of air escaped him. “No. It’s a reminder. Of the first one I lost.” His voice went quiet. “A girl. Fourteen. Her name was Lidy. We were too slow.”
The grief in his voice was absolute. It was older than the grief for her shattered greenhouse, deeper than the panic of the night. It was a foundational stone of who he had become. This was the dark he’d spoken of. Not some abstract concept. A fourteen-year-old girl named Lidy.
Poppy closed her eyes. The trembling worsened. She felt the two objects in her hands, the cold brass and the smooth stone, digging into her flesh. One was a token of a life spent nurturing living things. The other was the byproduct of ending one.
The car slowed, then turned onto a gravel track so hidden by overgrowth she hadn’t seen it. Branches scraped the sides. They climbed for another five minutes before the trees opened into a small clearing. A modest, rustic cabin sat there, dark and silent against the towering pines.
“Home sweet safe house,” he muttered, killing the engine.
The sudden quiet was deafening. Just the ticking of the cooling engine and the distant whisper of the wind in the trees. No sirens. No city hum. It felt like the edge of the world.
Elias was out of the car in an instant, circling to her door. He opened it and helped her out. She stumbled, her legs rubbery. He caught her, his arm around her waist, and for a moment they just stood there in the clearing, under a vast blanket of stars he’d always said he loved looking at with her.
He looked down at her face, pale in the starlight, at the dark matted blood in her hair. His expression fractured, the hardened operative gone, leaving only a man gutted by his own failure to protect what he loved. His gaze dropped to her hands, still clenched in front of her.
HE SEES THE BULLET.
His eyes fix on the small, dull glint of brass peeking between her fingers. He goes very, very still. All the breath seems to leave him. That one spent cartridge, held in her grimy, gardener’s hand, seems to condemn him more than the body back in the greenhouse ever could. It is the perfect, damning proof. This is the residue of his world, the world he vowed would never touch her, now literally in her grasp.
He doesn’t speak. He just stares, his own guilt reflected back at him in that tiny metal shell.
He just stares, his own guilt reflected back at him in that tiny metal shell.
“Give that to me,” he says, his voice strained. He holds out his hand.
She doesn’t move. She just looks from the casing to his face, her expression unreadable in the dark.
A twig snaps in the tree line.
Elias’s head whipped toward the sound, every muscle locking. The guilt vanished, replaced by instant, predatory focus. He shoved Poppy behind him, against the car, his body a solid wall between her and the woods.
“Get in the cabin. Now. Don’t turn on lights. The key is under the stone frog by the step.” The words were a barely audible, urgent stream. He didn’t wait to see if she obeyed. He was already moving, melting into the shadow of the car.
Poppy stumbled toward the dark shape of the cabin, her heart a frantic drum against her ribs. The stone frog was cold and heavy. The key scraped in the lock. She slipped inside, into absolute blackness that smelled of pine sol and dust. She leaned against the closed door, her ear pressed to the wood, listening.
Silence.
Then, a muffled curse. A grunt of pain that wasn’t Elias’s. The sound of a heavy impact, meaty and sickening. Another. A choked gurgle.
She squeezed her eyes shut, the brass casing biting into her palm.
The door handle turned. She scrambled back. It was Elias, a darker shadow against the night. He stepped inside, closed the door, and locked it. In the slit of starlight from a window, she saw him wipe his knuckles across his jeans. They were dark with wetness.
“Two of them,” he breathed, his chest rising and falling rapidly. “Scouts. They were already here.” He crossed to the window, peered out, then pulled a heavy curtain shut with a sharp rasp. The room plunged into total darkness. “They won’t be calling it in.”
The adrenaline was a chemical burn in his veins. He could taste it, coppery and sharp, at the back of his tongue. It vibrated in his hands, in his teeth. Ten years of careful distance, obliterated in one night. Ten years of watching her laugh from across a room, of hands carefully kept to himself, of burying every violent, possessive impulse so deep he almost believed they were gone. Gone. It was a joke. They were right here, screaming in him, finally unleashed. The fear for her life had detonated the last of his control. The sight of her holding that casing, the proof of his corruption, had shattered it. The fight outside, brief and brutal, had lit the fuse.
He could hear her breathing in the dark, shallow and fast. He could smell her fear, and under it, the familiar scent of her—soil and sage and something purely Poppy.
“Elias?” Her voice was so small.
He didn’t answer. He moved.
In the absolute black, his presence was a wave of heat and intention. She gasped as his hands found her shoulders, pinning her to the wall beside the door. She felt the solid weight of him press against her, felt the rapid, hammering beat of his heart against her own.
“You’re safe,” he growled, the words hot against her temple. “You’re safe. I’ve got you.”
But it wasn’t a comfort. It was a claim.
His mouth crashed down on hers.
It wasn’t a kiss. It was a takeover. A decade of starving poured into a single, devastating point of contact. His lips were hard, demanding, stealing her breath and her thoughts. He tasted of violence and night air. She froze for a second, shock stiffening her spine. Then a whimper broke from her throat, a sound of pure, overwhelmed confusion, and her hands came up, not to push him away, but to clutch at the front of his shirt.
He made a low sound in his chest, almost a snarl, and deepened the kiss, his tongue forcing its way into her mouth. He explored her with a rough, desperate intensity, as if mapping her, memorizing her. One hand slid from her shoulder into the wild tangle of her hair, curling tightly, tilting her head back to give him better access. The other hand dropped, skated down her side, over the curve of her hip, and gripped her thigh, hiking her leg up around his waist. The sudden, intimate contact, the solid ridge of his erection pressing against the seam of her jeans, shocked a moan from her.
He broke the kiss, his breath ragged. “Tell me to stop.” The words were guttural, raw. He didn’t move an inch. His forehead rested against hers. “You have to say it. Or I can’t.”
Her mind was white noise. The world had ended hours ago. There was only this dark cabin, the scent of his sweat, the hard planes of his body, and a hollow, aching need that was swallowing the terror whole. She didn’t recognize this man. But her body did. It was arching into him, seeking the heat.
She didn’t say it.
A shudder ripped through him. The last thread of his restraint snapped.
He spun her around, away from the wall. In three strides, he found the couch in the dark, a worn lump of furniture. He sat, pulling her down so she straddled his lap. His hands were everywhere, rough and urgent, pushing her cardigan off her shoulders, yanking her simple cotton t-shirt up and over her head. The cool air pebbled her skin. His mouth was on her neck, sucking a dark mark into the skin over her pounding pulse, his teeth scraping. She cried out, her fingers digging into the short hair at the back of his head.
“Elias, please—”
“Please what?” He bit the soft curve of her shoulder, his hands cupping her breasts through her plain lace bra, his thumbs scraping over her nipples. She jerked in his lap, a bolt of pure sensation shooting straight to her core.
“I don’t… I can’t think.”
“Don’t think.” He unclasped her bra with a single, practiced flick. “Just feel.”
He took one tight peak into his mouth, sucking hard, his tongue lashing it. She nearly screamed, her back bowing. The pleasure was brutal, direct, cutting through the shock and the headache and the grief. It felt like the only real thing left. His hands dragged her jeans and panties down her hips, just enough. He shifted beneath her, his own pants already undone, and then he was there, the thick, blunt head of his cock pressing against her soaked, aching entrance.
He didn’t enter her. Not yet.
He looked up at her, his face a stark mask of need in the faint light bleeding around the curtain. “Look at me.”
She looked. His eyes were black, endless.
“This is me,” he breathed, surging up to claim her mouth again in a searing kiss. “This is what I wanted. Every goddamn day.” On the last word, he drove up into her, filling her in one relentless, stretching thrust.
She shattered. A ragged scream tore from her throat as her body clenched around him, a shockwave of an orgasm ripping through her without warning, without build-up. The overload of fear, adrenaline, and years of sublimated desire broke her open. He swallowed her cry, holding her hips hard, keeping her impaled as she convulsed around him.
“Fuck,” he groaned against her lips, his own control fraying at the edges. “So fucking perfect. Mine.”
He began to move. His thrusts were hard, deep, and perfectly measured. Each one dragged a broken sound from her throat. He held her close, one arm banded around her back, the other hand fisted in her hair, controlling the pace, the angle. She was limp in his arms, boneless, utterly spent and yet sensitized to the point of madness. Every stroke stoked a new, rising heat.
“You feel that?” he growled, his voice ragged. “You feel how much I need this? How much I need you?”
She could only nod, her face buried in his neck.
He stood then, lifting her with him, her legs wrapping around his waist. He carried her to the floor, laying her back on the rough wool of an area rug. He never slipped out of her. He covered her, bracing his weight on his arms, and drove into her again, his pace turning brutal, frantic. The floor was hard beneath her back. The cabin was dark. The bodies outside were cooling. And he was fucking her like it was the last act on earth, like he was trying to brand himself inside her, to carve out a space where the horror couldn’t reach.
His rhythm faltered. A hard, desperate groan was torn from his chest. He pulsed deep within her, his entire body going rigid above hers before collapsing, his weight crushing her into the floor, his face buried in the curve of her neck. His breath was hot and fast against her skin.
For a long moment, there was only the sound of their breathing, syncing, slowing.
Then, he moved again.
He kissed his way down her trembling body—her collarbone, the valley between her breasts, her quivering stomach. He pushed her thighs apart, his hands firm, and buried his face between her legs.
The first swipe of his tongue made her jolt. It was too much. She was raw, oversensitive, her nerves scraped bare. “Elias… no, I can’t…”
He didn’t listen. He was insatiable. The adrenaline had found a new channel. He licked into her with a focused, relentless hunger, lapping up the evidence of their joining, of her pleasure, of his release. He circled her clit with rough, deliberate strokes, then sucked it firmly into his mouth. Her protests became choked sobs. Her hands fisted in his hair, not to pull him away, but to hold on as another orgasm, vast and terrifying, began to gather deep in her belly.
He was murmuring against her flesh, filthy, beautiful words. “That’s it. Come for me again. Let go. I’ve got you. Always.”
The coil tightened, unbearably. The world dissolved into pure sensation—the rasp of his stubble on her inner thighs, the mastery of his tongue, the heavy, possessive weight of his hands holding her open. It was an assault on her senses, a claiming more profound than the sex. He was consuming her, and she was letting him. The darkness, the danger, the blood—it all funneled into this single, shattering point of pleasure-pain.
Her climax hit like a silent explosion. It tore through her without a sound, a seismic wave that emptied her lungs and turned her vision to static. Her body arched off the floor, rigid, suspended in endless, blinding release.
He didn’t stop. He rode it out with her, gentling his tongue but not relenting, drawing every last pulse and shudder from her until the sensations tipped over from pleasure into a kind of merciful overload. The tension finally, completely, left her body. A deep, thick blackness, warmer and safer than the one outside, rose up from the base of her skull. It pulled her down.
Her grip in his hair loosened. Her legs fell open, boneless, against his shoulders. The last thing she was aware of was the heat of his mouth, still pressed against her, as the world faded into a silent, velvet nothing.
She fell unconscious.