Chapter 60 BREAKING POINT
Ava's POV
Dominic lost the tail.
I don't know exactly what he did because I was holding onto the door handle with both hands and not looking, but whatever it was involved two sharp turns and a road that I was fairly certain wasn't a road and then silence behind us and Adrian saying quietly from the back seat, "they're gone," and Dominic's hands relaxing on the wheel by maybe five percent.
We got to the second safe house an hour outside the city and it was nothing like the underground space in London, just a farmhouse at the end of a long private road, dark and quiet and old, and Elias was already there when we arrived which meant he'd taken a different route and made better time and I didn't ask how.
I slept for a few hours and woke up before everyone else and lay on my back in the small bedroom staring at the ceiling and felt the walls closing in.
That was the only way I could describe it, not literally, just everything pressing in at once, my father downstairs, Dominic asleep beside me, the mark on my shoulder that wouldn't stop pulsing, the hunters who wanted me dead, my mother sick in a hospital in New York, the bond advancing whether I agreed to it or not, all of it sitting on my chest at once and not moving.
I got up carefully so I didn't wake Dominic and I got dressed and I went downstairs and past my father who was asleep on the couch with his arm over his face and I went out the front door and started walking.
The road was dark and the air was cold and I just walked, no direction, no plan, just moving because staying still felt impossible and the space around me helped, the dark fields on both sides and the sky overhead and nothing requiring anything from me for five minutes.
I walked for maybe twenty minutes before I saw the lights.
There was a place about a half mile down the road, music coming from it, cars outside, a pub or a club of some kind, and I stood on the road and looked at it and thought about everything waiting for me back at the farmhouse and kept walking toward the lights.
Inside it was dark and loud and full of people who had no idea what a mark was or what a bond meant or what hunters were, just people drinking and dancing and existing without the weight of any of it, and I stood just inside the door and breathed it in and felt something in my chest loosen slightly just from being in a room where nobody knew me.
I got a drink and stood near the bar and let the music be loud around me and tried to think about nothing and almost managed it.
A man came to stand beside me, not pushy, just there, and he was ordinary and uncomplicated and when he smiled at me I smiled back because it cost nothing and felt normal and I had not felt normal in weeks.
We danced and it was easy and meaningless and I needed easy and meaningless so badly I nearly cried about it, just moving in the dark with the music loud and nobody needing anything from me and the mark quiet for once, not pulsing, not burning, just still.
And then it wasn't still anymore.
The moment his hands moved to my waist properly the mark started burning, not warm the way it did near Dominic, sharp and insistent, and I ignored it and kept dancing and it got worse, spreading out from my shoulder down my arm and up my neck and I pressed my hand over it and the man noticed and said something I couldn't hear over the music and I shook my head.
I let him lead me to a quieter corner and he was saying something about getting another drink and his hand was on my jaw tipping my face up and I let him kiss me and the mark burned so hot I made a sound against his mouth that had nothing to do with wanting him.
He pulled back and looked at me and said, "you okay?" and I said yes even though I wasn't and then I said actually no and stepped back and his face did something confused and I turned to go and walked straight into a chest.
I didn't need to look up to know it was Dominic, I felt him before I saw him, that pull that the mark made ten times stronger, and when I did look up his eyes were gold and his face was completely still in the way that meant he was working very hard at not reacting.
The man behind me said something and Dominic looked at him once and the man found somewhere else to be very quickly.
"I told you not to leave the house," Dominic said, not loudly, which was somehow worse.
"You were asleep," I said.
"I woke up," he said, "Ava, you can't just—"
"I needed air," I said, and my voice cracked on it, just slightly, and something in his face changed immediately, the anger dropping away and something else coming through underneath.
"Hey," he said, quieter now, his hand coming up to my face, "hey, look at me."
I looked at him and the crack in my voice got wider and I hated it.
"I'm so tired," I said, "I'm tired of being scared and I'm tired of the mark and I'm tired of my father and I just wanted one hour of not being any of this and I know that was stupid but I needed it."
He looked at me for a long moment and then he pulled me into him and I went and pressed my face against his chest and he held me and didn't say anything and the music was still going around us and nobody paid any attention to two people standing still in the middle of it.
"Okay," he said finally, his mouth at my hair, "okay, you get tonight."
"What does that mean," I said against his shirt.
"It means we're not going back yet," he said, "it means you get tonight to not be any of it."
I pulled back and looked at him.
He took my hand and led me to the bar and ordered two drinks and we stood there and he didn't talk about bonds or hunters or my father and neither did I and the music was loud and the room was dark and for a while it was almost like being normal people.
Two drinks became three and somewhere in the middle of the third one he was standing behind me with his mouth at my ear saying something about the song that was playing and I turned around and kissed him right there at the bar, not carefully, just kissed him, and he kissed me back with both hands on my face and I forgot what I'd been running from for a few full minutes.
"Come on," he said against my mouth and took my hand and we found a dark corner at the back of the place, a corridor near the bathrooms, and he pushed me gently against the wall and kissed me again and his hands slid under my shirt and I pulled his head back down every time he tried to slow down.
"Here?" he said, half laughing, low against my neck.
"Here," I said, reaching for his belt, "I don't want to think anymore."
He looked at me and checked my face the way he always did and whatever he saw there he accepted, and his hands found my jeans and pushed them down just enough and lifted me and I wrapped my legs around him and the wall was solid at my back and his mouth was on my throat and the music from the main room came through the walls and it was urgent and rough and exactly what I needed, both of us not careful for once, not thinking, just this.
I said his name into his shoulder when I came and he held me through it and then followed and we stayed like that for a moment, breathing hard in the dark corridor with the bass coming through the walls.
He set me down gently and helped me straighten my clothes and then kissed me once more, slow and deliberate, like a punctuation mark.
"Better?" he said quietly.
"Better," I said, and meant it.
We walked back through the bar and out into the cold night air and started back toward the farmhouse and I felt hollowed out in a good way, lighter, like something had been released and I could breathe again properly.
We were halfway down the dark road when Dominic stopped walking.
I stopped too and looked at him and he was looking back toward the lights of the place we'd just left and his whole body had gone still in that particular way.
"What," I said.
He turned and looked at me and his eyes were gold again, fully, and his voice when he spoke was very careful and very quiet.
"The man you were dancing with," he said, "I need you to think very carefully, did he touch the mark."
I thought back, his hands on my waist, his thumb brushing my jaw, and then I remembered, when I'd pressed my hand over the mark he'd reached up and moved my hand away and his fingers had been directly on it for a second.
"Yes," I said slowly, "why."
Dominic looked back at the building and then at me and said, "because he's still in there and he's not moving and three people around him are also not moving and that's not drunk, that's something else entirely.”