Chapter 257 Chapter 257: Olive’s POV
Chapter 257 Chapter 257: Olive’s POV
Chapter 257: Olive’s POV
It was him.
For a second I couldn’t make my body do anything with that information.
I couldn’t stand, couldn’t speak, couldn’t even finish the breath I’d started, because the man standing in that doorway didn’t look like Zane.
Not the Zane I knew. Not the one who showed up in my apartment in gray pant and white shirt, or sat across from me at dinner asking about my day like the rest of the world wasn’t on fire around us.
This was someone else wearing his face and it was wildly uncanny to think I considered him hot and tempting in this situation, but I couldn’t help it.
Blood down one side of his jaw, dried dark, not his color at all.
His shirt torn at the shoulder where something dark and wet had soaked through the fabric and kept soaking, slow, steady, like he hadn’t had a second to deal with it yet and didn’t plan on finding one anytime soon. A gun in one hand. A knife in the other, blade still wet.
He was breathing hard. Each breath audible across the whole room.
God he was sin, a dangerous one at that and I closed my eyes tightly.
I was pathetic.
Nobody has moved in the room, obviously shocked like I was but in different terms.
Nobody spoke either.
I stared at him, and some part of me that had spent months falling in love with a hockey player and a businessman and a man who laughed at his own jokes too easily finally understood, completely, what Simon had been talking about this entire night.
Not the version Simon wanted me to hate. The actual man.
The one who’d survived something none of us had ever asked him about directly, because it had always felt easier not to.
He’d fought through every single thing standing between him and this room.
For me.
“Zane,” I said. It came out smaller than I meant it to.
He didn’t answer right away.
His eyes found me first, swept over me fast, checking, cataloguing, the way you’d check on something you’d been terrified to find broken. Then they moved to Ruby, his face looked blank when he staredat her, like hehad never come across her before, then they landed on Cole.
Then, last, slow, deliberate, to Simon.
Simon smiled.
“I knew you’d come,” he said.
“You knew nothing,” Zane said. His voice was wrong too. Lower. Flatter. Stripped of every easy thing I’d ever heard in it.
“I knew exactly what you’d do,” Simon said. “I’ve known it since the night you walked into that club. You were always going to end up here, in this room, looking like that. I just didn’t think it would take you quite this long.”
Zane took a step forward.
Simon raised one hand, almost lazy, and somewhere behind him a low whistle cut through the room, two notes, sharp.
Four more men came through the side door.
I felt my stomach drop. Zane didn’t flinch, didn’t even look at them directly, kept his eyes locked on Simon like the new arrivals were beneath his attention, but I watched the math happen behind his face anyway, the same calculation I’d watched him run a hundred times on the ice, except this time the stakes weren’t a game.
“You walked into a room full of guns,” Simon said, “to save someone, and now you’ve got more guns in the room than when you started. How does that feel.”
“Let her go.”
“I told you earlier. I’m not done talking yet.”
I felt rather than saw one of the new men move closer to where I sat, close enough that if I leaned even slightly I could feel the heat off the barrel of his weapon.
I made myself stay perfectly still. Made myself keep breathing slow, even, counting the men in the room without letting my eyes move too obviously, because somewhere in the last hour I’d promised myself I wasn’t going to just sit here and be something that happened to.
Cole shifted in his chair, rope creaking.
“Cole,” I said, barely above a whisper.
“I’m not doing anything.”
“Cole.”
“I’m just sitting here.”
He wasn’t just sitting there. I could see it building in him, the same restless, stupid courage that had gotten him dragged into this warehouse in the first place, and I didn’t have a free hand to grab him with, didn’t have anything except my voice and the hope that it would be enough.
It wasn’t going to be enough. I already knew that.
“Don’t,” I said again, louder this time, because some things deserved to be said clearly even if nobody listened.
Outside, somewhere past the walls, the building shuddered.
A second explosion, closer than the last one had been, loud enough that dust sifted down from somewhere in the rafters and every single person in that room, Simon, his men, Zane, all of us, turned toward the sound for one single, unguarded second.