Chapter 27 Chapter 27
Time stopped. The soft lapping of the waves, the gentle sea breeze, Ava’s soft, hopeful expression, it all froze. There was only the glint of silver in the sand and the words made of black stones. SHE LOVED THIS VIEW.
He wasn’t just watching us. He was inside my head. This place, this fantasy of a private beach, had been a secret between me and Sarah. A dream we had whispered about in the dark. A place that had never existed until now. And he had found it. He had defiled it.
The earring was a desecration. A piece of my grief, my history, plucked from a cold evidence locker and placed here as a trophy. A reminder that he held all the cards. That he had been there for it all.
“Marcus?” Ava’s voice was a soft, worried question, pulling me back from the abyss. She had seen it too. Her eyes were fixed on the earring, her face pale with a horrified understanding.
A rage, black and absolute, unlike anything I had ever felt before, surged through me. It was a cold fire, a promise of annihilation. I didn’t roar. I didn’t move. I simply let the promise of violence settle deep in my bones. I would kill him. I would erase him from this world.
“We’re leaving,” I said, my voice a dead, flat monotone.
I turned and walked away, leaving the message, the earring, and the ghost of Sarah behind. Ava hurried to keep up, her hand hovering near my arm, but she didn’t touch me. She could feel it, the wall of ice that had just slammed down around my heart. The romantic interlude was over. The PR stunt was a catastrophic failure. He had proven that nowhere was safe.
Back in the villa, I went straight to the bar. I poured a whiskey, the amber liquid doing nothing to numb the frozen rage inside me. I could feel Ava’s presence behind me, her worry a tangible force in the room.
“This was a mistake,” I said, staring out at the perfect, mocking turquoise of the ocean. “I thought I could protect you here. I was wrong.”
“It’s not your fault, Marcus,” she said, her voice soft but firm. She came to stand beside me, her reflection a pale, determined ghost in the glass. “He’s playing with you. He’s using your grief, your memories, to break you. Don’t let him.”
Her strength, her unwavering refusal to let him win, was the only thing that cut through the icy fog of my rage. She wasn’t afraid. She was a warrior, standing beside me in the dark.
I turned to face her, the empty whiskey glass in my hand. “He was listening to us, Ava. For years. The things I told her, the dreams we had… he heard them all. He’s been a parasite on my life since the day I was born.”
“Then we cut him out,” she said, her green eyes blazing with a fierce, protective light. “We don’t let him take anything else from you. From us.”
The word, us, hung in the air between us. It was a truth that had been growing in the spaces between our strategic meetings and late-night work sessions. It was the truth of our hands brushing as we cooked, the truth of the shared smile over a balance sheet, the truth of the kiss on the dance floor.
The mate bond, which had been a low hum, roared to life. The grief for Sarah, the rage at Nathan, the fear for Ava, it all coalesced into a single, overwhelming need. A need for her. For the anchor she had become in the storm of my life.
I set the glass down with a sharp click. Before I could think, before I could stop myself, I closed the distance between us. My hand came up to cup her jaw, my thumb stroking the soft skin of her cheek. She leaned into my touch, her eyes fluttering shut, a silent surrender.
I lowered my head and my lips met hers.
This was not like the kiss at the gala. There was no hesitation, no gentleness. This was raw, hungry, and desperate. It was a kiss of shared pain and furious defiance. It was a claiming. I poured all my rage, my fear, my suffocating grief into it, and she met me with equal force, her hands coming up to grip my shoulders, pulling me closer.
Her lips were soft and yielding, a stark contrast to the hard, unyielding lines of my life. She tasted of salt, sun, and a strength that matched my own. The world narrowed to this, to the feel of her in my arms, the frantic beat of her heart against mine. For a single, breathtaking moment, there was no Nathan, no Garry, no past. There was only Ava.
But as I deepened the kiss, as I felt her responding with an urgency that mirrored my own, a single image flashed in my mind. Sarah’s face. Smiling, trusting, her eyes full of a future that had been stolen from us. And then, the image of her silver earring, half-buried in the sand.
A wave of guilt, so powerful it was nauseating, crashed over me. What was I doing? I was using this woman, this incredible, strong woman, to erase the memory of the woman I had loved, the woman I had failed to protect. I was becoming a monster, just like him.
I pulled back abruptly, a ragged gasp tearing from my throat.
Ava stared at me, her lips swollen from my kiss, her eyes wide with confusion and a dawning, terrible hurt.
“I can’t,” I choked out, the words tasting like ash. I backed away, shaking my head. “I’m sorry. I can’t do this.”
The light in her eyes died. The warrior, the Luna, the partner, she vanished, replaced by the ghost of a woman who had been betrayed one too many times. She thought I was rejecting her. She thought she wasn’t enough.
“I see,” she whispered, her voice a hollow echo of the strength it had held moments before. She wrapped her arms around herself, a shield against a blow I had just delivered.
I had to get out. I turned and fled from the room, from the hurt in her eyes, from the truth of what I had just done.
I ran out of the villa and onto the beach, the sand swallowing the sound of my frantic footsteps. I ran until my lungs burned, until I collapsed on the shore, the waves lapping at my feet.
The PR stunt was a lie. The island was not safe. And the kiss, the one real thing I had felt in five years, had just become my greatest betrayal.
My phone, which I had left in the villa, buzzed on the coffee table where I had dropped it. A new message had arrived on the secure channel from Rachel Mitchell.
\`I found something in the old coroner’s report on Sarah’s case. An anomaly they couldn’t explain. There was a second set of DNA found under her fingernails. It was a partial match to yours, Marcus. But it wasn’t yours. And it wasn’t Garry’s.\`