Page 32 of Beautiful Savage
"Leverage." Her voice carries an edge I haven't heard before. "That's what someone said downstairs. Through the door. I'm just leverage."
My discipline cracks. She overheard something from the family dinner. Not everything, she couldn't have from outside, but enough. The confrontation I planned dissolves. She's taken control before I could establish my ground.
"What did you hear?" I keep my voice controlled, but the Saint Michael on my forearm flexes as my fist clenches.
"Fragments. Voices through a door I shouldn't have been near." She stands, and there's nothing of the soft teacher in her posture now. This is the real Daphne, sharp-edged and angry. "Something about my father painting in a garden. Someone named Hallstein. That I'm just a tool in something I don't understand."
I step fully into the room, closing the door behind me. The apartment shrinks around us. Her scent, vanilla and something purely her, fills the space between us.
"Your father was in our garden. Three weeks ago. The timing—"
"The timing was coincidence." Her voice cuts through my attempted explanation. "Papa found that garden through a church commission. The priest at Sacred Heart asked him to paint local gardens for their new prayer room. Your back gate was open. He saw the bougainvillea and couldn't help himself."
The theory I've been building wobbles. I keep my face neutral, but she sees it anyway.
"You never asked about him," she continues, stepping closer. The heat from her body makes my jaw clench. "Three weeks. Never pushed for information. Some part of you knew I wasn't… whatever you thought."
"The timeline—"
"Stop." She's close enough now that I can see her pulse in her throat, rapid with anger. Close enough that my body responds despite my control. "Tell me why I'm here."
Nine years press down. I move to the window, needing distance from her heat.
"Hallstein." The name tastes bitter. "His name has been put forward for a Pentagon advisory position."
"Who is he?"
"Someone from before."
"Before what?"
The wall goes up. Some things stay buried.
Silence stretches. In that silence, she moves behind me, close enough that her warmth presses against my back.
"My father's going half-mad with worry. You've been managing my phone, turned him away at your door."
The betrayal in her voice lands hard. But I have ammunition too.
I turn to face her, and the movement brings us too close. I can feel her breath on my chest.
"I heard what you told him in the phone call. You told him you were safe." My voice stays flat, operational. "Said you were figuring things out. Needed more time. You had your code word, blue. Didn't use it."
She goes still. The anger doesn't leave her face, but something else joins it. Recognition.
"That's different."
"Is it?"
We stand in the middle of the apartment, inches apart, twenty-one days of unspoken truths finally surfacing. My cock stirs at her proximity, at the fire in her eyes, at the way she doesn't back down even now.
"Papa's not a spy," she says, her voice dropping lower. "He's a sixty-three-year-old painter who talks to my mother's roses every morning. Who hasn't been the same since she died when I was seven. Who's probably not sleeping because I'm gone."
Something in my chest shifts, an ache I refuse to acknowledge.
"He can barely kill spiders. I have to do it for him. The idea that he's working for someone like this Hallstein…" She laughs, bitter and beautiful. "You built this on coincidence."
She's right. I know she's right. Have known for days, maybe longer. But I can't admit it aloud. My jaw works, but no words come.
