Page 50 of Beautiful Savage
"And he was a colonel with thirty years and friends at the Pentagon, and I was a sergeant from nowhere with a temper in my file." The old fury moves through me, familiar as a scar. "He got ahead of it. Turned it around inside a week. By the time the investigation opened, I wasn't the man who found six dead women. I was the unstable enlisted man with a grudge against a decorated officer. The violence I'd reported became violence they pinned on me."
Her thumb moves once against the back of my hand. The only motion in the room.
"They gave me a dishonorable discharge. Unprofessional conduct." I let the words land flat, the way they landed on me. "He kept his record clean. Kept his pension. Walked out and built a company and started getting his picture taken at award dinners. And the file on him closed. Just—closed. Like the women never happened."
This is the part I've never said. Not to Jorge. Not to Marisol. Not to Logan. I look at her while I say it.
"I keep a list. In my head. Of everything I had and didn't use right. The witness I should've protected better. The report I should've taken outside the chain. The night I confronted him to his face instead of going around him, because confronting him is what gave him the warning he needed." My voice doesn't break. I won't let it. But it goes lower. "Six women, and the thing I'm best at in the world is making people disappear, and I couldn't keep a single one of them alive. I had the truth in my hands and he took it from me because I wasn't the right kind of man to be believed."
"Gunner—"
"That's the discharge." I cut over her, gentle, because I need to finish before I lose the nerve. "That's what Hallstein is. That's the file in the drawer. Nine years I've been building the thing that ends him, because the official version of that war says I'm a liar and a rapist and a thug and he's a hero, and I am the only person left who knows it's backwards."
I turn my right forearm so the tattoo faces up between us. Saint Michael. The sword.
"I had this done three weeks after they threw me out. Warrior of justice." A breath. "I got it because I couldn't be a soldier anymore and I needed something on me that said I knew which one of us was the monster. Even if I was the only one who'd ever read it that way."
Daphne is quiet for a long moment. Her hand comes up off mine and finds the tattoo, two fingers laid over the armored figure, the way she touched it the first time.
"You weren't too late for me," she says.
It's not absolution. She's too honest for that, and I'd know if she were lying. It's just true. She's the one I got out. The one I took for the wrong reason and kept for a worse one and somehow, somewhere in nine years of being the dragon, she's the one still standing in the room with her fingers on the sword.
I don't have words for what that does to me. So I don't reach for any.
We kiss slowly on the counter, unhurried and domestic, like we have time. My hand slides up her thigh, and she shifts on the counter, opening for me. My cock hardens instantly. She's not wearing anything under this shirt. The discovery makes me groan against her mouth.
"Woman," I growl, and everything in me wants to take her here. "I need to be inside you again. Here. In our home."
She pulls back just enough to look at me, her eyes dark with promise. The way she's looking at me, like I'm something she's decided to keep, makes my chest tight.
"Our home," she repeats, and grinds against me once, deliberate, making me curse. "Then we better survive whatever's coming, Gunner."
Her hand slides down between us, palming my cock through my jeans. The touch is electric, makes me buck against her palm.
"Because I have plans for that bed." Her voice drops to a whisper that shoots straight through me. "Plans that involve you not holding back anymore. Plans that involve finding out exactly how much this body of yours can give me before we both break."
She squeezes me through the denim, and I scoop her up, toss her onto the bed, and follow her down with a growl.
19 - Daphne
Istand at the apartment door with my hand on the knob, choosing this. Not escaping, not because Gunner asked. I’m going downstairs because I live here now and I want to walk my building. The tension in Gunner’s shoulders tells me we’re running out of time for whatever he’s planning. The Hallstein files spread across his desk grow thicker each morning.
The service stairs echo under my bare feet, concrete cool against my skin. The hallway below stretches empty, just the hum of refrigeration and distant kitchen sounds. Evening prep smells drift up: citrus, garlic, something slow-cooking that makes my stomach remember I skipped lunch. The cabaret opens at seven. It's three-thirty now, that liminal time when the building shifts from sleep to preparation.
The kitchen door stands open two doors down the back hallway. I pause at the threshold, watching Seraphina work. She's at the central prep table with a chef's knife in one hand, a glass of white wine at her elbow, dicing onions with fluid precision. Her dark hair is pulled back in a practical knot, her movements economical but graceful. This is Sera at work: focused, competent, creating something from nothing. The knife work reminds me of Gunner's hands. Precise, deadly, beautiful.
She glances up, catches me hovering. "Get in here."
I cross into the kitchen, this kitchen that smells like home, if home came with expensive copper pans and a knife collection that could double as weapons. Before I can speak, she picks up her wine glass and extends it to me.
"Taste the mojo," she says, nodding toward the bowl beside her. "Tell me if it needs more sour orange."
The assumption that I belong here, that my opinion matters about her cooking, settles somewhere behind my sternum, warm. I take a spoonful from the bowl. The citrus-garlic marinade floods my tongue, bright and sharp.
"More citrus than my father makes," I say. "But good. Really good."
"Your father cooks?" She resumes dicing, the knife moving in perfect rhythm.
