Chapter 102 Courthouse Paperwork Is Polite His words were a grenade. Heat slammed into me in a way I did not want. I could feel the electrical charge curve in my limbs—my muscles tightened, blood punched my ears, heat pooled where it should not. A traitorous, animal reaction tightened across my skin and pooled low in my belly. No. No. No. This is not what this is. My brain screamed. I had to remind myself what had happened. This man—this man—had taken someone’s life. He had arranged pain. He had given himself the license to end a life and call it devotion. And yet my body answered with the most humiliating trait—want. The wrongness of it was immediate and corrosive. I could almost hear the shame ooze from my pores. I pressed the heels of my hands to my eyes until stars flashed. For a moment I couldn’t tell which sensation belonged to which truth. The physical coil of attraction I'd once known—warm, dangerous—or the well of dread that had nested where trust should be. For a wild, loathsome second I imagined throwing myself at him, pressing into that violent certainty because maybe then I’d stop being afraid. The thought was addictive because it promised something my body craved at the moment. But it also made me want to vomit. “You’re sick,” I said finally. The words scraped. “And you’re naive,” he said back. “You want the clean story. Man wronged, man punished by law. We both know that’s not how the world works. Your parents didn't help you. The law wouldn’t help you. The law never helps women like you. So someone had to.” “You become judge, jury and executioner,” I spat. “You don’t get to pick when you get righteous.” I could feel the air humming between my teeth with all the things I couldn’t swallow. “Did it ever occur to you that he might have been killed and it still would not fix anything? Did it occur—” “It fixed something,” he snapped. “It fixed the fact that the man who hurt you will never look at another woman the way he looked at you. It ensured he couldn’t hurt someone else. And if that’s what love looks like—if it is ugly and bloody and I get up with that on me—what then? Tell me how I should have handled it. Tell me how I should have watched you suffer and do nothing because courthouse paperwork is polite.” I wanted to sink my fingernails into him until he felt pain. I wanted him to stop rationalizing and start being the man who protected me without leaving corpses in his wake. Instead I shoved at him—a flailing, useless shove. He didn’t fall. He just took a half step back as if the contact amused him. “You think you listened to me?” I said. “You think you ever truly heard me? I survived—do not make my survival into your mission statement, Roman. I survived this by burying it. I survived by making myself small, by telling myself I was okay until I truly got okay. I didn’t ask for this kind of justice. I didn’t ask you to write a blood debt across your hands and call it love.” He closed his eyes for a second like a man savoring a memory. “You didn’t ask for it because you were broken, Sav. Because you were told to be small. Because you were trained not to scream. I heard your screams. I saw what they did to you. And I decided I wouldn’t let him walk.” My mouth tasted of metal and shame. I looked at him as if he were a disease. “You are dangerous,” I told him plainly. “You are dangerous to me. To everyone. You wrote a law for yourself that no judge, no jury, no conscience signed off on. That’s not protection. That’s a sentence.” He moved like a coiled animal, close enough that I felt the heat from his chest. His voice dropped to a dangerous purr. “And yet,” he said softly, “you keep choosing to be with me. You keep crossing back here. You keep loving me with all your cracked edges. So, who is the real hypocrite?” That question almost undid me. Rage and humiliation warred with a kind of desperate hunger that felt like an old addiction. I could taste it like copper. I could feel the itch for him building under my ribs, a thing I would later punish myself for even thinking. “Don’t,” I said, the single syllable a command I hoped he would honor. “Don’t you dare frame my staying here, my…whatever this is, as consent to what you did.” My voice became a blade. “I am not your justification, Roman. I am not your excuse. I did not sign off on killing him.” My throat closed. “I didn’t want someone dead because of me.” “You didn’t want to watch him live while you rebuilt,” he pushed, eyes unblinking. “You didn’t want to stand in a courtroom watching him smirk. You wanted it over.” There was gentleness in the edges of his voice that made bile rise in me because it sounded like a lover’s hush under the howl of a tyrant. “You just don't want to admit that you wanted that bastard dead.” The world narrowed again. My body, traitorous and stupid, reacted. It was not the clean line of desire—no. It was the warped residue of adrenaline hitting a system already wired for survival. It felt like an animal’s appraisal of strength. It felt like shame. God, the shame was worse than the fear.And then the other thing happened—the thing I’d been fighting in myself since his confession. My limbs betrayed me. Heat flooded the hollow of my throat and pooled low and wrong. My pulse slammed, and every nerve ended in a flare of unwanted sensation. Not lust—no. This was a physiological hijack. Trauma and adrenaline confusing pain and arousal until they were indistinguishable. My body and my brain miscommunicated catastrophically, blinding me. I pressed my knuckles into my eyes until stars burst in patterns. I wanted this to stop. I wanted this to make sense. I wanted to be an honest creature who felt proper reactions and not this tangled mess. Shame flooded me harder than anything he’d said. The realization that a carnal response had flickered through me felt like the last place I could fall apart into. It meant everything he’d done had seeped into me deeper than I wanted to admit. It meant I was not wholly myself. For a ridiculous second I imagined telling him—exposing this traitorous detail—and then imagined him using it like an accusation. I recoiled inside myself. I would never tell him. I could not. The knowledge of this dirty little truth would be a leash. I took a step back from him as if distance might give me clarity. But it did not. The apartment hummed, indifferent. The lights reflected off his watch and my lipstick on the carpet. The city continued to breathe beyond the glass as if none of it mattered. I should have walked out. I should have left him there with his ice cream and his certainty and his blood. I should have run until my legs ached and never returned. Instead I stood there, a statue of rage and confusion, watching the beauty of the man I called my best friend, after he told me he would sleep like a baby with murder on his hands. Something hot curled inside me. My pulse spiked, sweat prickled my neck, my thighs pressed together without my permission. Raw hunger slammed into me instantly. No. No, no, no. This wasn’t a normal arousal. It was adrenaline, terror, my nervous system glitching under the weight of everything. But my body didn’t know the difference. My body betrayed me. I wrapped my arms around myself, nails biting into my skin. My breath came fast, shallow. He stood by the window now, his silhouette carved sharp against the city lights. All power and violence wrapped in one man. And my eyes, traitorous, flicked to the tight line of his shoulders, the strength in his thighs, the dark storm in his stance. My heart stuttered. My thighs ached.A sob tore from me, jagged, raw. I pressed my forehead to my palm, eyes squeezed shut. What the fuck is wrong with me? My body was a traitor. My mind screamed horror, disgust, fury— and yet my pulse throbbed with something it mistook for want. I wasn’t just turned on. I was broken. Adrenaline, trauma, confusion. My body didn’t know how to separate them anymore. And the shame of that carved me open. I wanted to crawl out of my skin. I wanted to scream until my voice gave out. I wanted to tear myself in half. Instead, my whisper cracked the silence. “I don’t even know who I am anymore.” Roman’s reflection in the glass didn’t move. He didn’t turn. He stood there, steady, certain, a man convinced he was right, watching me through the glass. And the worst part? I wasn’t sure if the thing I feared most in that moment… was him. Or myself. Or what I was about to do…