Chapter Four: The Stranger
889 Words
~Nadia~
He was gone by seven.
I stood at the window and watched the black car disappear into the morning traffic below. Only when it turned the corner and vanished completely did I feel my shoulders drop from where they'd been sitting somewhere near my ears.
"Heart of gold," Sienna said from the couch. Completely unprompted.
I turned around slowly. "I'm sorry?"
"Cole." She wrapped both hands around her mug and looked at me over the rim with that careful expression she wore when she was about to defend something she already knew I'd push back on. "He can be a lot. But underneath all of it, he genuinely—"
"Sienna." I pointed my coffee spoon at her. "The man told your entire social circle I was a bad influence. He left me in a police station overnight. He walks around like everyone within a ten-foot radius should be grateful for his presence." I set the spoon down. "There is no heart of gold somewhere underneath all of that."
She smiled into her mug. Which was worse than arguing.
We left the house by ten and Barcelona consumed us completely.
The Gothic Quarter was everything I hadn't known I needed — five-hundred-year-old stone streets so narrow you could touch both walls, the smell of old wood and fresh pastry drifting from small doorways, locals and tourists moving around each other in that easy, unbothered way that cities with real history always seemed to manage.
We saw the cathedral. We ate lunch at a tiny restaurant with no English menu and pointed at things until the waiter took pity on us and started making suggestions. We walked until our feet genuinely ached, found a shaded bench in a small square, and sat there doing absolutely nothing for twenty minutes.
That was, somehow, the best part.
By five in the afternoon the light had gone golden and long and we were heading slowly back toward the metro when Sienna slowed down.
I noticed immediately. "What?"
She was looking at her phone. There was a smile on her face that I recognised — the specific one she wore when something was happening that she hadn't told me about yet and was now trying to decide how to introduce it.
"Marco texted," she said.
I stopped walking completely. "Who is Marco?"
"He's..." She glanced up, and the smile turned slightly more careful. "Someone I've been talking to. For a few months. He lives here in Barcelona."
I stared at her for a long moment.
"You planned this," I said slowly. "This was never just a girls' trip."
"It is absolutely a girls' trip," she said quickly. "I wanted to explore with you and I wanted to see him and I genuinely did not think those two things were in conflict."
I unzipped my bag and pulled out the small pepper spray I'd packed from home.
Three people walking past us on the pavement stared.
Sienna pressed her lips together to keep from laughing. "Nadia. We're in Barcelona."
"Take it," I said, holding it out.
She took it, still fighting the smile, and dropped it into her bag.
"Come with me if it makes you feel better," she offered.
"You said you want to make a good impression." I looked at her steadily. "You can't do that with me sitting across from him running background checks on my phone."
She laughed properly then and threw her arms around me. "I'll text you the address. I'll text you when I get there, when I sit down—"
"Every thirty minutes," I said into her shoulder.
She pulled back, kissed my cheek quickly, and was already moving before I could say another word. I watched her disappear around the corner with the pepper spray in her bag and her whole body practically vibrating with excitement.
The street felt immediately quieter.
She was a grown woman. She made her own choices. I knew both of those things.
I also knew what happened when you put your trust in the wrong person. I knew it in a way that had never fully left my body, no matter how many years passed.
I took the metro back alone, watching my own reflection in the dark window across from me and trying to locate something that felt like calm.
The compound was dim and still when I let myself in. I exhaled, dropped my bag by the door, reached for the light switch—
"She's not with you."
I spun around.
Cole was in the armchair by the window. Jacket gone, shirt sleeves rolled up, a glass of whiskey resting between two fingers. His black eyes swept over me once before settling on my face with an attention that was uncomfortably direct.
He wasn't supposed to be back until the weekend.
"She went to meet someone," I said carefully.
The stillness in his expression shifted. Barely. But I'd spent three years learning to read the things Cole Whitmore tried not to show.
"What do you mean, someone?" The temperature in his voice dropped by half a degree.
And something about the way he was looking at me — all that focused, cold attention suddenly with nowhere else to go — made something low in my stomach pull uncomfortably tight.
I really needed to stop noticing things like that.
- Writer
