The Billionaire Bodyguard

Chapter Four contd

Back in the estate, the lockdown was absolute. His team moved with a new, grim efficiency. Sofia was deposited in the library, a de facto holding cell. She sat, numb, staring at her hands.

An hour later, needing water, she ventured to the kitchen. He was there, at the sink. He’d removed his suit jacket. The sleeves of his white shirt were rolled up, revealing forearms corded with muscle and a scattering of old, faint scars, silver lines against his skin. He was methodically cleaning the cut on his knuckles with antiseptic wipes from a small, tactical medical kit.

The casual domesticity of it was surreal. The most dangerous man she’d ever seen, was tending to a wound incurred saving her from her own stupidity.

She hovered in the doorway. “Your hand,” she said quietly.

He didn’t look up as he applied a butterfly stitch with practiced ease. “It’s fine.” He replied.

“Does it need stitches?”

“No.”

And the silence stretched further. The violence of the morning was a beast in the room with them.

“What… what would they have done? If they’d taken me?” she probed.

He finally glanced at her, his expression unreadable. “Used you to make your father pay. In ways that aren’t monetary. Then they’d have disposed of you. Or kept you as ongoing insurance. And neither outcome involves coffee shops.”

He finished with his hand, balling up the used wrappers. He turned off the tap and looked at his reflection in the dark window, his profile hard.

“Thank you,” she whispered, the words sounded foreign in her mouth but necessary. “For being there.”

He was silent for a long moment. “I’m always there, Miss Moretti. You just don’t always see me.” He replied as he flexed his bandaged hand, testing it. “The van had reinforced doors… commercial grade… military latch. That’s why the window was the better option.”

He said it offhandedly, like a simple technical explanation. But the implication settled over her like a lead blanket. Reinforced doors. He hadn’t merely just slammed a flimsy panel. He’d overcome engineered strength with raw, brutal power. The cut on his knuckles wasn’t from the glass but from punching through the safety glass to get to the man inside.

The casual reveal of that contained, monstrous strength was more unsettling than the attack itself. It forced a new, horrifying question.

She had been focusing on the threat outside. The van, the mysterious debt-collectors.

But what about the force her father had hired to stand between her and them?

Adrian Vane had just demonstrated he could shatter a van door with his hands. He moved like a shadow, thought like a computer, and had fought like a demon.

Blank checks never get filled out with money. Rang in her mind.

As he turned and left the kitchen, leaving her alone with the hum of the refrigerator, the real terror finally took root. Her father had hired a ghost to protect her from monsters.

But then, what do you do when you started to wonder if the ghost was the most monstrous thing of all?