A Wrong Love

EXPOSED

Chapter 11

They left the building together twenty minutes later, Damian insisting on walking her to her car despite her protests, both of them scanning the near empty parking structure out of habit more than expectation. Nothing happened on the way down. That should have felt like relief. It didn't.

They were three steps from the crosswalk when the sedan came around the corner too fast, engine roaring, no headlights, aimed squarely at the stretch of pavement where they stood.

Damian moved before Selena's mind had even finished processing the threat, one arm hooking hard around her waist and hauling her backward onto the curb as the car swerved at the last possible second, veering wide only because a delivery truck idling at the light blocked its intended path. It clipped a parked car instead, metal screaming against metal, and then it was gone, taillights vanishing around the corner before either of them could catch a plate number.

"That wasn't an accident," Selena said, shaking, adrenaline roaring loud enough to drown out everything except the pounding of her own heart.

"No," Damian said, arm still locked protectively around her, his own voice not quite steady either. "It wasn't."

They didn't go back to either of their apartments that night. Damian drove them instead to a small, unlisted safehouse his father had quietly kept for emergencies decades ago, tucked into an unremarkable building his family had held under a shell company for years, completely off anyone's radar including, as far as either of them knew, Reyes's.

In the close, adrenaline soaked quiet of that borrowed apartment, fear stripped away every careful wall either of them had left standing.

"I spent ten years wanting you to suffer for something I was never even sure you did," Selena admitted, voice barely above a whisper, sitting close enough that their knees touched. "I don't know how to want anything else from you. I don't know how to just feel this without waiting for the other half of me to start hating you again."

"You don't have to know how," Damian said, closing what little distance remained between them, his hand coming up to cup her face with a gentleness that undid her completely. "You just have to let yourself feel it, Selena. Just for tonight. Just with me."

When he kissed her this time there was no interruption waiting in the wings, no floorboard creaking behind them, nothing left to stop ten years of anger and longing from finally colliding completely. She kissed him back like the enemy she'd built him into in her mind had simply never existed at all, like the only thing that had ever been real between them was this.

Neither of them heard the soft, deliberate click of a camera shutter through the narrow gap in the curtains.

By the time they surfaced, breathless and tangled together on the small apartment's worn couch, the man in the alley below had already sent his photographs exactly where he'd been paid to send them, and slipped away into the dark without either of them ever knowing he'd been there at all.