Chapter 10: Refuge on the Coast
The safehouse was a stone-and-timber cabin perched on a jagged cliff overlooking the crashing waves of the Atlantic, miles away from the city lights and the immediate danger of the docks. There was no power inside, only the amber glow of a kerosene lamp casting long, flickering shadows across the rustic pine walls and the low-slung wooden furniture. Outside, the ocean storm battered the coastline with relentless fury, hurling heavy sheets of rain against the reinforced glass windows and rattling the iron hinges of the heavy front door.
I knelt beside the wooden armchair where Dominic sat, carefully cutting away the ruined fabric of his charcoal suit jacket and the blood-soaked cotton of his black shirt to expose the raw, bleeding furrow across his left shoulder. The bullet had thankfully missed the bone and the joint, but the tissue damage from the grazing impact was severe, torn open by the velocity of the round and crusted with dark, dried blood.
"Hold still," I instructed, my voice steady and clinical as I popped the latches on the emergency medical kit we had hurriedly grabbed from the floorboards of the SUV during our frantic escape.
"You're shaking," Dominic noted quietly, watching my hands with his piercing gaze despite the sharp lines of pain etched visibly into the corners of his eyes. His dark hair was plastered to his forehead from the rain, and his breathing was shallow but controlled.
"It's the adrenaline," I lied smoothly, dousing a sterile cotton ball in antiseptic solution and pressing it deliberately against the ragged edges of the open wound to clean out the grit and debris from the pier.
Dominic hissed sharply through his teeth at the sudden sting, his hand coming up with surprising speed to wrap firmly around my wrist, stopping my movement before I could apply more pressure. His skin was burning hot to the touch, radiating the feverish heat of a fresh trauma. When I looked up, our eyes locked in the dim, shifting light of the lamp, the oppressive weight of the storm outside fading into absolute silence. The distance between us vanished, stripped away by the raw, brutal reality of everything we had endured together over the past harrowing forty-eight hours.
"It wasn't adrenaline," Dominic whispered, his voice dropping to a low, gravelly register that made my breath catch in my throat. "You're terrified of losing control."
"I am in complete control," I murmured back, though my pulse raced wildly against the grip of his fingers on my arm.
May you like
"No," Dominic said, pulling me closer with agonizing slowness until there was no space left between us at all, his dark eyes searching my face with an intensity that defied the physical pain of his injury. "You're surviving. Let yourself stop running, Maya."
The rigid professional restraint that had held us together since the rain-soaked alleyway finally shattered. When he kissed me, it wasn't a sudden, reckless impulse born of panic; it was the inevitable collision of two people who had stared down death and refused to break. His hand shifted from my wrist to cup the back of my neck, his thumb brushing my jawline as the storm raged outside the cabin walls, anchoring us against the dark unknown waiting for us at dawn.
