“Oh!” Puzzle pieces fall into place, click click click in my mind as his words sink in. I sit down next to him, perched on the edge of the couch, facing forward.

“Oh, God,” I mutter, staring straight ahead, everything going out of focus. “Poor Kelly. You didn’t say a word. She doesn’t know?” Tears come unbidden, filling my eyes. I don’t hide it. I couldn’t even if I tried.

“No. Not yet. I thought it was best, until my mom gets here tomorrow.”

“Your mom knows?”

“Yes. That was one of the calls earlier today.”

“You hid this from me?”

“You?”

“Yeah, me. I know we’re not friends, but Jesus, Silas. I’m a human being with compassion, you know.” Weeping openly, I turn to him and touch his hand. “I am so, so sorry. I’m sorry you lost your sister. I’m sorry Kelly lost her mother. I’m sorry you didn’t feel you could talk about it with me. I’m just sorry.”

“Stop saying you’re sorry. You have nothing to do with my sister’s drug addiction and her stupid, stupid relapse.”

But he squeezes my hand back.

“You can talk about it with me, you know. I’ll listen. I’m here.”

“Nothing to talk about. My sister made heroin more important than her kid. Open and shut. Now she’s dead and I have to pick up all the pieces. So does my mother. That’s what addicts do. They make the dope more important than human beings.”

I just nod.

“She made getting high more important than her daughter. Best guess the cops have is that the heroin was contaminated. Fentanyl, some other substance–toxicology reports will take awhile. It’s all details, though. Bottom line: my sister, Tricia, is dead and someone has to tell Kelly she’s never seeing–” His voice cuts off, then an enormous sound of anguish ripples through him. “–never seeing Mama again.”

I move quietly toward him and reach up, sliding the palm of my hand over his jaw, fingers skimming his neck, tips brushing against his hair. He’s looking down but lifts his head. Our eyes lock.

His are glistening. The whites are slightly bloodshot, his nostrils flaring, jaw muscles ticking.

His brow is up and as I take in all of the microscopic ways his body is feeling emotion he can’t bring himself to express, I realize he is pissed.

Really, really pissed.

“Never seeing Mama again,” he repeats, standing up and moving away from my touch. He starts to pace, like a big predator churning all the attack instincts into the perfect form. Silas’s shoulders swell, his arms curling under yet at his sides, his eyes out of focus as he paces his small, nondescript living room.

“Tricia did it again, damn it. Couldn’t hold back. Not even one bit for her kid. Nooooo, the drugs were too powerful. And who the fuck is ‘Uncle Rick’?” he hisses, the sound like broken glass being dragged over my heart. “Who is he? I’ll get Drew to help me find out, but if that fucker laid a finger on Kelly, he’s dead.”

The way Silas says it makes me shiver.

Because I know he’ll do it.

“Silas, we don’t know. And right now, you just need–”

“Don’t tell me what I need!” he rumbles, the sound somehow more biting because he’s saying it low, in a whispered hush that seems to scream. Whipping around, he recedes, body barreling full speed toward his kitchen, fist cocked, elbow coming back. The sound of bone on wood is surprisingly quiet and shattering at the same time as he punches the door jamb quietly, the crunching all the worse for his silent destruction.

“Fuck!” he growls, the sound low and quiet for Kelly’s sake, piercing and deep to be in the room and witnessing all his pain trying to come out as he contains it. Savage and real, Silas is unmoored. Unleashed. He grunts as he thrusts his arm back, plowing it over and over into the wood until I see he’s leaving smears of blood on the wall.

I don’t try to stop him.

I don’t think I could, even if I tried.

“Why? Why why why why why,” he says, his voice fading as he repeats the word, punching softly over and over. Silas presses his forehead against the wall and bangs it, slowly, the rhythm more important than the impact. I realize how much he’s been holding it together, how skilled and eloquent he had to be through our time together with Kelly. How he was broken inside, emotional splinters working their way out of him as he pretended for his niece’s sake.

How pain finds a way out, no matter how hard you try to pen it in.

Pain won’t be denied. You can defer it. Postpone it. Think you’ve got it all under control. Just when you reassure yourself you have mastered it, the pain emerges.

Pain dominates.

And when it does, the world submits.

Drops of blood soak his pants leg, just under where his pocket seam resides. His arms are loose at his sides and I come to him now, ready to offer whatever solace I can.

“Silas,” I say, the word barely touching my lips and tongue as I gingerly rest my fingertips on his shoulder. He tenses, then leans against the wall, breathing hard.

A million words rush through my mind as we stand there, Silas’s ragged breath its own language. But I say nothing, instead letting him just feel. His bloodied hand rests at his side, making me cringe. The last time I saw so much blood was yesterday, the image of Tara pushed aside quickly, triggering the scent of burning wetness. Before that, it was seven months ago, the day Silas, Drew, and Mark rescued Lindsay and me from our tormenters.

The trauma of both days is palpable.

I don’t let go, my fingers connecting us as if we have no choice. Bound to each other by forces beyond us, we’re here, together. I’m not just his client. He is not just my security person. There is no “just” here.

I am honored. I am horrified. I am traumatized. I am grieving. The space we’re inhabiting right now as Silas steadies his breathing, as his blood smears along an inelegant line on his trousers, as the scent of true expression makes me breathe in deeper–it all feels so sacred.

And oh, so profane.

“Why?” he gasps, then makes a sick, laughing huff. His injured hand comes up and runs through his dark hair as he turns around, staring down at me with eyes that somehow are devoid of emotion and also contain every molecule of feeling in the world. Inky and dilated, his eyes are a window, a black hole, a promise, an abyss.

Jump, those eyes say.

I’ll catch you.

I stand on tiptoe, arms at my sides now, and take the leap.

My kiss is meant to be gentle and comforting, to convey that I feel so bad for him and his loss, to try to share in his pain and maybe–just maybe–carry some of the burden of it for a little while. At first he moves back, a tiny recoil of surprise, but before I can react and pull away he’s enveloping me, arms crushing me to him, the comforting kiss I started turning rapidly into a passionate exploration that conveys even more of what he’s feeling, tapping into what I could see on the surface of his body, revealing the true depths.

My God. It’s endless.

Pieces of me come forward and attach to the broken pieces of him, the rush to join a physical sensation as his arms turn to steel bands around me, his heat and touch and scent so all-encompassing. So welcome. So transcendent.

His hands press me against him, shimmying under my shirt, up my back, fingers impossibly strong, palms muscled and heated against my shoulder blades, my ribs, my bones. As I arch my back, leaning into him to breathe in the fire between us, I surrender. All the churning in my mind lessens, the flurry of pain and uncertainty receding like the tides. Silas is my moon, my true North, my divining rod, my center. The trail of touch he leaves along my skin is a thousand years of memory. The sound of his low, deep pleasure–made by me–is my compass.

Too much time spent living in my mind, the cage that holds all my screaming thoughts, has meant I’ve forgotten my body.

But it has not forgotten me.

I reach down and undo his buckle, frantic and in need of more skin, more Silas, more of him. His phone slips out of his back pocket and onto the floor between us, the blue glow showing unread messages, shining up at us. He ignores it.

He focuses on me.

We move to the couch, where gravity lets me fall into him. I’m grateful. The laws of physics work for us, propelling me deeper against him, giving me more.

I can’t get enough, his groan of relief showing me he feels the same way as I unzip him and stroke the length of him with the palm of my hand, sliding down the long trail of his thigh, taking in his muscled leg, the groove of bone and tendon, the light sandpapery feel of his hair. In the dark, I close my eyes and take in the dusting of tight curls that cover the powerful bulk of him, the same flesh and bone that protects me every hour, every minute, every second we’re near each other.

It’s intoxicating to be the object of that protection. I’ve shunned it, resented it, pushed it away, and hated it.

Not now, though. Now I give in to it and let the weight of it blanket me, the warm trusting of his mouth turning me toward all he offers. No longer a client, I’m a lover in his arms. No longer Jane Borokov, a public enemy and object of shame to use as a weapon in the media, I am just Jane, all breasts and gasps and wetness and need, writhing in his lap as he pushes up against me, seeking and seeking and seeking.

I’m here, my mind moans to him in a language that only uses my tongue, my fingers, my nails that dig into broad shoulders designed to move with deep grace to keep danger at bay.

I’m here.

“Jane,” he says, as if warning me, as if I don’t know what I’m getting myself into, as if I’m in peril. A very different kind of peril. This time, my body isn’t being threatened.

It’s about to be worshipped.

He doesn’t understand that I’m finding the first safe space in months right here, right now, as my hands define him, map him.

Ache for him.

Or maybe he does understand, and that’s the secret eluding me. When you spend every waking second in a state of stone-cold panic, the truth becomes a hidden treasure. A secret. Silas’s mouth glides across mine, his lips full and giving, his hands taking palmfuls of my willing skin and blending our movement into a fine art.

He cups one breast and kisses me with such fevered power, I stop thinking. All light behind my closed eyes bursts into shades of nothing, words disappearing into colored mists that spread out into the corners of my mind and heart. Slipping under my bra, his fingers make my nipple tighten, a gasp coming from me without volition.

In his hands I am my true self.

I’m so wet for him, those thin pieces of cloth keeping us from joining, my bare belly brushing against his as our shirts ride up. A cold arc of air encircles my waist as Silas uses his open hand to tug at my shirt, signaling what he wants next.

More.

More of me.

He can have it all.

Tap tap tap.

Bzzzzzz.

Simultaneously, someone knocks at the front door and Silas’s phone buzzes.

I shriek in surprise, the snap of my bra as Silas snatches his hand away like a rebuke, a punishment, a shaming. I roll away. We both look at the door as Silas automatically buckles his belt, zips up his pants, and tucks everything into place.

Including every single damn emotion he just let me feel.

He picks up his phone and looks at it while striding quickly to the door, opening it swiftly as a man in a suit stands there, hand ready to knock again.

“Blumenthal?” he snaps at the guy, a tall, thin man who seems out of place for a bodyguard, his lean look more marathoner than muscle.

“Yeah. Foster sent me.”

“I thought you weren’t coming until later,” I say in a high, nervous voice, trying to put all the passion we just shared into a box like Silas did. My ability to compartmentalize is at war with the lingering memory of his taste, his hands, his touch, his groan.

Blumenthal frowns. “Foster said this was a priority. Sent the first guy he could.” His eyes ping between Silas and me, narrowing.

“It is,” Silas replies, clearing his throat. “It’s more of a priority than you could ever imagine. Glad you made it early. We’re trying to avoid crises.”

Suddenly I want to punch walls, too.

Silas looks at me, then Blumenthal. “You know where to take her?”

He nods. “The Grove.”

Silas gives him a suspicious look. “The Grove? What? No. Monica Bosworth refuses to let her stay there.”

I’m back to being “her” again.

“Change of plans,” Blumenthal says with a shrug. “Big meeting in the morning. I’ll get her there tonight. Foster says you need to be there at 9 am.” His eyes skitter to Silas’s bloody hand. Eyebrows go up, but he says nothing more.

Pure terror shoots through my bloodstream, crowding out all of the much nicer sensations that were just there. The Grove? Without Silas? Why? What is Monica Bosworth doing? I race to find something–anything–I can say to stay here for a few seconds longer, to try to reconnect with Silas.

“Silas,” I say softly. “What about Kelly?”

“What about her?” he asks gruffly, closed off, shut down.

“When she wakes up, will you tell her I’m sorry I didn’t say goodbye?” Tears threaten to take over, my skin tingling with the effort to hold them back. “She’s been through so much. I don’t want to be another person who disappears on her.” A single teardrop, fat and round, breaks the line of my lower lid and lands on my upper lip. I lick it and look at him, imploring.

I might as well have slapped him.

Quickly, microscopically, he drains his emotions off his face and looks neutral again. I get a curt nod. “Right. I’ll handle her. My mother is on her way.” He gives a tight, polite smile. “I’ve already inconvenienced you enough. I apologize for the disruption. You don’t need to worry.”

“I’ll feel whatever I want to feel, Silas,” I declare. Out of the corner of my eye, I see Joey’s little black face peeking out from under the couch, just watching.

Silas’ smile tightens to the point of snapping. “You do that, Jane.”

And with that, Blumenthal escorts me to a black SUV. Duff is driving.

That night, I sleep in the guest house at The Grove, body reeling from Silas’s attention, heart broken from his withdrawal.

I do not dream.