The early morning crept through the linen curtains in pale, silvery streaks, casting soft shadows across the tangle of limbs and sheets. The room smelled of sex and something richer—warm skin, worn silk, and the faintest trace of gunpowder that clung to him like a secret. The kind of scent that never truly faded, no matter how many times he washed the blood from his hands.

Alana Bloom lay on her side, half-covered by the expensive bedding she had long since grown used to, one hand resting on the slow, steady rise of his chest. Her fingers traced idle patterns there, as if memorizing the rhythm of a heart too dangerous to love—but far too intoxicating to resist.

He was sleeping. Or pretending to.

His face, in the dim light, looked almost holy in its serenity. Sharp cheekbones softened by sleep, lips slightly parted, eyelashes casting fragile shadows. No one would ever guess what that face had seen—what those hands had done.

They had warned her. Will, most of all, his voice shaking with desperation and something like heartbreak. Jack, blunt and unyielding, barking truths she refused to hear. Even Chilton, once, had given her a look across a room that said more than words ever could.

But it hadn’t mattered.

Because what Alana saw in him was something no one else dared to look for: elegance, brilliance, restraint. A man of taste and control, a man who read poetry in the bath and drank wine like it meant something. A man who could shatter her body with pleasure, night after night, and still whisper her name like it was made of glass.

She didn’t want the truth.

She wanted this.

The safety of his arms after chaos. The lies that tasted like love on his tongue. The fantasy that maybe—just maybe—he was only hers, and not the monster they all believed him to be.

“You look so peaceful when you sleep,” she murmured, her voice barely above a breath. “So unlike what they say you are.”

She smiled faintly, her thumb brushing over the curve of his jaw. There was no fear in her touch. Not anymore.

“You kill people, don’t you?” she whispered, not expecting an answer. “You do awful things in the dark... and then come home to me like none of it ever touched you.”

She said as if it were gossip, gossip that shouldn't be paid attention to. "No, of course not"

She leaned in then, pressing her lips to his temple, lingering.

And in the hush that followed, as the world outside began to stir, Alana remained exactly where she was—nestled against the devil she chose, the man the world feared, and the only person who had ever made her feel truly alive.