Aimed at my heart - Chapter #7 - by Tessa Kelwyn

POV Mara

The door cracked open and I drove my elbow into soft throat before thought could form, before the man could process that Gabe had somehow become a bleeding girl with murder in her eyes.

He dropped gasping, and I bolted over his body into a wide, unlit hall where dawn leaked through high windows like an apology that came too late.

Shapes erupted from the margins—three, four, too many to count in the gray half-light.

"Don't shoot—no light, you'll hit each other!" someone yelled, and for one delirious breath I thought luck had finally chosen my side. Not nearly as hard as Adrian predicted.

The thought of him—bleeding in that room, playing his part—sent something hot and confused through my chest.

I ran like a wire pulled tight to breaking, discovering I was thinner, faster, tougher than these slabs of meat who'd grown comfortable with their size advantage.

My body remembered every hour of training, every bruise earned learning to turn weakness into a weapon.

They crashed into each other in the dark while I threaded between them like smoke.

Outside—no BMW.

Wrong face of the building. Of course. Nothing could be easy, not when the universe had already taken everything that mattered.

I hooked around the corner and two more guards surged from an alcove, one spitting "you little bitch—" before his fist found my solar plexus. The world went white, airless, my diaphragm seizing.

But I'd been hit before, learned to ride pain like a wave instead of fighting it.

My knee found his groin, elbow to his throat, heel to his temple. His partner tried to grab me; I dropped him with the same combination, bodies falling like my parents had—sudden, final.

No. Don't think about that. Not now.

There it was: tinted, sleek, expensive. Adrian's BMW sitting like a promise I didn't trust.

Voices erupted behind me, boots on concrete, and the first shots cracked the morning air as I hit the curb. The sound—even unsuppressed—made me think of my mother's face, the surprise in it, the way she'd reached for my father as she fell.

I didn't circle the car—they'd expect that, these men who thought in straight lines.

Instead, I sprinted straight at it, planted a foot on the hood, vaulted with the fob slapping against my palm midair. The driver's door opened to my desperate grab and I spilled through—

Onto someone's lap.

Adrian's lap.

The impossibility of him here, now, in this car when I'd left him bleeding in a basement, short-circuited every thought.

His body under mine was warm and solid and real in a way that made no sense. I could smell his blood, his cologne, the specific scent of him that had haunted me since that first collision.

"Hold on," he said, voice steady as his hands, and buried the accelerator.

My body moved without permission, clamping an arm around his neck for stability, feeling his pulse against my forearm—alive, strong, inexplicably here.

In the side mirror, headlights knifed after us, and I pressed closer to him, my mouth near his ear.

"We're being followed," I said, stating the obvious because I needed to say something that wasn't how are you here or why did you save me or I can feel your heartbeat against my ribs and it's making me insane.

"I had no doubt," he replied, calm as if we were discussing dinner plans instead of fleeing the people who'd murdered my parents. "Everything is according to plan."

The confidence in his voice did things to me I hated—made me feel safe when safety was an illusion, made me want to trust when trust had died on my kitchen floor.

I studied his profile, the bruises I'd given him already darkening, blood dried at the corner of his mouth I wanted to kiss away.

"How are you even in this car?" The question escaped before I could stop it, needy and confused and nothing like the enforcer I was supposed to be.

He laughed without taking his eyes off the road, hands steady on the wheel as he threaded through traffic that was just beginning to wake.

"You didn't think I was gifting you a BMW on the second date."

The callback to normalcy—to dates and gifts and things that belonged to a different life—pulled a helpless laugh from my throat.

He always knew how to make me laugh, even when the world was ending. And he knew how to save me, knew exactly where to wait, exactly when to appear.

The affection I felt for him—overwhelming, terrifying, completely inappropriate—no longer felt like betrayal. It felt like the only clean thing left.

Two savage turns that threw me harder against him, my nails digging crescents into his neck that he didn't flinch from. The contact sent electricity through me, want and grief tangled so tight I couldn't separate them.

One red light burned, a lane split that earned honks and curses from drivers who had no idea they were watching a girl flee her parents' killers. The tail sheared away, lost in the maze of morning traffic.

"Safe house," he said, voice rougher now. "Edge of town."

* * *

By the time we rolled in, the sky had gone pearl with dawn and I was still sprawled across him—half in his lap, half braced on the console, my body refusing to move even after the engine cut.

I could feel every breath he took, the rise and fall of his chest against mine, the heat of him seeping through my clothes like a guilty secret.

His hands settled on my thighs with devastating gentleness, and we looked at each other in the new light.

His face was a mess I'd made—bruises blooming purple and blue, lip split and swollen—and somehow he was sexier for it.

The damage made him real, made this real, made the impossible fact of our survival something I could almost believe.

"You're dangerously hot," he said, and the words landed low in my belly like molten metal.

I leaned in without thinking, drawn to him like gravity, needing to taste his blood and thank him with my mouth and forget everything in the press of his body against mine.

His breath ghosted against my lips, and I could taste the copper of his pain, could feel the moment stretching taut between us.

"Not here," he murmured, stopping me with just his breath against my mouth, and the denial made me want him more. "Inside, where it's actually safe."

I nodded, frustration and relief warring in my chest.

His split-lip smile answered both, and I wanted to cry at how well he could read me, how even after everything he could still see straight through to the woman underneath who just wanted to be held.

"Adrian," I whispered, his name a question and confession and prayer.

"Inside," he repeated, steadier now. "Then we figure out what comes next."

What came next. As if there was a next.

As if girls like me got to have futures with men who saved them.

As if my parents weren't dead and his face wasn't bruised by my hands and we weren't hiding from the family that made us both into weapons.

But when he helped me off his lap, his hands lingered on my waist, and I let myself believe. Just for now. Just until the world remembered we weren't allowed to have this.