Aimed at my heart - Chapter #8 - by Tessa Kelwyn

POV Mara

I woke to absence—not Adrian's, but my Beretta's.

I'd dozed off on the bed for what couldn't have been more than minutes, exhaustion finally winning over adrenaline. Adrian had been across the room, absorbed in something on his phone, and I'd let my eyes close just for a moment.

So I woke with my hand already reaching for the headboard, muscle memory searching for the Beretta that lived taped beneath my bed.

Nothing. Just empty air and the small, stupid grief of being without it. My body knew before my mind did—this wasn't home. Home was a crime scene now, my parents' blood soaking into the floor I'd never see again.

The safehouse came into focus in pieces.

Adrian somewhere behind me, keeping that careful distance like he understood I was a wire about to snap.

I forced myself through the routine anyway—checking vents for movement, the gap beneath the closet door, testing hinges for recent oil. The familiar paranoia felt like prayer, something to hold onto when everything else had dissolved.

"I left gauze and water on the counter," he said, voice neutral as Switzerland. "I'm going to shower. Get the blood off."

My blood. His blood. All of it mine, really, since I'd put it there with my fists. The bathroom door closed with a soft click, and I heard the fan hum to life, water hitting tile in a steady rhythm that made me think of rain on my parents' roof.

Stop. Don't go there.

His phone buzzed against the kitchenette table, and the sound pulled me like gravity. The lock screen flashed with a notification—Unknown contact, but the message preview made my stomach turn to ice.

DROP CONFIRMED. Rat line clear. Asset M stabilized?

Asset M. The phrase lodged in my throat like glass.

I reached for it, expecting security, but the phone opened without protest. Of course—I'd smashed his face enough that FaceID wouldn't know him anymore.

He'd probably killed the feature rather than reset it. The intimacy of that, of knowing I'd changed his face enough to confuse his own phone, sent something hot and confused through my chest.

The thread opened like a wound.

Weeks of tight exchanges, coded but clear enough. Locations. Times. Burn ops not bodies—the kind of lie people tell themselves when they're halfway to hell and need to believe they're still good.

My address. Timestamped hours before they came for us.

Heat shifting to her. Move quickly or she's the proof.

His response: Trying to pull it back.

Another: Clock's running.

The water was still running in the bathroom, but I could hear him moving, the subtle shift of weight that said he was almost done.

I shot photos to my own phone, fingers steady despite the rage building behind my ribs, then placed it exactly where it had been. Maybe a hair off. Let him wonder.

The empty space where my Beretta should be throbbed like a phantom limb, but his sidearm—mine now, really, stripped from him in that basement—sat by the water bottle like an invitation.

Crossing the room felt like walking naked, every nerve exposed, but I did it anyway. The gun fit my palm like it had been waiting for me.

I planted myself mid-room, two hands on the grip, the weight of it steadying something fractured inside me. The shower was cut off. The door opened.

Steam followed him out, and for a moment I forgot how to breathe.

He wore only sweatpants, water still beading on his chest, and the sight of him half-naked sent heat flooding through me that had nothing to do with anger.

The bruises I'd given him painted him in purple and blue, a map of violence that looked almost beautiful in the morning light. I wanted to trace them with my tongue, wanted to add more, wanted to press him against the wall and—

Stop. Focus.

His eyes found the gun first, then traveled to my face, then flicked to his phone sitting slightly wrong on the table. He understood immediately.

No surprise, no indignation. Just that steady green gaze that made me feel seen in ways that terrified me.

"You saw it," he said, not a question.

"Rat line." The words tasted like copper. "Asset M."

"That's me," he said, then paused, something shifting in his expression. "And you."

I gestured with the gun, and he moved to the chair without being asked, settling into it with his ankles crossed, hands on his knees. The submission in it, the trust, made something dangerous flutter in my chest.

"Talk," I said, keeping the gun trained on his center mass. "Make it make sense, or this ends exactly how you'd expect."

"My girlfriend died two years ago," he said, voice steady as his gaze. "Car bomb meant for her father. She was twenty-four, a talented artist preparing for her first solo exhibition. She had nothing to do with any of this except loving the wrong man. After that, I started looking for the exit. The handler—Orchid—offered me a way to dismantle things from inside. Burn operations, compromise logistics, make it expensive enough that Mare Nero would have to contract. No bodies, that was the rule."

"But bodies are the currency," I said, my voice flat as the kitchen floor where my parents died. "Operations are just an excuse."

"I know that now." No defensiveness, just acknowledgment. "I didn't know who you were when we met in the gallery, when this operation was started. The handler sent me your packet hours before they moved—photos, name, address. Said the math didn't add up, that someone inside was playing angles. I tried to pull it back, tried to redirect, but they'd already chosen speed over evidence. By the time I got there, you were already in that room."

"So you saved me out of guilt."

"I saved you because the moment I saw you in that chair, I knew I'd burn the whole building down before I let them touch you again." The intensity in his voice made my hand shake slightly. "I saved you because even covered in blood with a gun in your hand, you're the only clean thing I've seen in years."

"Two bodies on a kitchen floor," I said, needing to hurt him the way his words were hurting me, making me want things I couldn't have. "That's your clean conscience. That's your 'operations, not people.'"

"I know." He leaned forward slightly, not enough to threaten, just enough to close the distance between us. "I can't bring them back. But I can help you find who really did this. The one who flipped the tip and pointed it at you. We will hunt them together, I will stand graveside with you when it's done, and then you decide—turn me over to the handler, put a bullet in me, or let us disappear. Whatever closes the ledger for you."

"And if I say yes to disappearing together? What then?"

"Then we walk away from all of it." His eyes held mine, and I could see the future he was painting—small, deliberate, impossible. "Morning coffee without checking corners. Language classes like you mentioned at dinner. A life where the only thing we have to be is ourselves."

I let out a chuckle.

"I didn't start as a traitor to you," he said, each word careful and deliberate. "I started as a traitor to a machine that turns people into currency. But now, right now, I'm choosing you. Not the handler, not the exit, not my own safety. You."

I stepped closer, close enough to smell soap and the faint copper of blood, close enough to see his pulse jumping in his throat.

The gun pressed against his sternum, cold metal against warm skin, and I looked for the flinch.

There wasn't one.