by Eva K. More
“Good. Unfortunately, I don’t know anything about you, Eric,” Kat said, feebly turning her body to look at him. Gabriel and his little games could go to hell for all she cared.
He leaned closer to her, his grin widening. “I can help with that. What do you want to know?”
It was easy to flirt with him. And their conversation was certainly lighter than any she had ever had with Gabriel.
As the evening wore on, Kat decided that Eric was a good guy. Gabriel had been exciting, yes, but in the wrong way. He had had too much baggage, and he had been much too rough. She hadn’t spent one teasing light-hearted moment with him.
Well, that isn’t entirely true.
“I like you, Kat.” Eric’s easygoing smile was hard to ignore, so she bashfully shot him one of her own.
“You are very likable yourself.”
And indeed, he was. He was the complete opposite of Gabriel, personality-wise, as well as in his appearance. Where this young man here was sporty and trim, Gabriel was broad like a brick wall. Of course, he needed the steely strength for his job.
Kat suddenly felt concerned. Would he be somewhere out there now, wearing his silver skull, frightening the enemies of her father?
“Then how about you give me your number so we can meet again? Maybe, without these two annoying lovebirds?” Eric said.
Kat wanted to meet him again; she really did. But for some reason, she couldn’t stop thinking about Gabriel, the savage Beast that had protected her fiercely. He had been an asshole at times, but he had been even sweet in rare moments, and others, shown her great pleasure.
“I-”
Eric had noticed her hesitation, and though his smile wavered a little, he kept watching her with a kind expression.
“That’s okay, then. Maybe next time.” His laugh was self-deprecating. “I tend to be a bit eager, and you are so pretty, you must be used to guys getting on your nerves. But I can wait, no pressure here.” He put up his arms in a gesture of innocence.
She appreciated his easy nature. Still, at the same time, she wanted to bolt out of this bar and run back home. She realized, once more, that whatever she had been feeling for Gabriel hadn’t just been some sort of misguided gratitude or even a case of Stockholm syndrome. With enough time to contemplate their situation, she had to admit that she missed him, that she craved to be with him. That her heart raced whenever she thought about him.
Oh heck!
Despite her mild rejection of his advances, Eric offered to bring her home, and since Andrea and her boyfriend were still freshly in love and had barely paid attention to her, she accepted. Because once she stepped outside of the bar, a cold shudder ran down her spine. She looked back at the corner of the building but could see no one.
Once she reached her house and hugged Eric goodbye, she could have sworn that she saw something silvery glinting in the distance. But it might have been her imagination, creating images out of fear.
few days later, Kat found herself storming over to a café opposite her university. It was cold, so most people were sitting inside. Only a few of the hardier ones used the tables outside, and one, in particular, had caught her attention.
“What are you doing here?” she asked.
Gabriel was lounging on a stool, a black leather jacket enhancing his broad shoulders instead of his trademark sweater. His black hair was messy, windblown, and his gunmetal eyes were clear and piercing, sweeping boldly over her body. With his tight jeans, he might have looked normal even, but his ruggedly handsome face bespoke of the dangers lying beneath his calm demeanor.
“Drinking coffee.” He replied as he took a sip from his cup.
She didn’t believe him even for a second. “You’ve been stalking me.”
A wolfish grin graced his features, sharp teeth showing. It was regrettable how good he looked, and that this was the first time that she ever saw his grin. “I’m just sitting here.”
Kat scoffed. “Yeah, right. Taking a break from your busy nightlife? Just minding your own business, coincidentally right where I’m spending my time?”
“Something like that.” He muttered nonchalantly.
“I don’t believe you. I saw you the other night. You’ve been following me.”
His eyes darkened. “I might have been keeping an eye on you.”
A gust of wind blew past her and twirled her hair about her face. “Why? If that is still Maryan’s order, you can tell him that I relieved you from your obligation. I don’t need your protection anymore.”
His grin was infuriating, and it didn’t reach his eyes. “That’s not your decision to make, little bird.”
Some people on the sidewalk moved up to Kat, so she had to step closer to the table. She refused to sit down, preferring to look at him from above and have an advantage.
“I’m not pregnant,” she blurted out. As he kept staring at her with an unreadable look, she continued awkwardly, “I’ve had my period, and I’m back on the pill. If that’s what- what has been worrying you.”
“That’s good to know,” he retaliated eventually with a gruff voice.
“You can leave me alone now,” Kat said, feeling how her heartbeat increased exponentially the more time she spent in his presence.
Calmly, he took another sip of his coffee. “No. I haven’t finished my coffee yet.”
Kat considered crying out in frustration but decided against drawing too much attention. “You-”
“Sit down.” He interrupted her with his quiet command. Any previous smug joviality was gone. He nudged a stool in front of him with his foot but didn’t take his eyes off Kat.
“What?” She asked, confused. She wasn’t about to sit down like they were close acquaintances.
He inclined his head to the side, motioning to the aforementioned stool. “You want to have this out now? Then sit down.”
Her legs moved, and her knees bent but not because his voice had held this tone of calm request, unyielding to any form of protest. It was because he looked at her like he had something important to tell her as if for the first time, Gabriel did not hide what he was thinking. He wanted her to listen to whatever he had to say.
“Okay,” she said with a sigh, arranging herself to sit more comfortably on the cold metallic surface of the stool.
Gabriel leaned back into his seat and regarded her coolly, taking another sip of his coffee. The waitress rushed out, but her smile dropped slightly when her gaze wandered from Gabriel to Kat.
Eat your heart out, Kat thought, he’s a mobster.
Before she could decide whether or not she was going to sit long enough to have a drink, Gabriel ordered tea for her.
“You’re paying for that,” Kat said as the waitress rushed inside, visibly shuddering when a gust of wind blew past her.
“Of course, payment for your lovely company,” he replied with a crooked smile that made Kat uncomfortable.
She cleared her throat and glared at him. “Why exactly am I sitting here, Gabriel?”
He averted his eyes to look across the campus.
“Remember what I told you about my mother?” He didn’t look at her or wait for her answer. “I was seven when she died – in bed, killed by her biggest fan, or rather, her employer. Thinking back, I’m still not sure what he loved more, fucking her or fucking with her. She was a pretty little thing. Gullible, had no real backbone, but even dead, she still looked pretty.”
Kat’s breath hitched at the casual way he told his story. “You saw her die?”
Gabriel turned his head back to her at the same time the waitress came back with the tea and the sandwich he had ordered for himself. He looked at his food and lifted his gaze only after the waitress had gone back inside.
“I saw her dead; I heard her dying.”
Kat's fingers had become ice - and not only because of the weather - disturbed by his apparent coldness, unable to reach for her tea, or lift her arms to do anything. She watched him chew on his sandwich and drink his coffee like he wasn’t
telling her some morbid story of his past. Was his heart so cold he could not even feel love and sadness for his mother?
But mid-chew, he shot her a quick look, and what she saw in his eyes belied his calm posture. There was a storm there, though, when he blinked, all tender emotion had vanished from his eyes. But Kat had been looking so closely at him that she knew she had caught him being a real human.
“I guess he hadn’t planned on killing her, but with me playing next door, he had some loose ends to finish off. Drink, it’s cold.” He motioned to her tea; the steam had nearly ceased to rise from her mug.
“I- I’m not thirsty. How can you even eat telling me all that? As if you are a heartless robot.”
He waved a hand at her. “I’m not a child anymore; it’s long past. And I’m not telling you so you’ll feel sorry for me.”
“Then, why?” Kat croaked.
He straightened in his seat and leaned his upper body slightly over the table. “I should have died that day, but the man my mama’s killer called to finish me off was a decent man. He could not kill an innocent child and look himself in the mirror anymore, so he took me in instead, cut all ties off with his acquaintance, leaving him nearly on the streets, and took care of me. He was like the father I never had.”
Gabriel kept looking at Kat, prompting her to fill in the gaps in his story.
“It was my father, right?” She guessed, biting her lip.
Gabriel nodded once. “It was your father.”
“You care about him.” Obviously, this was more than an employer-employee relationship between the two. She had guessed as much when she had been at the penthouse. However, she still wasn’t sure what to do with this information.
Or how she felt about Maryan being a true father to someone else.
“It’s more than that. I owe him my life,” Gabriel said.
“Is that why you won’t ever bail on an assignment? Is this the reason you won’t leave me alone?” She said, and her voice betrayed her, because it broke at the end.
Gabriel clicked his tongue after he drained the last bit of his coffee and made a face. “Cold coffee’s not my favorite thing.” His gaze landed on her cup. “And cold tea is not very effective. Drink.”
This time, she obediently did as he said, not because he ordered it, but because she felt cold. Due to her lack of movement, her limbs were nearly frozen. She saw that he was satisfied with her and lifted one corner of his mouth into a sinful little smirk.
“Let me be blunter,” he said. “Maryan is the only person I’d die for. I know him, and I especially know how much you mean to him. We live in the darkness; that’s our fate. But no man in our profession is exempt from longing for something pure and innocent. You are, in a way, more than his daughter. You are his salvation – the one thing he has managed not to corrupt, the one thing still glowing in the light.”
“You’re painting a pretty picture of a man responsible for a lot of corruption and death,” Kat retorted sarcastically. “Romanticizing everything as if it was a movie. Can you imagine the title? Creatures of the Mafia: When the light meets the darkness.” Still, she could not stop her heart from beating frantically and her stomach from warming at his words.
“Yes,” Gabriel huffed out a laugh. “Maybe the first movie could be about you. The Adventures of the Little Bird”
“Oh, no. If this were a movie, or a book, or something, it would definitely be about you. Beast. Kind of poetic, don’t you think?” The loud laugh that her words brought to Gabriel warmed Kat’s heart.
“And maybe Matthias could have the second installment.” He said between guffaws.
“Who’s Matthias?” She asked, confused, but still keeping a small smile on her face.
Gabriel kept quiet for a minute, although, with a look full on fondness and his – now typical, Kat realized – mischievous grin over his lips.
“Kat, your father… He’s not a saint, but for him, you’re everything.” He said, instead of answering her question. But his words were sobering.
“I didn’t even know he existed,” Kat replied, looking down at her tea. She cupped the cup with both her hands, warming her fingers.
“That was the idea. Imagine how pissed he was when Ivo captured you,” Gabriel continued with a lower voice, “imagine how pissed he’ll be if he ever finds out that I’ve tainted his precious little girl.” He didn’t say it like an insult, she noticed by the way his gaze became suddenly hooded; his voice sounded a lot more like a caress. “If anything happens to you,” Gabriel continued, “he’d be devastated.”
Kat cleared her throat. “Okay, okay. You’re telling me he won’t just let me out of his sight.”
“You haven’t been listening. I will do anything to prevent Maryan from the grief of losing you, little bird. I won’t let up of you by my own choice. As of now, I’ll be your shadow, just like I’ve been ever seen I brought you home.”
“Your loyalty runs that deep that you would do this forever until he dies?”
“No. Until I die.” Gabriel’s intense glance captured hers as the wind carried his easily spoken words. Kat gulped. The intensity in his beautiful eyes was too much to witness. She licked her lips, remembering their kiss, and her heart constricted. This man had her aching so badly. He had hurt her, he still did, and she couldn’t allow him to mess with her life even more.
“Therefore, your own choice in keeping me safe is indefinitely linked to your loyalty to Maryan.” She could not keep the sarcasm from biting her voice, tinting her small grin with sadness. He didn’t really care about her.
“Not quite.”
She raised her eyebrows at him.
“I told you how important you are to him and how he’d kill me if he found out about us. Sleeping with you was a breach of my loyalty to him. As much as I’d like to say that it was a mistake,” his eyes lowered to her lips and back to her eyes, “I can’t, and I won’t. Somehow, I’m starting to think you are that one stray of light in my life, too.”
Kat didn’t know what to feel. Her emotions were running wild, making her think the shudder she felt was not from the wind but his stare. He had so casually told here about his mother that, for a moment, she couldn’t believe that he was able to feel any human emotion. But back at the cabin, she had seen glimpses of what she considered a decent man beneath all that hard exterior.
And now, as he ate the last bite of his sandwich, his eyes were unguarded for a moment. And when he swallowed, she could see the desire in them, bare, raw, unprotected.
He shrugged. “Are you still moping?”
“I’m not moping! I want to forget and leave all of that behind me.”
Gabriel observed her rosy cheeks and feverish eyes for a long moment, and then his eyes became hooded. “Tell you what. You can try that if you want to, but I’m not going anywhere.”
“You can’t always follow me around,” Kat said.
“I won’t make the same mistake again.”
When a few seconds passed in which she only stared at him in exasperation, he nudged the stool.
Contemplating his past words, she got lost in his grey eyes for a second. The wind cooled her cheeks, but she wished for his warm touch to soothe her, and then, her eyes were drawn to the stubble on his cheeks and his wide mouth. After not having seen him for a month, she was taken aback by the magnetic pull of his presence.
In an uncharacteristic move, he leaned slightly forward and loosed one of her hands with his own so that he could grip it tightly and stroke it gently with his thumb, which made her shiver.
Kat frowned.
She knew that feeling; she had felt that kind of intense longing once before. In fact, she had been so enthralled by it that she hadn’t been able to sleep for a while. But, as it is, one forgot a face if they never saw it again for a certain amount of time. But she remembered now. Oh, how vividly she remembered! And all of his accusations made sense now.
“I... I remember you!” Instead of pushing him away, she dug her fingers int
o his hand and kept it in place. “You were the guy in the club, the one that… nearly kissed me!”
He squinted thoughtfully at her. “Me?”
The wheels in her head were rapidly turning as she searched his face. “Yeah… yes, you. I’m sure.”
“You remember, huh?”
Her breathing was slightly erratic. She had felt his animalistic pull that night in the club. It was the same unmistakable, unreasonable longing that had attracted her to the Beast, which made her dizzy with a dangerous desire. She felt like a moth orbiting around his searing flame.
And it was ironic because it had been that one near-kiss and the feelings it had awakened inside her that had made her ultimately less cautious and more daring. The boldness that had eventually led her back to him.
“Then why didn’t you take your mask off? Why did you let me believe that there was something wrong with that part of your face?” Kat asked.
“I couldn’t risk that in case you remembered me. You shouldn’t have known that I had met you before. Initially, your father wanted to let you go without ever seeing any of us,” Gabriel said, watching her lips with a scorching look.
“Is that the reason you lied about your face?”
He scoffed. “I didn’t exactly lie. I wasn’t about to involve you further in our world. If I were ever made to look out for you again, I couldn’t risk you knowing how I looked. The club was my first mistake.”
“It never occurred to me at the cabin that I’d seen you before.”
A devilish smile, one full of male pride, formed on his lips at her words. “I thought that night in the club might have been… memorable.” His thumb had resumed its sensual touch on her hand. “It doesn’t matter. I fucked up anyway.”
Memorable? It had been truly something. Kat thought. Wait!
When she kept staring at him, his smile vanished.
“What do you mean, initially? Would you have waited, killed Ivo, and then taken me home to my grandparents and be gone forever?” Truthfully, Kat hadn’t thought about a future with Gabriel back at the cabin. But she had become fond of him, enough so that the thought of never seeing him again wouldn’t have made her happy. In fact, after her anger had slowly dissipated in the past few weeks, she had felt sort of depressed when she thought about never looking into those gunmetal eyes again.