Chapter 5 5

Wren

I got in the car.

I want it understood that I hated every single second of getting in that car, hated the warm, expensive interior that smelled like leather and something clean and faintly citrus that I refused to identify as him specifically, hated the strange , infuriating satisfaction on his face as I slammed the door harder than strictly necessary and dripped rainwater all over his no doubt obscenely expensive seats.

"Seatbelt," he instructed, pulling away from the curb.

"I don't need a lecture on car safety from you."

"Seatbelt, Wren."

"I'm fine."

"I'm not driving anywhere until you put on your seatbelt."

I glared at him, furious, soaked, thoroughly done with this entire night, and yanked the belt across my chest with as much aggressive energy as the gesture could possibly hold, crossing my arms and staring resolutely out the rain-streaked window, refusing to look at him even as I felt his gaze flick sideways, once, twice, something shifting in the air between us that I didn't have the emotional bandwidth left to examine.

"What," I snapped, when the silence stretched too long.

He didn't answer right away. When I finally turned my head, unable to stand the quiet any longer, I found him looking at me with an expression I couldn't immediately place, something sharp and assessing that had nothing to do with the argument we'd just been having.

"What are you wearing under that coat," he asked, voice gone strange.

"Excuse me?"

"You heard me."

I looked down at myself for the first time since bolting from the house, and understood, with a fresh wave of horror, exactly what he was seeing. In my panic I'd grabbed the coat and nothing else, thin cotton shorts and a camisole soaked completely translucent from the rain, clinging to every inch of skin they were technically supposed to be covering.

"That's none of your business," I stammered, yanking the coat tighter around myself, though the damage, evidently, had already been thoroughly done.

Kai didn't answer. He was still looking at me, and something in his expression had gone tight and focused in a way that made my whole body go warm despite the cold rain still dripping from my hair, and the car had gone very, very quiet.

He leaned in slightly, and for one wild, disorienting second I thought, absurdly, that he might actually be about to kiss me, his eyes dropping to my mouth and back up with a deliberateness that stole every ounce of air from my lungs.

Then he inhaled, sharp, through his nose, and something in his expression cracked entirely open.

"Fuck," he breathed, low and rough, and it did not sound like a curse aimed at the situation. It sounded like something else entirely.

"What," I managed, my heart suddenly hammering for reasons that had nothing to do with anger. "Wh— what are you doing?"

He didn't answer with words. He leaned in even closer, close enough that I could feel his breath against my ear, and whispered, low and furious and something else underneath the fury I refused to name, "You don't leave my house until I tell you to. Understood?."

"Whattt," I stammered, my heart absolutely heaving now, some traitorous, humiliating part of me leaning almost imperceptibly toward him instead of away.

He started to speak again, getting closer and closer to my mouth, close enough that his lips nearly grazed mine, close enough that I could smell rain and expensive cologne and something underneath both that made my whole body go strangely, dangerously still.

"You heard me clearly, you spoilt brat," he murmured, voice dropping even lower, rougher, wrecked in a way that had absolutely no business doing what it was currently doing to me. "I can tell from how you’ve been squirming restlessly that you aren't wearing any panties, and I would bet my life that you're wet, soaking my million dollar car seat right now."

I was, for one full, humiliating second, entirely and completely dumbstruck. This. This absolute, insufferable, unbelievable bastard.

Then he smirked, cat-got-the-cream smug, entirely too pleased with himself, watching my face for the reaction he clearly expected, some flustered, wordless collapse.

How dare…

My fist connected with his face before I'd fully processed the decision to throw it.

The sound it made was sickening, a wet, solid crack, and Kai's head snapped sideways with the force of it, his whole body jolting back against the driver's seat, one hand flying up to his face on pure reflex.

"Get the fuck off my face, young man!" I shouted, my heart still heaving, adrenaline and fury and something else entirely tangled together so thoroughly I couldn't have separated them if my life depended on it.

For a long, ringing moment, neither of us said anything at all.

Kai stared at me, utter shock written across every line of his face, blood beginning to trickle from his nose and a fresh split at the corner of his lip, his hand still frozen midair like he couldn't quite process what had just happened to it.

"What," he managed, voice thick with disbelief, "the actual fuck just happened."

I stared back at him, my own chest heaving, my knuckles already beginning to throb, my mind screaming the exact same question right back at him.

And it was in that ringing, rain-streaked silence, both of us staring at each other in mutual, stunned horror, that the full weight of what had just happened, what had almost happened, finally, devastatingly landed.

"You just," he started, touching his own lip gingerly, wincing, pulling his fingers back to find them red. "You just broke my nose. I think you actually broke my nose."

"You deserved it."

"I didn't deserve a broken nose, Wren, I made one inappropriate comment."

"One extremely inappropriate comment," I corrected, though my voice was shaking now, adrenaline finally starting to ebb into something closer to genuine alarm at what I'd just done. "About my body. In your car. After chasing me down the street. After I watched you have sex with a stranger in your dining room approximately forty minutes ago."

Something in his expression shifted at that, some of the shock giving way to a rawer, more complicated emotion I couldn't quite name.

"That wasn't," he started, then stopped, jaw working. "That's not what tonight was supposed to be."

"I don't particularly care what tonight was supposed to be. I care that my nine years of very justified opinions about you were apparently entirely correct, and that I am currently sitting in your car, soaking wet, having just committed actual assault, at nearly four in the morning."

"You should probably get that looked at," I added, gesturing vaguely at his face, guilt and vindication warring uncomfortably in my chest in roughly equal measure.

"You think." He pressed the back of his hand against his nose, wincing again, and reached blindly for the glovebox, producing a stack of napkins with the weary move of someone who apparently kept emergency supplies on hand for exactly this kind of catastrophe. "You have a genuinely concerning right hook for someone who spends her free time reading romance novels."

"How do you know I read romance novels."

"Zara mentions things."

I filed that away for later interrogation, too exhausted and adrenaline-drained to properly examine it in the moment, and watched him press napkins against his bleeding nose with visible irritation, the two of us sitting in charged, damp silence while rain continued drumming against the windscreen.

"I'm not apologizing," I declared finally, into the quiet.

"I didn't ask you to."

"Good. Because I'm not going to."

"Noted." He glanced sideways at me, something unreadable moving behind his eyes despite the blood and the mess and the sheer, undignified chaos of the entire evening. "For what it's worth, Sokolov, that's the most interesting thing that's happened to me in about two years."

I didn't have an answer for that. I turned back to the window instead, watching rain streak sideways across the glass, my knuckles throbbing, my whole body still humming with something I had absolutely no intention of naming, not tonight, not with him sitting three feet away bleeding because of me, not with silly years of careful, practiced hatred sitting considerably less steady in my chest than it had twenty-four hours earlier.

Neither of us said anything else the rest of the drive back.

He pulled up outside the townhouse and killed the engine, and for a moment neither of us moved, the rain finally easing into something softer, quieter, drumming gently against the roof instead of hammering it.

"You're staying," he stated. Not a question.

"Excuse me?"

"You heard me. It's nearly four in the morning, it's raining, you have nowhere else to go, and I am not currently in a position to argue about it with blood still coming out of my face." He unbuckled his own seatbelt, wincing slightly as he touched his nose again. "You're staying. Both of you. I'll sort out actual arrangements in the morning when I can think straight."

"I thought I wasn't welcome in your house."

"You're not," he replied, opening his door, "but it's raining, and despite what you clearly think of me, I'm not actually going to let you sleep on the street to make a point."

I sat there a moment longer, watching him climb out into the rain, blood-streaked and irritable and, infuriatingly, still managing to look completely unbothered by the indignity of the entire evening, and felt something complicated and unwelcome twist low in my chest, something that had no business existing after everything that had just happened.

By the time I made it inside, Zara was hovering in the front hallway, wrapped in a blanket, Reid nowhere in sight, and her eyes went comically wide taking in her brother's bloodied face and my own thoroughly disheveled, rain-soaked state.

"What," she asked slowly, gaze ping-ponging between the two of us, "did I miss."

"Nothing," Kai and I blurted, at exactly the same moment, with exactly the same forced expression, and Zara's eyebrows climbed so high they nearly vanished into her hairline entirely.

"Right," she replied, clearly not remotely convinced. "Well. I'm exhausted, and apparently there's a lot to unpack in the morning, we’ve got to see the Iris concert too, so I am simply going to go back to bed and pretend I didn't see any of this."

She disappeared up the stairs, and Kai and I stood in the hallway in damp, exhausted silence, both of us thoroughly unwilling to look at each other, both of us, I suspected, thinking considerably harder about the last hour than either of us wanted to admit.

"Guest room's still made up," he offered finally, already turning toward the kitchen, presumably to deal with his own bloodied face in private. "Try not to break anything else of mine before morning."

"No promises," I replied, and climbed the stairs without looking back, my whole body still humming with adrenaline and rain and something else entirely that I fully intended to spend the rest of the night refusing to think about.

I did not succeed, because I knew very well I was going to think about him, and I was going to make incoherent sounds while doing so.