Updated Oct 2, 2025 • ~11 min read
The celebration Rafe promised turned out to be dinner.
Not in the formal dining room with crystal and tension, but in the kitchen—the massive, professional kitchen that Elena had only glimpsed through doorways, where staff prepared elaborate meals she barely tasted.
At 9 PM, after his meetings finally ended, Rafe appeared at her door still wearing the blood-stained shirt, exhaustion carved into every line of his face.
“Come with me,” he said.
Elena followed him downstairs, expecting another surprise, another test, another reminder of the dangerous world she’d married into.
Instead, Rafe led her to the kitchen and started opening cabinets.
“What are you doing?” Elena asked.
“Cooking.” He pulled out a pan, set it on the stove. “You hit a bullseye today. That deserves more than whatever the chef prepared.”
“You cook?”
“Don’t sound so surprised.” Rafe opened the massive refrigerator, started pulling out ingredients. “I wasn’t always this. Before—” He stopped, jaw tightening.
“Before what?”
“Before my father decided I needed to be forged in blood.” Rafe set down eggs, cheese, vegetables. “When I was young, before Isabel died, my mother used to let me help in the kitchen. It was the one place my father didn’t control.”
The vulnerability in his admission made Elena’s chest ache.
“What are you making?” she asked.
“Migas.” His lips quirked. “My mother’s recipe. Comfort food. The thing I make when the world feels too heavy.”
Elena moved closer, watching him crack eggs into a bowl with practiced ease. “Does the world feel heavy tonight?”
“The world always feels heavy.” Rafe whisked the eggs, added milk. “But today you learned to shoot. Today you became dangerous. That deserves celebration, not heaviness.”
He handed her a cutting board and knife. “Make yourself useful. Dice those tomatoes.”
Elena took the knife, and they worked in companionable silence—Rafe preparing the eggs and tortilla strips, Elena chopping vegetables, both of them moving around each other in the large kitchen like they’d done this a hundred times before.
It felt domestic. Normal. Like they were just a couple making a late dinner together instead of a cartel heir and the woman he’d bought.
“Smaller pieces,” Rafe said, glancing at her tomatoes. “They cook faster.”
“I’m a nurse, not a chef.”
“And I’m a criminal, not a culinary student. Yet here we are.” He started frying tortilla strips, and the smell made Elena’s stomach growl. “When’s the last time you ate?”
“Lunch, I think.”
“You think?” Rafe’s frown was disapproving. “You need to eat regularly, Elena. Especially if you’re going to keep training.”
“Yes, dad.”
The word slipped out before she could stop it, and they both froze.
Then Rafe laughed.
Not a dark chuckle or a bitter sound—a real laugh, surprised and genuine, that transformed his entire face. His eyes crinkled. His shoulders relaxed. For a moment, he looked like someone who’d never pulled a trigger, never interrogated anyone, never lived a life soaked in violence.
He looked happy.
“Did you just call me dad?” Rafe asked, still grinning.
Elena felt her cheeks heat. “It was an accident.”
“It was perfect.” He turned back to the stove, but she could see his smile in profile. “Though for the record, my feelings for you are extremely not paternal.”
The heat in his voice made her stomach flip.
They finished cooking together, and Rafe plated the migas with the kind of care he brought to everything—precise, beautiful, exactly right. He grabbed two beers from the fridge, and they settled at the small table in the breakfast nook, surrounded by the warm smells of cumin and cilantro.
Elena took a bite and made an involuntary sound of pleasure.
“Good?” Rafe asked.
“Incredible.” She took another bite. “Your mother taught you well.”
Something sad crossed his face. “She died when I was sixteen. Cancer, like yours.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. She got out before things got really bad.” Rafe took a long pull from his beer. “My father became worse after she died. More violent. More paranoid. Like her goodness was the only thing keeping him human, and without her—” He shrugged. “He became what this life makes everyone eventually.”
“Is that what you think will happen to you?”
Rafe set down his beer, looked at her directly. “I thought it already had. Until you.”
Elena’s breath caught.
“You make me remember there’s more than this,” Rafe continued quietly. “That I used to cook with my mother. That I used to read poetry. That I wasn’t always someone who solves problems with violence.”
“You still read poetry,” Elena pointed out. “I’ve seen the books in your room.”
“Reading isn’t the same as feeling.” His hand found hers across the table. “I’ve been numb for so long, Elena. Going through motions. Doing what’s necessary to survive and protect what’s mine. But with you—” He paused. “With you, I feel everything. And it terrifies me.”
Elena turned her hand over, laced her fingers through his. “Why?”
“Because feelings are weakness in my world. They get you killed. They get the people you love killed.” His grip tightened. “Every time I look at you, I know I should push you away. Keep distance. Maintain control.”
“But?”
“But I can’t.” The admission was raw. “I tried. God, I tried. I told myself you were just an arrangement. A solution to a problem. That when the two years ended, you’d walk away and I’d go back to being numb.”
“And now?”
Rafe’s thumb traced her knuckles. “Now I know I’m lying to myself.”
The moment stretched between them, heavy with implications.
Then Elena’s stomach growled—loudly, embarrassingly—and the tension shattered.
Rafe’s laugh came again, that same genuine sound, and he pushed her plate closer. “Eat. I’m not pouring my heart out to someone who’s going to pass out from hunger.”
“You’re pouring your heart out?” Elena teased, picking up her fork.
“Apparently.” He took another bite. “Don’t get used to it.”
“Too late.”
They ate in comfortable silence, and Elena realized this was the most relaxed she’d ever seen Rafe. No guards hovering. No phones demanding attention. No meetings or violence or control.
Just a man and a woman eating migas in a kitchen, pretending the world outside didn’t exist.
“Tell me something,” Rafe said suddenly. “Something I don’t know from investigating you.”
Elena thought about it. “I’m terrified of birds.”
His eyebrows shot up. “Birds?”
“When I was six, a pigeon flew into my hair at the park. Got tangled. I was traumatized.” She could hear the smile in her own voice. “I know it’s irrational. They’re tiny, harmless. But if a pigeon gets too close, I panic.”
Rafe was grinning again, and the sight of it made Elena’s heart do complicated things.
“What?” she demanded.
“I gave you a necklace with a bird pendant.”
Elena’s hand flew to her throat, where the tracker necklace rested. “Oh my God. I’ve been wearing my phobia.”
“And you never said anything.” Rafe’s eyes danced. “You just accepted jewelry that probably gives you nightmares.”
“It’s a pretty bird. Abstract. Doesn’t have that beady-eyed pigeon look.”
Rafe laughed so hard he had to set down his beer, and the sound filled the kitchen, warm and genuine and so unexpected that Elena found herself laughing too.
“I’m sorry,” Rafe managed finally. “I’m imagining you being terrified of your own necklace.”
“I’m not terrified of it. It’s fine when it’s jewelry. Just don’t let any actual birds near me.”
“Noted.” He wiped his eyes, still grinning. “No pigeons at our anniversary party.”
The casual mention of their anniversary—like they’d have one, like they’d still be together in a year—made Elena’s chest tighten.
“Your turn,” she said, needing to shift focus. “Tell me something I don’t know.”
Rafe considered, his smile fading into something more thoughtful. “I wanted to be a poet.”
“What?”
“Before all this. Before I understood what being my father’s son meant.” He turned his beer bottle in his hands. “I wrote poetry. Terrible, melodramatic teenage poetry about love and death and meaning. I even applied to a creative writing program at university.”
Elena stared at him. “What happened?”
“My father found my portfolio. Burned it in front of me. Said poets are weak. That I needed to be steel, not words.” Rafe’s voice was matter-of-fact, but Elena heard the old wound beneath. “That was the last time I wrote anything that wasn’t a death warrant.”
“That’s horrible.”
“That’s my life.” He met her eyes. “But sometimes, late at night, I still compose lines in my head. Metaphors. Imagery. All the things my father tried to burn out of me.”
“Tell me one,” Elena said softly.
“Elena—”
“Please. Show me the poet you wanted to be.”
Rafe was quiet for so long she thought he’d refuse. Then:
“‘Her eyes hold storms I cannot weather,'” he recited quietly. “‘Tempests that promise both my salvation and my drowning. I am the tide, and she is the moon—forever pulled, forever distant, forever bound by forces I cannot name.'”
The words hung in the air, beautiful and devastating.
“That’s about me,” Elena realized.
“Everything is about you now.” Rafe’s smile was sad this time. “See what you’ve done? You’ve turned a killer back into a poet. That’s dangerous.”
“Good.” Elena squeezed his hand. “Because I like the poet better.”
“Even if he comes with the killer attached?”
“Especially then.” Elena held his gaze. “Because the poet understands what the killer has to do. And that understanding—that duality—that’s what makes you real.”
Rafe stood abruptly, circled the table, pulled Elena to her feet. His hands framed her face, and he looked at her like she was the only thing in the world worth seeing.
“When did you become the wisest person I know?” he asked.
“When I started paying attention to the man behind the monster.”
His forehead pressed against hers. “I don’t deserve you.”
“Probably not.” Elena’s hands fisted in his shirt. “But you’re stuck with me anyway.”
“For two years.”
The words should have been a reminder. A boundary. A limit.
Instead, they felt like a lie neither of them believed anymore.
“For two years,” Elena echoed, but her voice was hollow.
Because somewhere between the contract and the shooting range and the kitchen where they’d laughed over her pigeon phobia, the expiration date had stopped meaning anything.
They weren’t counting down anymore.
They were just… existing. Together. In this strange limbo where captor and captive had blurred into something dangerously close to partners.
“Come on,” Rafe said, releasing her. “Help me clean up. Then I have something else to show you.”
They washed dishes side by side—another moment of startling normalcy—and Elena realized she was happy. Genuinely, inexplicably happy in a way she hadn’t been since before her mother died.
How was that possible? How could she feel joy in a prison? How could she laugh with the man who’d bought her?
Maybe because he wasn’t just the man who’d bought her anymore.
He was Rafe. The poet and the killer. The man who cooked his mother’s recipe and composed verses in the dark. The man who looked at her like she was both his salvation and his drowning.
And Elena was falling.
Not into captivity. Into something far more dangerous.
Into caring whether he lived or died.
Into needing to hear his laugh.
Into wanting to know every secret behind those dark eyes.
She was falling, and there was no bottom in sight.
As they finished cleaning, Rafe caught her around the waist, pulled her back against him, and pressed his lips to the top of her head.
“Thank you,” he murmured.
“For what?”
“For seeing me. Not just the monster. All of me.”
Elena turned in his arms, looked up at him. “Thank you for letting me.”
His smile came again—softer this time, intimate, just for her.
And Elena realized she’d do anything to keep that smile on his face.
Even stay.
Even choose the cage if it meant keeping this strange, fragile connection they’d built.
The realization should have terrified her.
Instead, it just felt inevitable.
Like falling had always been her fate the moment she’d signed those papers.
She just hadn’t realized the fall would feel like flying.
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