Chapter 251
Elena’s Point Of View
I stared at him.
Not the casual kind of staring people did during elevator small talk or polite coffee shop interactions. No. This was the terrifying kind where your brain completely severed its connection to rational thought. Where every logical circuit in my head scattered like startled birds, leaving behind nothing but an echoing, paralyzed void. Where words refused to form because my vocal cords were still trying to process whether the sentence I had just heard was a glitch in the simulation or a cruel, elaborate prank engineered by the universe.
“My woman p>
That was what he said.
Just like that. No hesitation. No stutter. No qualifying clause tacked onto the end to soften the blow or leave him an escape route.
Spoken like it was a fact as foundational as the sky being blue, or water being wet, or the sun rising in the east. Like men casually walked around claiming people as their personal property every Tuesday afternoon, right between ordering lunch and commenting on the traffic. As if the sheer audacity of it hadn’t even occurred to him, because in his mind, there was nothing audacious about the truth.
My heart hammered against my ribs like a trapped bird, though whether the frantic rhythm was fueled by indignation or something far more terrifyingly soft, I honestly couldn’t tell you. Maybe it was both, tangled together so tightly I’d never manage to pick them apart.
I pressed my spine straighter against the vanity, as if good posture might somehow lend me the composure my scattered thoughts refused to provide. My fingers curled against the edge of the counter behind me, searching for something solid to hold onto while everything else tilted sideways.
I blinked once, trying to manually reboot my hearing.
Then I blinked again, slower this time, desperately hoping the physics of the universe would rearrange themselves into something that actually made logical sense.
Still the same man standing right in front of me.
Still the same calm, unyielding expression, completely devoid of doubt, panic, or second thoughts. Still those dark, heavy eyes watching me like he had just stated the most obvious truth in the world… something that required no further explanation, as if defending it would be entirely absurd.
There was no smugness in it, no trace of the performative arrogance I’d grown up resenting. Just unwavering certainty, and that frightened me more than any smirk ever could have. A smirk, at least, I would have known how to fight. This was something else entirely, something that didn’t offer me a single foothold to push against.
I shook my head slowly, feeling the cool, smooth surface of the vanity mirror press gently against the back of my hair.
“You can’t just I started, my voice coming out sharper than I intended, practically dripping with the frustration I had been trying so hard to bottle up. “You can’t just claim me as yours when I haven’t even agreed to any of this p>
Jaxx didn’t flinch. He didn’t look remotely offended. He didn’t even look surprised by my outburst. If anything, a strange, profound patience settled over his features, as though he had mentally mapped out this exact argument and had prepared himself to weather the storm, brick by brick, for as long as it took. It unsettled me more than anger would have. Anger I understood. This quiet, immovable calm felt like something I had no defense against, like arguing with a locked door that simply refused to rattle no matter how hard I pushed.
Instead of stepping back, he stepped closer.
That single, deliberate movement obliterated the remaining space between us until my spine pressed flat against the glass. The chilling bite of the mirror against my back only magnified the radiating heat of his body in front of me, making his presence impossible to ignore. I could feel the steady wave of warmth rolling off him, could catch the clean, intoxicating mix of his dark cologne and the subtle, unmistakably familiar scent of his skin… a scent I hated myself for still recognizing after all this time.
My body remembered him even when my mind was busy drafting arguments against it, and that small, silent betrayal infuriated me almost as much as anything he’d said. I had spent years telling myself that memory would fade, that proximity would eventually stop meaning anything. Clearly, my body had never gotten that memo.
“That’s why I’m offering it to you, Bambina.” His voice wasn’t loud, but it was stripped of all its usual playfulness, devoid of teasing or mockery. It carried a quiet, terrifying certainty that felt infinitely more dangerous than any of his games.
“I’m offering myself to you p>
My internal operating system crashed all over again.
That sentence did not belong in this vocabulary. Not from Jaxx. Not from the man who had spent the majority of our shared history being pathologically arrogant, impossibly reckless, and emotionally unavailable in ways that should have qualified him for a medical exemption. The same Jaxx who had elevated emotional evasion and strategic distance into an elite art form, who could walk out of a room mid-conversation if things got too close to real feeling.
And now? Now he was standing in my personal space, talking like some reformed romantic lead out of a paperback novel, leaving me completely stranded without a script. I didn’t know this version of him, and not knowing terrified me almost as much as wanting to. I had spent years cataloging his flaws like evidence for a trial I always assumed I’d eventually win.
Now the evidence was rearranging itself in front of me, and I didn’t know what verdict I was even supposed to be reaching anymore. Some small, traitorous part of me wondered if I had ever actually wanted to win that trial at all, or if I had just needed somewhere safe to put all that old hurt.
I lifted my hand slowly, operating almost on pure instinct, and pressed my palm flat against his solid chest. His heartbeat thudded rhythmically beneath my fingers. Strong. Real. Unapologetic. The steady, heavy thrum of it grounded me, dragging me back from the dizzying edge and proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that this wasn’t some fever dream conjured by an exhausted brain.
“Jaxx p>
It came out as a breathless sigh. Just his name, barely loud enough to carry across the room. Because my vocabulary had entirely abandoned me, leaving me with zero idea how to construct a coherent sentence in the face of whatever this was.
He lifted his hand, his long fingers gently cupping my chin. He tilted my face upward with infinite care, forcing me to meet his gaze, removing any possibility of escape.
“I know you’re scared I’ll hurt you again,” he murmured softly.
The words didn’t land like a blow; they landed like a key turning in a lock, springing open a vault of old defenses I had spent years welding shut. My chest tightened instantly, and that old, familiar reflex flared up… the primal urge to pull back, to build the walls higher, to protect myself before the inevitable damage could take root.
I had spent so long perfecting that reflex it had become almost involuntary, a muscle memory of self-preservation I didn’t know how to override. Somewhere beneath the panic, a smaller, quieter voice wondered what it might feel like to simply let the walls stay down for once, just this one time, just to see what happened.
“I know how you feel.” His thumb traced a slow, feather-light line along my jawline, a gesture so impossibly tender it made my breath hitch in my throat.
“And I’m sorry p>
I blinked hard, genuinely uncertain if my ears were betraying me. An apology? From Jaxx? That was honestly the last thing on earth I expected to hear tumbling from his lips. I had spent years constructing an image of him as a man incapable of admitting fault, and now that image was crumbling in real time, brick by brick, faster than I could rebuild it.
“I’m sorry for being a jerk back then.” His voice remained remarkably steady, as if he had rehearsed these exact confessions in the quiet dark of his own mind a hundred times over. “I’m sorry for acting like an idiot during high school. For making you feel like you didn’t matter when you meant everything p>
I stared up at him, my chest heaving, my pulse roaring in my ears. A treacherous part of me desperately wanted to lean into the warmth of those words, to believe every syllable, to let the years of carefully constructed armor simply fall away. But the other part… the guarded, defensive shell that still carried the lingering sting of old rejections, held fast, bracing for the other shoe to drop, because surely a man like Jaxx didn’t change this completely, this suddenly, without some catch waiting in the wings.
Hope, I had learned the hard way, was a dangerous thing to hand him twice. I had handed it to him once already, years ago, and watched him set it down somewhere and simply walk away.
“But I’m all grown up now,” he said, pausing for a fraction of a second as if weighing the immense weight of what came next. His dark eyes searched mine with a terrifying, unblinking intensity that made my knees feel like water. “And I finally know what I want p>
His gaze didn’t waver. Not an inch.
“And it’s you p>