I can already see myself in it. Wide eyes. Bare shoulders. Every thought I didn’t say out loud scrawled across my face.
Dax steps in behind me.
Doesn’t touch.
But I feel him.
Everywhere.
He closes the door. The click is soft. Final.
“You okay?” he asks, voice low.
I nod.
Lie.
He doesn’t call me out on it.
Instead, he moves past me—slow, calm, controlled—and pours a drink like he’s done it a hundred times in this exact room. Whiskey. Two fingers. No ice.
He sets it down on the low table beside the lounge. Then turns to face me.
That’s when I realise I haven’t moved.
I’m still standing in the middle of the room like a stray girl who wandered into the wolf’s den and forgot she had legs.
“You ever been in a room like this, butterfly?” he asks.
I shake my head.
His mouth twitches. Not a smile. Not really. More like the shadow of one. Like the idea of one died before it made it to the surface.
“Do you know what this room is for?”
“No.”
He steps closer.
I forget how to blink.
“It’s not a bedroom,” he says, slow and deliberate. “It’s not a bar. It’s not a lounge.”
He stops in front of me.
His voice drops.
“It’s a permission slip.”
I don’t breathe.
I don’t move.
He tilts his head, eyes dragging over every inch of me like he’s trying to decide what I’ll do when he breaks me open.
“What do you want, Cassandra?”
My name in his mouth is a sin.
