“It’s okay to eat, I had it made earlier but had to…work.”
Every instinct warns me not to lower my guard.
“What’s wrong?” His voice cuts through the quiet.
“You tell me.” I lift my gaze to his. “You said you’re keeping me alive… but for how long?”
Something flickers behind his eyes, frustration or concern, I can’t tell. “Eat,” he says softly. “You’ll think more clearly once you do.”
He rolls his eyes with a huff and snatches my fork, stabbing a piece of pasta and thrusting it into his mouth.
“See, it’s fine, just eat already,” he says, dropping the fork back onto the plate.
I take slow, cautious bites, each one reminding me how long I’ve been running on desperation and adrenaline. He watches me, not like a man observing a woman, but like someone cataloguing every tiny movement and precisely what it means. I tell myself not to be intimidated by that. To use it. To learn him the same way he’s learning me.
“You look…” I begin, searching for the right word. “Different.”
His brow arches. “Different?”
“Tired,” I say, the admission quiet, carefully. “Like you’ve been fighting something.”
The sharpness in his posture shifts, softens ever so slightly. He leans back in the chair, arms crossing his chest, a barrier that looks instinctive rather than planned.
“Fighting is what I do,” he says, his accent a little thicker with the fatigue.
“But this,” I press, gesturing between us, “isn’t normal for you, is it?”
He doesn’t answer. But he doesn’t look away, either.
I take a breath and, before I lose courage, I say, “You didn’t have to take me. You could have… handled me downstairs.”
His eyes darken, that dangerous storm rolling through again. “I told you. You were in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“That’s not the full truth,” I say, though I can’t believe I’m challenging him. “If I’m not allowed to lie to you, you can afford me the same courtesy. Something changed your mind. What was it?”
He studies me in silence. The way his gaze traces my face makes heat pool low in my stomach. Something raw and primal takes root. Something possessive.
“You’re asking questions you don’t want the answers to,” he says.
“Maybe I do,” I counter, heart pounding. “Because I need to know if these are my last moments on Earth.”
“What if they are?” he asks, voice low enough to scrape along my nerves. “What if these were your last moments? Your last breaths?”
He is looking at me like my answer will be a revelation, but I can’t think of what to say. Because what if they were?
He stands and steps toward me, closing the last few feet of distance so slowly I feel every inch of space surrender. When he stops, he’s close enough that I have to tip my head back to look up at him. Close enough that his scent, clean, cold danger, fills my brain.
He pulls me up to stand in front of him and looks down at me. He is close enough that I can see the faint line of a scar running through his left eyebrow. The way one eye has slightly more blue in it than the other, but both are smoky quartz gray with thick, dark limbal rings.
“Tell me I’m crazy,” he says, and it comes out as a desperate plea. “Tell me you don’t feel this and I’ll figure out a way to get you out of here safely.”
But I can’t do that either. Because from the moment our eyes met in that small, cold room, I was hooked. And being here, in his penthouse, wearing his clothes, eating his food...I already feel like I’ve been assimilated into his life.
He nods slowly, my silence answering a question he never voiced.
“You’re mine, Callie. Whether you’re ready for that or not.”
The word mine coils around my heart like a fist tightening, but it doesn’t feel like suffocation. It feels like peace.
