"Someday I'll develop Stockholm syndrome and thank you for kidnapping me?" I interrupted, my voice dripping with sarcasm. He smiled, that soft, devastating smile that had destroyed me when I was sixteen and was destroying me still. It lit up his whole face, crinkled the corners of those warm eyes, made him look like everything safe and good in the world.
"Something like that," he agreed. I turned away. Couldn't look at him anymore. Couldn't look at that face and feel what I was feeling and pretend it was hatred.
"Go away, Mason."
"No."
"I'm asking you to leave."
"And I'm telling you no." His voice was calm. Patient. Absolutely immovable. The wolf beneath the sheep's clothing, finally showing its teeth, but gently. So gently. "I'm not leaving you alone tonight, Red. Not with your heat this close. Not when I can smell how much you're suffering."
"Then sit there and watch me suffer," I snapped, pulling the blankets over my head like a child hiding from monsters. "I don't care. Just stop?—"
My voice broke. I hated it. Hated the weakness. Hated the tears burning in my eyes.
"Stop pretending this is something other than what it is," I continued, my words muffled by the blankets. "Stop acting likeyou're taking care of me when you're the reason I need care. Stop?—"
I couldn't finish. The tears were falling now, hot and shameful, and I buried my face in a pillow that smelled like Caleb, when had I added something that smelled like Caleb?—and let myself cry.
Mason didn't speak. Didn't move. Just sat in his chair and waited, patient as always, while I fell apart. When the tears finally stopped, when I'd cried myself empty and hollow and exhausted, I heard him stand. Heard his bare feet pad softly across the floor. Felt the mattress dip as he sat on the very edge of the bed—not inside the nest, not yet, but close. So close I could feel the heat radiating from his body.
"I'm not going to apologize for bringing you here," he said quietly, his voice barely above a whisper. "I'm not going to pretend this is anything other than what it is. We took you. We're keeping you. And we're never going to let you go."
I didn't look at him. Couldn't.
"But I need you to understand something, Red." His hand came up, hovering just above my hair, not quite touching. I could feel the warmth of his palm, the ghost of contact that wasn't there. "This isn't cruelty. It isn't punishment. It isn't some twisted game we're playing for our own amusement."
His voice dropped even lower, rough with emotion he rarely showed. "I love you. I've loved you since you were sixteen years old and I didn't know what to do with it. I've loved you for eleven years, through every moment of waiting and wanting and watching you from a distance. I will love you for the rest of my life, whether you love me back or not."
"That's not love," I whispered into the pillow, my voice hoarse from crying. "That's obsession."
"Maybe," he admitted. I felt him pull back, felt him resettle in the chair, giving me space I hadn't asked for but desperatelyneeded. "But it's all I have to offer. It's all any of us have. And someday, when you stop fighting long enough to see it... I think you'll find it's enough."
I didn't answer. I didn't sleep, either.
Sometime in the dark hours of the night, with Mason still keeping his silent vigil in the armchair across the room, I found myself reaching across the nest. My fingers closed around the sleeve of a shirt I didn't remember adding.
Gray. Cashmere. Impossibly soft.
It smelled like cedar and old books and ozone.
Ethan's.
I pulled it close to my chest and tried not to think about what that meant.
CHAPTER SEVEN
ETHAN
She was magnificent when she was angry.
I stood in my study, watching her on the monitors, six different angles, six different views of the woman who'd consumed my every waking thought for the past years. She was pacing the bedroom like a caged animal, all coiled energy and barely contained fury, her red hair wild around her face and her green eyes blazing with hatred.
God, those eyes. The same shade as mine, people used to say. Back when she was a girl, back when she'd follow me around the estate asking questions about whatever book I was reading, they'd joke that we could be siblings. Same green eyes, same sharp mind, same tendency to watch and analyze before speaking.
There was nothing brotherly about the way I watched her now. On screen, she stopped pacing and stared at the door, the one I'd designed, the one with the rotating codes and biometric locks and thirty-minute lockout protocols. I could practically see the gears turning in her head, that brilliant mind workingthrough the problem, looking for weaknesses, for angles, for any way out of the trap I'd spent three years building.
She wouldn't find one. I'd made sure of that. I settled into my chair and pulled up the files I'd been maintaining since the day she ran. Three years of data, organized and cross-referenced and updated daily. Her work schedule. Her eating habits. Her sleep patterns. Her spending, movements, health records, social interactions, or lack thereof.
