“I won’t,” I answer. “Not until you tell me if that’s all I am here—a useful tool fornow.”
He rises then like a man who knows the speed at which he stands is itself an answer.
I set my palms on his desk because if I don’t put my hands somewhere I will wrap them around my own throat and squeeze until the anger has to come out a different way. “You don’t get to decide how I’m seen,” I say. “You don’t get to rewrite my place in your story because it helps you keep your secrets.”
He steps into the space between my words and the wood and says, very quietly, “I decide how you’re protected.”
“That’s not protection,” I say, my voice rising. “That’s control.”
“Sometimes they’re the same,” he retorts.
“Sometimes you tell yourself that because it keeps your hands steady while you do what you were going to do anyway,” I shoot back. “I am not a door you can lock every time you’re scared of a draft.”
Silence settles like dust. He looks at me long enough to count regrets. When he finally speaks, the words are precise and heavy, one by one. “You’re right that I used that night strategically. You’re right that I introduced you in a way that took a choice out of your mouth. You’re right that I knew you would hate it and I did it anyway because the equation that keeps people downstairs breathing demanded it.” He pauses for a beat. “I’m not sorry for protecting them. I am sorry for hurting you with the method.”
The apology hits me where I don’t expect it and makes me want to weep or slap him or both, which is worse than anger because it makes me feel helpless. I push past it because if I sit down in it I’ll drown. “I’m done,” I say. I hear the flatness in my voice and don’t care. “I’m leaving today.”
His eyes darken. “No.”
I laugh once, deranged, and breathless. “No?”
“You signed a binding contract,” he says, the words clean and cold as metal. “Breaking it would destroy you and the people you care about. Caldwell would eat you alive before you got out the door. He’d strap a microphone to your anger and call it conscience. He would use you to burn down everything below your feet and then leave you with the ashes and the bill.”
“What people I care about?” I ask viciously because I’ve already lost the round and I need to pretend I haven’t. “You’ve engineered my life so there aren’t any left to hurt.”
His jaw shifts. “Lila,” he says. “The kids you make work for. The boy you sketched. The woman in the clinic whose ex has a cousin with a badge. Don’t insult yourself by pretending youdon’t care. And don’t insult me by pretending I haven’t seen you prove it.”
My throat tightens. Of course he knows where to push.
“You don’t own me,” I say, because the alternative is saying something that sounds like please.
“No,” he says, and the word is soft, almost tender. “But you’re not free yet.”
We stare at each other across the inch of air where last night I would have leaned into his hand. The rage that lit me when I hearduseful for nowburns clean for a moment, then licks at my ribs from the inside. It would be so easy to let him talk me back down into his world with that voice and that body and all the reasons he knows by heart. I can’t afford what easy costs today.
I turn on my heel and walk out. I don’t close the door gently. It slams and the sound is bigger than the room. It follows me into the corridor like a drumbeat. I am aware of my hands without owning them; they are shaking with adrenaline and something colder. I keep them at my sides anyway, open, fingers splayed.
If he is the one who sets the key for the song this house sings, I will write my own counterpoint. If he thinks I’m useful for now, I will show him useful for always. Or I’ll teach him the cost of confusing me with a tool.
Either way, I’m not done.
Chapter 48 – Cassian
I sit in the dark and let the room hold the weight I won’t put down.
The only light comes from the fire, shuttered low behind glass. I’ve taken off my jacket and left it over the chair arm with the careless precision of a man who knows exactly where he’ll find it again. My tie lays coiled like a well-fed snake on the table; my shirt sleeves are rolled to my forearms, and the scar that tracks across the back of my hand—a thin, pale signature—catches the ember glow each time I turn it.
Reid’s last words had not been spoken to provoke. He doesn’t waste breath. Still, they nest behind my sternum and pry.You’re losing your objectivity.He meant it as a diagnosis, not an accusation. In the glass I can see the version of me who never allowed that; in the reflection the scar looks deeper.
“She’s not a resident,” I tell the window, my voice soft and unrecognizable in the empty room. “She’s… something else.”
The admission is as dangerous as any code. Residents have protocols. Residents have charts, trained hands, and a path mapped in pencil that can be erased and redrawn when something bled into it. “Something else” has only instinct and the thin line between need and the damage you do meeting it.
She left my office like a storm walking on two legs with her jaw set, eyes bright with fury that didn’t seek permission to exist. I let her go because the part of me that can still count understands there are moments where you break someone by catching them too soon. I told myself that was restraint. It might also have been fear. Anger is not what I fear in her. Silence is. Silence in a survivor is the most dangerous vital sign I know.
I lean back, lace my fingers behind my neck, and stare at the ceiling until the plaster lines lose meaning. The burn in my muscles from this morning’s session lingers.
The door cracks the quiet like a whip.
