He’s in black; the suit is simple and private, the kind of tailoring that does everything without trying. His tie is undone at his throat the way people who have little need for pretense wear them. He stops in the doorway and looks at me like he sees the dress on me and also what is underneath it. He doesn’t smile much, but his eyes curve.
“Perfect,” he says. It’s not a compliment that unravels me. It’s a statement that puts me in a category. “I almost don’t want to share you with the world.”
“Then don’t,” I say, and the answer is more wish than command.
He offers his arm as if we are about to practice a performance and the world will call it real. I take it. The contact is small, but heat spreads the way the sound of a dropped cup reverberates in a quiet room.
We walk through quiet corridors toward the garage. The house is wrapped for transit: bundles and luggage, soft directions given in passing. His driver is there, and the car waits like a shadow with a polish that eats light. Cassian pauses in the garage and signals the driver to wait. The overhead lights are low; there is the scent of oil and rubber and something metallic that hums in my teeth.
He turns to me. The air between us thickens like storm clouds.
“Last chance,” he says. “Tell me no.”
I want to say so many things. I want to list the clauses Nadia read aloud to me in a voice that made the wordgagsound like a small weapon. I want to scold him for stalking my studio and for planting a card and for bringing a contract with strings. I want to tell him all the reasons I could walk away and be fine and angry and freed.
Instead I let the truth come out in another way.
“I’m not saying no,” I whisper.
He has the expression of a man given what he wanted and realizing that the wanting changes everything. There is no triumph in it—there’s a carefulness, a predator’s pause before the pounce.
The belt is the first thing to come undone. He acts with the practiced hands of someone who does difficult things regularly, who ties and unties knots for reasons children never have to measure. The leather is warm against his palms when he circles my wrists with it. He holds my gaze the whole time; there is no blindfold here, no pretending I don’t see the thing that will mark me.
“You want me to stop,” he says softly. “Say it.”
I do not say it. I close my eyes for a sliver and remember the stairwells, the brushes under beds, the way I learned to keep my throat tight. I think about the many nights I told myself I would not be visible again, that I would shrink into the corners and be tolerable. I think about the riot in my chest last night when he kissed me and how it feels to be held, to be wanted so completely someone redraws the map of your life and includes them.
I sink to my knees because the movement is mine to make. The dress pools at my thighs like a tide and the concrete is cold and honest. He guides my head with a hand in my hair in the way someone leads a painter’s brush—they move you where they want to see color. My mouth finds him. The first taste is metal, a tang of the wine he had earlier, of the sea that lives around his houses. The belt rubs the skin of my wrists in a way that sounds like a promise, and I focus on breathing through my nose to the rhythm of the thrum of the garage.
This is not a scene I would have written for myself. The power dynamic is obvious, dramatic, and transgressive. But it isalso meticulously negotiated in little checks that matter: the look he gives me when he needs to know I’m still present; the light pressure of his thumb between my shoulder blades as he guides me; the way there are no false starts, no sense that he could cross me into a place he would not own later.
He murmurs my name, a sound designed for private ears, and I answer with the only language I can find in the dark: present. He watches every closing of my jaw, every swallow. His voice is low and steady, not a demand but an instruction folded into praise. If power is a weight, he carries it like a thing he can set down on command.
When he pulls away, the belt loosens and he tugs the leather through the buckle with slow, deliberate motions. The ring of the buckle slides across the concrete with a soft scrape that echoes in the garage and then is gone. He brings my wrists to his mouth and kisses the red mark he left, leaving the humidity of his breath like a second signature. His fingers stroke at the indentation, smoothing my skin until it warms; his touch is a paradox—both claim and care.
“You’re shaking,” he says, more observation than accusation.
“From you,” I whisper. It’s honest and small and it belongs to us both.
He buttons his shirt with hands that keep pretending to be ordinary. He fixes my hair that has been mussed by the weight of a man and the motion of a garage. He helps me stand. We are normal now like two people who just might be leaving the house without being recognized for the clandestine discretion that just occurred, and that quiet is almost as dangerous as the act.
He moves around me with an effortless pivot. No one in the car will suspect the belt. No camera will see the way he balanced my wrist in his hands a minute ago.
We climb in. The driver eases the car into motion. The city hides itself in its evening thread, lights like small prayers. I fold my hands in my lap and feel the faint heat of the belt still on my wrists. The dress is every eye’s invitation, and my wrists are every memory’s map.
“This is the part where you tell me I’m insane,” I say.
“No,” Cassian answers after a beat. “This is the part where I tell you I have plans to keep what I value alive, even when men with microphones want to burn it for sport.”
I press my palm to my fingers where they still tingle and think about what it means to be seen in a room full of people who buy feeling with checks. I think about what it costs to be visible and how often visibility has led to losing things. I think about the boy in the clinic with hollow eyes and the shelter where my mural was burned out because I was too small to defend it. I think about how far I’ve come and about the private decisions that got me here.
The car moves through streets that know me only as the woman in its backseat for a handful of hours. I am both mine and his and more complicated than the bylines that might put us together tomorrow. There is risk in all of it. There is a delicious criminality to knowing we will walk into a public room after the thing in the garage and no one will know.
Cassian glances my way and I give him the briefest of nods. He nods back like a man who has been given an order to protect, and he will carry it even if it becomes the only thing he understands.
Tonight we play to a public. Tonight, we are creating a story the press will tell about in the morning. Tonight, I carry the echo of the belt and the quiet proof that I stepped down on purpose. I am aware in a way I haven’t been in years: of appetite and power and danger all braided together. Somewhere in me,a small, fierce part nods. Let them come. I am ready to meet whatever they bring.
Chapter 39 – Cassian
