Slow. Sharp. Just enough teeth to remind them who owned this locker room.
“She’s already playing my game,” I said, voice low enough to cut glass. “She just doesn’t know the rules yet.”
Silence followed—thick, electric, the kind that made weaker men sweat.
Jafar clicked his pen closed, brow furrowed. Still skeptical. Still trying to solve me like I was a puzzle and not a loaded gun with the safety off.
Scar shifted again, skeptical as hell. “What if she turns on you?”
I didn’t even flinch. “She won’t.”
Not because I trusted her.
Not because I believed in love or fate or some flowery version of happily ever after.
But because I’d built the world she now lived in.
I was her gravity. Her god.
And no one escaped a planet they didn’t even realize they were orbiting.
Jafar gave a lazy shrug, like he wasn’t already planning contingency plays in his head. “Just watch your back. Women like that? They’ll kiss you and kill you in the same breath.”
I chuckled low.
Let it echo.
“Exactly,” I said, smile curling like smoke. “That’s what makes it interesting.”
Every little act of rebellion, every glare, every slammed door?
It was foreplay.
She was tightening her own chains.
And when the final buzzer sounded?
When the truth hit her like a slapshot to the chest?
That was when she’d understand.
She’d never been the player.
She’d been the prize.
And she was already mine.
I slid into the driver’s seat; the leather hugging my back like an old vice I never really escaped. The engine purred to life beneath my fingers—smooth, obedient, mine.
No texts.
No missed calls.
Not that I expected anything.
Persephone clung to her silence like it could save her.
Adorable.
