“So that’s it? You isolate me under the pretense of safety? That’s not protection—it’s controlled captivity.”
“Call it whatever you want,” I say. “But you’re not leaving the compound.”
“You can’t make this a gilded prison just because it’s convenient.”
I step closer, lowering my voice.
“Convenient? You think this is convenience?”
Her breath catches, but her expression doesn’t falter.
“If I lose you,” I say, quietly and without armor, “I lose the only leverage I have left.”
Silence punches the room hollow.
The admission tastes like surrender, and I hate how true it is. I intended it as strategy, a simple statement of fact. But the moment the words exit my mouth, I hear them as something else entirely.
A confession.
Harper blinks, stunned for a moment. The tension between us liquefies into something sharper, something dangerously close to understanding.
She just watches me wordlessly, searching for whatever truth I didn’t mean to give.
Kiro shifts uncomfortably.
“I’ll coordinate containment,” he offers, quietly retreating.
I nod once without looking away from her.
The door shuts behind him, leaving us alone again.
Chapter 8 - Harper
Confinement tastes like metal.
It settles on my tongue every morning when I wake in the Ignatov compound, the walls too smooth, too silent, too knowing. The guards rotate in quiet shifts outside my door, their boots whispering against the marble floors like a metronome set to someone else’s rhythm.
I can move anywhere inside the estate but only with an escort. As though I’m a high-value prisoner. As though I’m something Anton might steal.
Don’t let it get to you, Harper,I tell myself miserably.You can do this.
I lie to myself that I’m immune to the eyes following me, to the coded taps on comms, to the sense that every hallway is an artery in a beast built for control.
But confinement has a way of stripping lies clean.
By the third day, I can feel the walls learning my patterns.
Mornings in the west office, combing firewalls. Afternoons in the cybersecurity suite, tracing Anton’s threads through encrypted channels. Evenings in the kitchen, where the scent of coffee—Damian’s preference, dark and bitter, always brewed at roughly the same hour he returns from council meetings—follows me like memory.
But nights…
Nights are the worst.
It’s quiet so thick it presses against my rib cage. The kind of quiet that makes the ticking of a heating pipe sound like a countdown. The kind of quiet that reminds me vividly that Damian sleeps in the next room.
He’s no longer down the hall or two floors away.
Next door, separated from me by a wall thin enough that I sometimes hear the shift of his weight, the soft scrape of a book being closed, the restless exhale of someone who trusts sleep as little as I do.
