I don’t bother arguing. Safe is relative in my world, and she’s standing in the most protected spot I can offer.
The distant crack of something outside cuts through the apartment.
It’s sharp and sudden—a gunshot if you know the sound, a backfiring engine if you don’t. Eden flinches so hard her chair scrapes the floor. Her eyes widen. One hand flies to her chest like she’s bracing herself from the inside.
I don’t think. I move.
In two strides I’m in front of her, body slotting between her and the window, the hallway, the door. My hand finds herarm and tugs her behind me without hesitation, guiding her into the space between me and the wall.
She stumbles into my back and freezes.
The contact hits me like another kind of impact—a rush of heat, instinctive and visceral, rippling under my skin as she presses close and stills against me.
She doesn’t know what she does to me when she clings like that.
Her body is pressed against my back, fingers curling unconsciously in the fabric of my shirt as the echo of the noise outside dies away. I can feel her breathing—shallow, quick, shaking—as she tries to decide if she’s still in immediate danger.
I listen.
One muffled shout. A car door slam. Tires squeal, then fade. Nothing that concerns us. Not right now.
I don’t move away from her.
“Just a car,” I say quietly, and I feel a flicker of relief. “Nothing you need to worry about.”
She doesn’t let go.
It’s instinct, I know that—fight, flight, latch on to the nearest solid thing. It isn’t trust. It isn’t choice. The effect is the same, and my body reacts before my mind catches up. Heat spikes under my skin, sharp and wrong and addictive.
Slowly, she realizes how close she is. Her grip loosens. She steps back, putting space between us, staring at the floor like she’s embarrassed to exist.
“Sorry,” she mutters. “I just—thought it was…”
“A gunshot,” I finish.
She nods.
“It wasn’t.”
“That doesn’t mean it won’t be next time.”
I file that away. She isn’t wrong.
When she walks back to the table, I stay where I am for a moment, feeling the ghost of her weight against my back. It shouldn’t matter. It does. It confirms something I’ve been circling around since the moment she hid behind that dumpster.
Fear isn’t enough to keep her away from me. I want more than her fear.
The realization settles slowly, heavily, like a decision I’ve already made and am only now acknowledging.
If I let things continue as they are, she’ll spend every second waiting for me to kill her. She’ll bolt the first chance she gets. She’ll run the second she finds a crack in the walls of my control. She’ll never look at me as anything but the man who kidnapped her and dragged her into a world she didn’t ask for.
That won’t work for me.
I need more than compliance. I need her attention. Her honesty. Her focus. Herattachment.
I need her to see me as inevitable.
So I start planning.
