Eli. I needed to think about Eli.
My son's face swam up through the gathering fog in my mind. Three years old with Vernon's dark curls and my grandmother's amber eyes, the only inheritance worth passing down. He'd be with Rosa's sister now, tucked into an unfamiliar bed, asking questions Rosa couldn't answer. When is Daddy coming back? Why did we have to leave? Is the bad man going to find us?
I'd promised him I would come back. Promised Rosa I would fix this. All I had to do was survive the next fifty-six hours and let some stranger claim me, and then Vernon would have no legal hold on either of us anymore.
Simple. Straightforward. A transaction, nothing more.
Except Min-ho was here. And Min-ho was not a stranger.
The thought of him sent a spike of heat through my core that had nothing to do with biology. I shoved it down,buried it beneath layers of fear and exhaustion, but it wouldn't stay buried. Twelve years of suppression, and my body still remembered him. Still wanted him with an intensity that terrified me.
I couldn't let Min-ho claim me. The scandal would give Vernon ammunition. The step-brother angle would dominate every headline, every legal filing, every custody argument. Vernon's lawyers would paint me as unstable, deviant, unfit. They would take Eli, and everything I'd sacrificed would mean nothing.
Anyone but Min-ho. That was the rule. Anyone but the one person I actually wanted.
The cruelty of it sat in my chest like a stone.
Night fell in layers.
First the gold bled out of the sky, leaving bruised purple in its wake. Then the purple darkened to indigo, and the indigo surrendered to black. Stars emerged in scattered handfuls, cold pinpricks of light that offered no comfort and less warmth.
The temperature dropped with the sun. Mountain cold, the kind that seeped through clothing and skin and settled into bone. I wrapped the emergency blanket around my shoulders, but the thin material could only do so much. Shivers wracked my body in waves, my teeth chattering loud enough that I worried the sound would carry.
And then I caught his scent.
Cedar and juniper, sharp and green, layered now with iron and forge smoke. The combination hit me like a fist to the chest, familiar and foreign all at once. The boy I'd known at Ashworth had smelled like the first one. The man he'd become added the second.
Min-ho. Close. Too close.
I pressed deeper into the crevice, pressing myself flat against the stone. My heart hammered against my ribs. My breath came fast and shallow, each exhale forming a tiny cloud in the frigid air.
He was out there. I couldn't see him through the gap in the rocks, couldn't pinpoint his location, but I knew he was there. Watching. Waiting. The way Vernon used to wait outside my locked bathroom door, patient and implacable, knowing I would have to come out eventually.
The memory surfaced before I could stop it.
Vernon's voice through the wood, calm and reasonable, asking me to open the door. Asking me to be good. Asking me to remember what happened when I wasn't good. The bruises had faded by then, hidden beneath long sleeves and careful smiles, but the lesson had been learned. Resistance invited escalation. Defiance invited pain.
He'd never hit my face. Never left marks where cameras might catch them. Senator Vernon Ashby was too smart for that, too calculating, too aware of his image to risk visible evidence. Instead, he'd learned the places that hurt worst and showed least. The soft tissue of my inner arms. The tender skin along my ribs. The soles of my feet, when he was feeling particularly creative.
I'd learned to be quiet. Learned to be small. Learned to give him what he wanted before he had to ask twice, because asking twice meant consequences and consequences meant days of agony hidden behind perfect smiles at campaign events.
I'd opened the door. I'd always opened the door.
The worst memory wasn't the violence. The worst memory was the night Eli was born, when Vernon had held his son for the first time and looked at me with something I could have sworn was gratitude. "You gave me this," he'd said, and his voice had been soft, and his hand had been gentle on my hair,and for one terrible moment I had believed that this was the version of him that was real.
That was the trap. Not the cruelty. The cruelty you could learn to expect, could brace for, could survive. It was the kindness that destroyed you. The intermittent flash of warmth that kept you hoping, kept you staying, kept you believing that the man who hurt you and the man who held your newborn son with tender hands were two different people, and if you were just good enough, patient enough, small enough, you could kill one and keep the other.
But Min-ho wasn't moving. Wasn't approaching. Wasn't demanding anything.
I could hear him out there as the hours crawled past. Small sounds carried on the still night air. The rustle of fabric as he shifted position. The soft crinkle of a wrapper, food being eaten. The measured rhythm of his breathing, steady and calm.
He wasn't sleeping. I could tell from the alertness in those small sounds, the way his breathing never deepened into the slow cadence of unconsciousness. He was awake, aware, keeping watch.
Over me? Or on me?
I didn't know how to interpret his stillness. Vernon had never been still. Vernon had prowled, circled, closed in with the inexorable patience of a predator who knew his prey had nowhere to run. Even in his calmest moments, there had been an undercurrent of threat, a reminder that his restraint was a choice he could unmake at any moment.
Min-ho just sat. And waited. And let the night pass without making a single move toward me.
