"Say it, Phoenix. Say what I was to you."
"You were never just?—"
"Say it!"
The word echoes in the car. My chest is heaving. Tears burn behind my eyes, but I refuse to let them fall. I won't give him that satisfaction.
"You were an opportunity," he says finally. "A solution to a problem I didn't know how to solve. But you were always much more than that.”
The confirmation shouldn't hurt this much. I already know. I heard Marcus. I saw the investors' faces.
“Like what?" I whisper.
He's quiet for a long moment. The road curves again, and through the trees I catch a glimpse of something—a structure, small and dark against the darker sky.
“You are my obsession.”
I laugh bitterly. "You have a funny way of showing it."
"I know." He pulls off the main road onto a gravel drive. "But you're going to understand. By the time we leave here, you're going to understand everything."
The cabin materializes out of the darkness. Small. Isolated. The kind of place where no one would hear you scream.
Phoenix stops the car and kills the engine.
The silence is deafening.
He turns to look at me, and in his eyes I see something that terrifies me more than the isolation and more than the fact that no one knows where I am.
I see a man who has no intention of letting me go.
"Welcome to the cabin," he says. "We have a lot to talk about.”
24
PHOENIX
She looks like a fallen angel standing in the middle of my cabin.
The emerald silk is wrinkled now, crushed from the car ride. Her dark hair has come loose from its careful styling, tumbling around her shoulders in wild waves. The diamond studs still glitter at her ears, catching the dim light from the single overhead fixture.
She's furious and terrified and so goddamn beautiful it hurts to look at her.
And she's mine. Whether she accepts it yet or not.
"This is it?" She turns in a slow circle, taking in the space. "This is where you're keeping me prisoner?"
"I'm not keeping you prisoner. I'm giving us time to talk."
"Without my consent. Without my phone. In the middle of nowhere." She laughs, and the sound is sharp enough to cut. "That's the definition of prisoner, Phoenix."
I don't argue. She's not entirely wrong.
The cabin is small—a studio, really. One room with a kitchenette along the back wall, a queen bed tucked into the corner, a two-person sofa facing a wood-burning stove, and a door that leads to the only bathroom. Rustic but clean. Mygrandfather built it decades ago, back when the Crawford fortune was still new and a mountain retreat meant something simple.
Now my parents wouldn't be caught dead here. It’s too small and rustic. Too far from anything that matters.
Which makes it perfect for what I need.
