It wasn’t a soft laugh, the kind of sound a man makes when he’s amused; it wasn’t a surprised one either. It was a bark—low, sharp, and ugly—ripping through my throat like a serrated blade. Because watching Noah try to play island warlord, dragging her into some mossy, decrepit ruin to smear his own pathetic blood on her like he’d actually invented the concept of ownership, was the most amateur, pathetic fucking theatre I’ve seen in years.
A knife? A speech? A goddamn altar?
Jesus Christ, the man was a walking cliché.
I crouch in the tree line where the jungle canopy knits together like a bruised ceiling, one boot braced against a root thick as a corpse’s thigh and slick with the rot of a thousand fallen leaves. Binoculars hang loose in my hand, useless now that they’re so close I can see the pulse jumping in her throat, and I shake my head slowly, with the weary disdain of a man who has just watched a drunk trip over his own dick in public.
“You stupid, arrogant cunt,” I mutter, the words tasting like the copper air and the smoke from the market. I watch him through the fractured sunlight as he presses that bleeding palmto her chest, staining that pristine silk like that singular act meant something—like blood makes you a king instead of just a liability with a hole in his hand.
He thinks he scared her. He thinks terror is the same thing as loyalty.
He did scare her, but fear doesn’t make her his; fear is a compass, and it only ever points her toward the one person who can actually handle the dark.
Fear makes her look for me.
And she does. Even as he’s posturing, even as he’s breathing his stale, expensive breath into her face, I see it—the frantic, subtle flick of her eyes toward the tree line, the way her breath stutters in a rhythm only I know how to read, the way her spine locks like she’s bracing for an impact she knows is coming from the right fucking direction.
She doesn’t look at him when the “sacrifice” is over. She looks at the trees. She looks at the suffocating weight of the dark. She looks exactly where I am, peering through the veil of the island’s teeth.
I grin so hard my jaw aches, a feral, jagged expression that would make a saint pray for lightning.
“Oh, sweetheart,” I breathe into the humid air, my voice a rasp that gets swallowed by the rustle of the palms. “You should’ve seen your face. You looked like you were waiting for me to tear his head off right then and there.”
Noah talks. Noah postures. Noah threatens like a man who has never had to actually bleed for what he wants. I watch. I plan. I wait with the patience of a landslide. That’s the fundamental difference between men who buy power with contracts and men whoarepower because they’ve survived the gutter.
By the time they leave that rotted temple, I’m already moving through the brush, a ghost in the machine of the island’s design.
The villa’s security is a joke—a collection of expensive toys placed for deterrence, not for a reality where I exist. The motion sensors are tuned for stray dogs and clumsy tourists, not for someone who knows how to breathe in sync with the dark instead of fighting against it. I slip along the perimeter, barefoot now, my boots slung over my shoulder by the laces, the stone of the terrace cool and slick as a snake’s belly under my feet.
I don’t rush. I don’t fucking need to.
She’s shaken to her core, and he’s smug with a false sense of victory; the rhythm of their evening is as predictable as a heartbeat before a stroke.
I time my entry to the shower.
Of course she showers. She always does when she’s trying to scrub something off her skin that won’t come off—guilt, memory, or the literal stain of a man she loathes.
Steam begins to bloom behind the frosted glass of the master suite, turning the bathroom into a glowing, translucent white lung that heaves with the heat. The water hisses against the tile, constant and loud, a beautiful, violent white noise that masks the sound of my movement, masks the scent of the jungle on my skin, masks every goddamn sin I’m about to commit.
It’s perfect. It’s a fucking invitation.
I slide the heavy glass door open just enough to slip inside, the air hitting me like a physical blow, thick with the scent of her and the humid weight of the spray. I ease it shut behind me, holding the handle until the latch barely kisses the metal with a whisper of a click. The room smells like her soap—something floral, something clean, something that tries so fucking hard to lie about the ruin she’s hiding inside.
I lean back against the cool, vein-streaked marble wall and fold my arms, my eyes fixed on the silhouette behind the curtain.
The water. Her breath. The faint, broken hitch she makes when she tilts her head back into the spray, letting the heat scald the place where Noah’s blood touched her.
My mouth twitches, a dark, hungry little movement.
He marked her. He actually thinks he marked her.
I reach out and drag two fingers through the condensation on the mirror, slow and deliberate, the glass squealing under my touch. I write nothing at all—I just want to remind the glass, the room, and the very air she’s breathing that they answer tomytouch, not his.
“Blood on your dress?” I murmur under my breath, my voice vibrating in my chest as I shake my head. “That’s the best the prick’s got? A little stain on a piece of silk?”
The shower curtain shifts.
It isn’t enough for her to see me, but it’s enough for me to see the blurred, agonisingly beautiful outline of her shoulder, the elegant curve of her neck, and the way her head tilts as she exhales a long, shaky breath like the water is the only thing holding her upright.
