I use the soap on the marble ledge because he told me to.
And because stepping out to grab my own supplies means leaving him unguarded for four minutes.
Clothes arrived on the second day. Folded. Pressed. Delivered without a word by a member of the household staff.
She held the bundle out like it was contaminated. Her eyes moved over me—unshaven, shirt wrinkled—then flicked toward the open bedroom doorway. It wasn't disgust; it was curiosity. She had heard stories about bodyguards, but none included a man living outside the heir's bedroom like a sentry dog.
I took the clothes. I didn't explain. There wasn't a version of the truth she would understand.
I smell like him now.
The soap is cedar with a chemical undercurrent—expensive, sharp. It clings to my skin after the shower and settles at the base of my throat. When I stand close to Ivan, the scents blur. I can't tell where he ends and I begin.
It should make me step back.
Boundaries exist for a reason. Distance keeps the sight picture clean. Distance stops the work from bleeding into something messy. Distance keeps you alive.
Those lines blurred the night Ivan put his fingers on my throat and counted my pulse.
I can still feel the cold of his touch, the way my skin tightened, the pressure of his thumb against my carotid, the way his fingertips traced the scar on my ribs like he was reading Braille.
I asked him a question I shouldn't have asked.
Should I be afraid?
And he answered.
No.
I'm not afraid of him. That's the problem.
I should have felt wary when he ordered me to strip in the dark. I should have felt anger. I should have felt the instinct to create space the moment his hand came near my throat.
Instead, my body went still—not the stillness of a target, but the stillness of waiting.
And then something worse: I wanted him to keep touching me.
That realization sits in my gut like swallowed lead, making me stand a little straighter when I'm alone.
Ivan is at his desk across the room. He has been there since the light outside shifted from morning gray to the hard, bright white of noon. Files arrived earlier by courier—security reports, financial records, the paper trail of an empire running on debt and violence. He is hunting for fractures, places where Boris has been pressing his thumb.
Ivan hasn't spoken to me for four hours.
That's standard; he treats words like ammunition—he doesn't waste them. But I can see the tension in his trapezius muscles. Itshows in the way his jaw locks when he reads a line that confirms a suspicion. He looks like a wire pulled to the breaking point.
The paranoia is getting worse.
Yesterday, he refused to let me leave the penthouse to meet with the tactical team, forcing me to conduct the briefing over video. He stood behind my chair, close enough that I could feel the heat radiating off him. When the team lead hesitated before answering a question about the perimeter, Ivan's breath hitched—a sharp intake of air, as if the hesitation were a physical threat.
The day before that, he canceled three meetings because the routes felt "wrong."
He isn't sleeping.
I hear him in the bedroom—sheets twisting, low sounds of distress. I've found him at the window at 3:00 AM, staring down at the grid as if he's trying to memorize the pattern of the traffic lights.
I can stop a bullet. I can break a wrist.
I can't stop whatever is eating at his mind.
