Morning came the way winter did here—quiet, absolute, and unbothered by what you wanted.
In Charleston, the sun always tried to soften things. Even in December. Even when the air had teeth. There was always that thin, polite warmth, that lie the Lowcountry told itself about gentleness.
Upstate New York didn’t lie.
Light seeped through the tall windows in a pale wash that made the room feel bigger and colder than it should’ve been, even with the thick rug under my feet and the heavy drapes hanging like velvet warnings. Snow sat piled on the ledges outside, pristine and indifferent. The pines beyond the glass were dark, still, and watchful—like they were holding their breath.
Likehewas.
I’d slept. Not well, but enough for my body to stop vibrating.
And still, the first thing I felt when I opened my eyes wasn’t rest.
It was awareness.
A slow, hungry pulse that lived between my thighs, answering a question my mouth had never dared to ask out loud.
Last night hadn’t been sex. Not really.
It had been something worse—something better.
A man had touched me like he already owned the right to touch me. Like my arousal was a fact he could hold in his palm and measure without effort. Like he could make me obedient with nothing but a sentence.
And then he’d left.
“Tomorrow,” he’d said.
I’d hated him for that.
I’d hated myself more for how hard my body had clenched at the word.
I swung my legs out of bed and stood, the cold floor shockingly real under my feet. I padded to the window and pulled the curtain back a few inches.
Nothing moved outside.
No footprints. No sign of life beyond the estate’s quiet, wintry exhale.
But the house itself felt alive. Heated. Waiting.
And I was in it.
A woman who had built her career on ending violence—on mitigating it, preventing it, scrubbing it from headlines and budgets—now standing in a hunter’s world with her skin still remembering his hand.
My phone lay on the nightstand. I picked it up, as if my fingers would find him in the glass.
No new messages.
Right.
Silence was part of this. A leash you couldn’t see.
I set the phone down and went to the bathroom. The mirror there was crueler than the one in my condo back in Charleston. Something about the light made everything sharper.
My eyes looked the same.
My mouth didn’t.
It was slightly swollen, like I’d been biting my own lip in my sleep.
