His thumb traced the curve of my lower lip, just enough to unsettle my breath.
“You were never prey,” he said quietly.
The words landed in my chest like something fragile and sharp.
“Then what am I?” I asked.
A beat.
“Choice,” he replied.
The air between us tightened.
Dangerous.
Alive.
And for the first time since stepping into this wilderness with him, I understood the true shift in the dynamic.
I wasn’t flipping the script.
I was rewriting it.
And the hunter?—
He was letting me.
15
He was letting me.
That awareness settled into my body slowly, like heat from a fire you don’t realize you’ve stepped too close to until your skin begins to prickle. Letting implied restraint. Letting implied choice. It suggested that whatever was happening between us wasn’t something I was stealing from him or prying loose—it was something he was allowing to unfold.
Which meant he was still in control.
I stood there in my aunt’s kitchen with my phone still warm in my hand from the call with my mother, feeling the echo of that conversation reverberate inside my chest. I had told her I was choosing. I had said it calmly, clearly. I had meant it.
But standing in front of Cassian now, I understood that choosing something dangerous and controlling it were not the same thing.
He watched me without speaking, as though he could see the tension beneath my composure—the careful recalibration of a woman who had spent her life mastering rooms and was suddenly unsure whether she was steering or being steered.
“You’re quiet,” he said.
“I’m thinking,” I replied.
His mouth curved slightly. “You always are.”
There was no accusation in it. No impatience. Just recognition.
For a second, I was somewhere else entirely—standing in this same kitchen years ago, my feet barely touching the floor as I sat at the table with a workbook open in front of me. My mother stood behind me, one hand resting lightly on my shoulder, the other pointing to a line of text I had already read three times.
Think it through, Lia,she’d said, her voice calm, measured.Don’t rush to an answer just because it’s there. The right answer holds up under pressure.
I had learned then that thinking wasn’t just a habit—it was an advantage. It kept me composed, kept me ahead, kept me from being caught off guard. It made me someone who could anticipate instead of react. Someone who didn’t get swept up in things she didn’t understand.
Standing here now, with Cassian watching me like he could see straight through that armor, I felt the edges of it shift.
The snow beyond the window continued its steady descent, the world outside soft and muted, while inside the kitchen the air felt dense and charged.
