The sentence lands like a blade.
“You ordered this,” I whisper.
“Yes,” he says. “Because you’re my vulnerability. And I can’t let you be someone else’s weapon.”
“Or because you want to control me.”
His jaw tics. “Maybe I do. Maybe I’m afraid enough to want to own what I can’t afford to lose. That doesn’t make you guilty. It makes me human in the worst possible way.”
The honesty stings.
“You could have asked me,” I say, barely a breath.
Regret flickers through him—brief, sharp, real.
“I needed truth,” he says. “And I didn’t trust you enough to tell me.”
He turns and walks away.
No goodbye.
No apology.
Just the measured steps of a man who believes he did the right thing.
The door closes behind him.
Silence fills the cell again.
I pull my knees to my chest, press my forehead to the cold concrete, and finally let the tears spill—not for the cell, not for the fear, but for the hollow, tearing ache of loving a man who put me in a cage to feel safe.
13
Lucian
I’m avoiding going home.
Because I’ve become too accustomed to being welcomed there. To his warmth in my bed.
Snow sheaths the roofs like a thin layer of ash, the morning sun carving pale light across the skyline. From my office window, I can see the whole stretch of North End—ships creeping through the harbor, steam spilling up from chimneys, traffic crawling like veins pumping through the city’s metal heart.
None of it gives me the clarity everyone always assumes I have. It’s been two days since I ordered Elias dragged from my home and locked in the cells below the building. Two days since he looked at me through the bars with something worse than fear—disappointment. Betrayal. Hurt.
Two days of me trying to prove—desperately, obsessively, pathetically—that he was guilty.
And finding absolutely nothing besides an email and a blurry picture.
I close my eyes, letting my head fall back against the leather of my office chair. My fingertips press into the almost fully healed wound under my ribs—still tender from Xavier Long’s bullet. It’s nothing, a graze. But Elias’s hands had shaken when he stitched it. He’d been so close I could smell the cinnamon from the cookies he baked earlier.
Now, he’s in my cells, probably wishing I were dead. My father would’ve been proud of the efficiency. The thought makes bile rise in my throat.
A knock breaks into the spiral.
“Come in,” I say, voice rough from too much silence.
Mara steps inside, carrying a tray of coffee the way she used to do for my father. The image hits me with an almost physical weight.
“I wanted to come down here and check on you. I figured you hadn’t eaten,” she says gently. She’s one of the only people who still speaks to me like I’m human.
