“Thank you, Derek,” I said. Steady. Neutral. The voice I used when my body was telling me to leave a room.
Then it was Rhys.
He walked onto the platform with the posture of a man filing a formal complaint with reality itself. Arms at his sides. Jaw set. That permanent vertical line between his eyebrows — the Callahan Frown, which I’d started thinking of as a structural feature of his face, as fundamental as the cheekbones or the scar on his left hand that I’d noticed in the garden and was categorically not attracted to. Absolutely not. The scar was irrelevant. I was a professional.
He looked directly at me and said nothing.
That was the problem with Rhys, the thing I kept trying to file under “hostile” or “difficult” or “emotionally unavailable” and that kept escaping every category I shoved it into. He didn’t look at the performance. He didn’t look at the Queen, or the lipstick, or the heels, or the careful presentation I maintained like a second skin. He looked at me. He looked at me the way he probably looked at blueprints — searching for what was real underneath, identifying where the cracks were, deciding whether they’d been patched or left to spread. Most men looked at me and saw a surface. Rhys looked at me and saw a floor plan, and the difference was undoing me in real time.
I started circling.
The room went quiet in a way it hadn’t for the others. No laughter like Mason’s round. No pleasant vacancy like Julian’s. No predatory tracking like Derek’s. Just silence — dense, electric, the kind that happens right before either a thunderstorm or a terrible decision. He was already tense. It showed in his shoulders, in the rigid alignment of someonebracing for impact, in the faint tension along his neck that I tracked with a specificity that was either clinical observation or full-blown obsession. His hands hung at his sides — perfectly, painfully still. Which told me exactly how much that stillness was costing him.
I moved closer. Close enough to catch his scent — clean soap, bare skin, and a note underneath that didn’t belong to any cologne I could name because it was just him, and my stupid brain had decided to memorize it. His breathing changed — not dramatically, because he was too controlled for dramatic, but the rhythm shifted, inhales going deeper, exhales landing harder, his lungs and his body visibly negotiating about how much oxygen this situation required. I watched his chest rise and had to remind myself that I was the one administering this test. That my own accelerating pulse was a hazard of the job and not evidence of anything.
I stopped in front of him.
Close. Too close. If either of us breathed wrong we’d touch, and touching was the one thing the rules said we couldn’t do. Warmth came off his body like standing near a wall that had been in the sun all afternoon — solid, radiant, making me want to lean in and press my palm flat against it just to feel the heat transfer. Which was a deeply weird thought to have about a person, and I was choosing to blame the lighting.
He was watching me. Blue-grey, serious, and underneath all that control it was there — want so barely contained it was practically vibrating off him. The tendons in his neck were taut as cables. His hands at his sides were rigid as rebar. Everything about him radiated the exact tension of a man holding himself together by force of will and losing the negotiation one second at a time.
I leaned in. Close to his ear. Close enough that my lips almost brushed where his jaw met his neck. So he could feel the shape of the words before he heard them.
“Good boy.”
I whispered it — rougher than Julian’s polish, darker than Mason’s teasing, past Derek’s measured calm. I whispered it like a secret. Like it was only for him. Like the room full of cameras and crew and competitors had dissolved and there was nothing left but his ear and my mouth and two syllables that meant a different charge when I aimed them at this man.
He broke.
His eyes closed — just closed, like I’d tripped a fuse and his entire system went dark. His breath stopped midway through an inhale, suspended, his lungs deciding oxygen was no longer the priority. And then his whole body shuddered. A visible, full-body tremor that started in his chest and rolled through his shoulders, down his arms, into the hands that had been so carefully still. His head dropped forward — barely an inch, just enough — and his throat worked once, hard, a swallow that looked like it cost him years off his life.
The silence in the room was total.
I stood there with my mouth still near his ear and his eyes still closed and I felt — God. I don’t have the word for it. It wasn’t power, and it definitely wasn’t triumph, and it had nothing to do with a test or data or any of the things I was supposed to be tracking. It was vertigo. Standing at the edge of something very high and realizing you’ve already stepped off and the ground was never where you thought it was. I was the one administering this test, and I had without question, failed it.
He opened his eyes. And they were wrecked. Everything he’d been holding behind the frown and the composure and the three feet of careful distance — all of it was right there, exposed,undefended, so raw that looking at it felt like trespassing. This was want. Not the practiced desire Derek wore like a costume, not the appropriate interest Julian delivered on schedule. This was the real thing. The kind you can’t fake because it involves your whole autonomic body and all the tells your body knows how to produce.
He looked at me for two seconds — I counted — then turned and walked off the platform.
Not quickly. Not panicked. Deliberate, measured, except that his composure had just cracked down the middle and we could all see light pouring through the fault lines. He didn’t look at the cameras. Didn’t look at the other contestants. He walked through the ballroom doors and disappeared, and the sound of his footsteps on marble faded until the only thing left was the silence he’d carved into the room.
Mason was the first to speak. “Holy shit,” he said softly.
Nobody disagreed.
Tessa appeared at my elbow with her tablet, already pivoting. “Sloane. Derek scored highest. Julian—”
“I know.”
I caught it from the corner of my eye as Tessa steered me toward the next segment. Derek, leaning against the back wall with his arms crossed and his head tilted at an angle that looked casual from twenty feet away but wasn’t. He’d been watching the entire exchange with Rhys. Every second of it. And the expression on his face wasn’t jealousy or surprise or competitive fury. It was study. The careful, focused attention of a man who had just watched someone reveal a vulnerability on camera and was filing away exactly how to use it later. Our eyes met for less than a second. He smiled. I smiled back. Two people performing pleasantness across a room while a darker frequency hummed beneath the surface.
“—and Rhys left before scoring could—”
“I know.”
She studied my face. Whatever she found there made her close the tablet and put it behind her back, which in Tessa-language was the equivalent of pulling the fire alarm. “You’re going after him.”
It wasn’t a question. I appreciated that about her — she never wasted time framing the inevitable as a choice. “I shouldn’t,” I said, already looking at the door.
