The moment shattered like someone had thrown a rock through a window. His expression shuttered — halfway, enough that the openness I’d been watching retreated behind his usual defenses. He took a half-step back. Straightened his shoulders. Started reassembling his composure piece by piece, and I wanted to grab it with both hands and tear it back down.
“You should go,” he said again. Steadier. Almost convincing.
“This isn’t over.”
“I know.” Barely audible. Delivered without looking away and his hands — those hands — curled into fists at his sides like he was physically holding himself in place.
I turned and walked back toward the ballroom, heels clicking a rhythm that sounded like a promise.
He didn’t run because he was embarrassed. I knew that now. He ran because I whispered two words and his body had answered before his brain could intervene, and in front of cameras and competitors and a room full of people, he’d been more honest than anyone I’d ever tested. He ran because that honesty terrified him — because he’d spent a lifetime learning to be stone, and I’d turned him to glass with a murmur.
I was going to say it again.
Forget the cameras. Forget the show. Forget strategy and tools and two syllables designed to reveal character. I was going to say it again because when I did, he closed his eyes like my voice was the only sound in the world. And nobody — not in four seasons, not in eleven men, not in a lifetime of being told I was too much — had ever made me feel like that was enough.
CHAPTER 8
Good Boy
“When he finally admits what he wants — and it’s you”
RHYS
Two words had taken me apart, and I couldn’t find all the pieces.
I was in the east corridor bathroom — not my bedroom, the garden, or any of the locations where a man might reasonably go to fall apart — because this had been the first door with a lock and my legs had made the decision for me while my brain was still buffering. The bathroom was marble and brass and obscenely expensive for a room designed around basic human functions, and the mirror spanning the wall above the vanity was giving me a high-definition view of exactly what a nervous breakdown looked like on a six-foot-two frame. My color was wrong. My breathing was doing an arrhythmic thing that my body seemed to be running without my authorization, and my hands were shaking in a way I hadn’t experienced since my licensing exam, which at least had the decency to involve calculus instead of two syllables whispered against the side of my neck.
I gripped the edge of the sink. White-knuckled. The marble was cool under my fingers and I focused on that — on the temperature, the smoothness, any sensory input besides the ghost of her breath on my skin. Because focusing on countertop composition was preferable to focusing on the fact that Sloane had leaned into my ear on a stage in front of cameras andcontestants and a live studio audience and whispered me into rubble. I could still feel it. The heat of her proximity. The shape of the consonants landing against my skin before the sound reached my eardrums.Good boy. Said like a secret. Said like it was mine. The rational part of my brain understood that these were phonemes, vibrations, air molecules organized into patterns that the auditory cortex decoded as language. The irrational part — which had apparently been running the show since approximately week two of this catastrophe — kept replaying them on a loop that was wearing grooves into my temporal lobe.
My reflection stared back at me: thirty years old, broad enough to fill doorframes, and absolutely, comprehensively wrecked by a woman who’d stood on tiptoes to reach my ear. If I’d been capable of laughing, I would have. But laughing required a muscular coordination that had been reassigned to keeping me upright, so instead I just stood there, gripping marble, running diagnostics on a psyche that refused to reboot.
The thing I couldn’t rationalize — the thing that kept circling in my skull on a loop that was wearing grooves into my cognition — was that I’d liked it.
I didn’t like the public spectacle. The humiliation of an entire room watching me come apart would fuel my insomnia for years, assuming I survived the next ten minutes. But the words themselves. The sound of them. The way they’d landed in some deep, untouched part of me and detonated with a certainty that suggested they’d been custom-built for that exact location — as if I’d been carrying a lock my entire life and she’d simply been the first person to show up with the right key. Which was, objectively, the most alarming thing I’d ever thought while gripping a bathroom sink on national television, so at least my capacity for self-assessment remained intact.
I splashed water on my face. It didn’t help. The mirror was still there, still showing me a man who’d spent thirty years perfecting self-control and had been leveled by a whisper. If my composure were a building, the inspector would condemn it. Catastrophic failure at all load points. Cause of collapse: two syllables, delivered at close range. Recommend demolition.
Three sharp raps on the door — a knock that had already decided you were opening. “Rhys.” Her voice through the wood, lower than her Queen register, the off-camera version I’d been cataloguing for weeks as if I collected audio samples and telling myself it’s research. “Come with me.”
Every rational argument for staying behind this lock assembled itself in the time it took me to cross the bathroom: distance, perspective, a hazmat team for the emotional contamination site. I inventoried each argument with the thoroughness of a man building a very compelling case for self-preservation. Then I unlocked the door anyway, because my hands had quit taking direction from logic sometime around week two.
She was standing in the corridor with her heels in one hand and her expression stripped of every layer of production value I’d ever seen her wear — the rehearsed composure gone, the camera-ready glow abandoned somewhere between the ballroom and this hallway. Just Sloane, barefoot on marble, looking at me with an expression so direct it made the fluorescent corridor feel like a confessional. Something turned over behind my ribs. My fingers curled against the doorframe. Both reactions were noted, filed, and completely ignored by the part of me that was already stepping forward.
“Come with me,” she said again, and my body followed her before my brain finished the risk assessment.
The Queen’s Suite was on the third floor, at the end of a corridor the production team had designated camera-free because Sloane had insisted on it during contract negotiations. A detail I knew because Mason had mentioned it during one of his unsolicited informational broadcasts, and because I filed every scrap of data about this woman with the obsessive thoroughness of a man building a case file he’d rather die than admit existed.
She opened the door. I walked in.
The room was nothing like the rest of the mansion, which had been decorated by someone with a deeply problematic relationship to gold leaf. Her suite was lived-in. Real. Throw pillows that had actually been thrown, not arranged for symmetry. A stack of books on the nightstand with cracked spines and dog-eared pages — a true crime paperback on top with a coffee ring on the cover, and I wanted, with an intensity that was frankly concerning, to understand everything about a woman who drank coffee while reading about serial killers in bed. There was a framed photo on the dresser of an older woman with Sloane’s exact jawline — her grandmother, probably, the one who’d taught her the pie recipe — and next to it, a bottle of prescription melatonin that told me she slept about as well as I did. Which was to say: badly, and with pharmaceutical assistance.
I was reading her space, compulsively, extracting meaning from every detail the same way I’d read a set of plans — and the intimacy of it hit me harder than the stage had. This was where she was real. Where the cameras couldn’t reach. And I was standing in the middle of it with my composure in pieces.
She closed the door behind me. The click of the latch was the loudest sound I’d heard in ten minutes.
“Sit down,” she said. Not unkindly. The tone you’d use on someone who’d just survived a car accident and was still standing through sheer adrenaline.
I sat. The edge of her bed, because it was closest, and because my knees had been running on borrowed time and chose this moment to submit their formal resignation. The mattress gave under my weight and I had the disorienting awareness of being in her space, surrounded by her things, sitting where she slept, and I would have traded my professional license for the ability to process one crisis at a time instead of experiencing them as a simultaneous buffet.
