Hunter stops at the edge of the main lounge, finding us a shadowed corner couch that still lets us see almost everything. He sits, and I follow, his arm sliding along the back of the seat.
“I come here when I need to watch,” he says quietly, eyes tracking a woman in sheer black leading her masked partner toward a private room. “When I need to feel something without being inside it. Voyeur mostly. Sometimes more, if the invitation’s right.” His gaze shifts to me, dark and unreadable behind his mask. “You wanted a distraction. This is mine.”
I swallow, heat pooling low in my belly. The anonymity of the mask makes it easier to look–toreallylook–at the bodies moving in the golden light, at the surrender and the control braided together so tightly. No one here knows who I am. No one cares about lost memories or past transgressions.
Next to me, Hunter seems different. Less stiff and reserved. More at ease than I’ve seen him before, other than maybe the victory party after Damon won the Fury. I suspect it’s that easiness that compels me to ask, “Why do you only watch? Why won’t you touch me? Do you really hate me that much?”
My heart stumbles. I hadn’t meant to ask it out loud and definitely not the last part, but the questions have been living under my skin for weeks. Why does he watch me like he’s starving, but never takes?
For a long moment he doesn’t move, doesn’t speak. The sounds around us–soft gasps, the wet slide of skin, a low throaty laugh–fill the silence between us like water rising. Then he exhales, and leans in until his masked forehead almost touches mine.
Almost.
“I think I told you that my old man works maintenance at the university,” he starts, low, like he’s confessing to the dark instead of to me. “Night shifts. Sometimes he’d drag me along.”
I stay still, tuning out the others around us and focusing on him.
“What I haven’t told you–or anyone else–is that one night we were down in the boiler room fixing a busted line. I was behind the pipes checking gauges when a woman showed up. At first I thought she was a student, but then I saw her uniform. She was a custodian.” He takes a deep breath. “She knew my dad’s name and after a few minutes she started flirting with him, which was weird to see. My parents are married, happily, or so I thought.”
His thumb traces idle circles on his palm, but there’s nothing idle about the tension in his body.
“It was rough from the start, from the way he kissed her to how his hands took control. He pinned her wrists above her head, slammed her against the wall hard enough her breath caught.Slapped her once, open hand across the cheek. I thought she’d fight. Scream. Something.”
He pauses. Swallows.
“She didn’t. She moaned. Begged him for more. Told him to do it again, harder. And he did. Her skin was splotchy from the hit, bruises blooming under his fingers while he tore the buttons off her blouse. Her tits… fuck.” His eyes dart down to mine. “He bit her. Pinched. And all she did was wrap her legs around him and take it like that was exactly what she wanted.”
The memory hangs between us, ugly and electric.
“I stood there the whole time and watched,” he says, voice cracking just a little. “The little corner was so hot I was sweating, I needed air, but I couldn’t move. Fuck, I couldn’t look away. I got so incredibly hard watching him hurt her. Not just the sex. The hurt. The way her eyes watered, but she begged through it. The way she came when he squeezed her throat just right.”
Shame drips from every word, but there’s something else threaded through it—something almost defiant, like he’s waiting for me to flinch. “He never treated my mother like that. They were always civilized. Bland. I didn’t understand their relationship other than it just was… but that night? I saw something taboo. Something hidden in the dark and it was thrilling.” He runs his hand through his hair and it falls, tousling over his forehead. “When it was over and she left trying to straighten her torn clothes, my dad called me to come out. He knew I was there. He knew I was watching and now I understand that he wanted me to. He told me, ‘That’s what women want. They all want you to control them and are waiting for you to push them farther than they thought they could take it.’ He said it like it was a lesson I was supposed to be grateful for.”
He lets out a bitter breath. “All I got out of it was an insatiable appetite. Seeing them do that… fuck, it lit something in me that I couldn’t snuff out. The problem was that I was awkward and beyond inexperienced. No girls noticed me or were interested.” He shrugs. “That’s when I started finding ways to watch. Vents. Crawlspaces. Anywhere I could see without being part of it. Told myself watching wasn’t the same as doing. That if I never touched, I wouldn’t turn into him. I would have control.”
His fingers tighten in and out of a clenched fist, but our eyes meet when he says, “You asked why I don’t touch you? That’s why. I want to, more than I’ve ever wanted anything. I want to pin you down and leave marks you’d feel for days. I want to hear you gasp my name when it hurts just enough. And that scares the shit out of me, because what if I don’t stop when you want me to? What if I like it too much?”
The confession lands heavy, raw. I feel it in my chest first—a twist of horror at what he saw, what it did to a teenage boy already half-lost. Then something warmer, more complicated emerges: recognition. I’ve felt that edge myself, the place where fear and want blur together.
I turn toward him, lifting my hand to the edge of his mask, tracing the line where satin meets skin.
“You’re not him,” I say quietly. The words feel too small, but they’re all I have. “You’ve stopped yourself over and over.” Even when I didn’t want him to. “That matters.”
His jaw flexes under my fingertips. “Does it? Or am I just a coward that’s too scared to take what I want.”
I think of the hole inside my memory, the pieces of me I can’t reach. I think of how he’s talked me through my own wants and desires, watching me when I come hard from my own fingertips.
“You’re not a coward,” I whisper. “You’re careful. There’s a difference.”
He makes a low sound–half laugh, half groan–head dropping back on the couch. “What else can I be with the King’s bride?”
The vulnerability in it undoes me. Around us, the golden light flickers over strangers lost in their own pleasures, but right here it’s just us—two people carrying monsters we didn’t ask for, trying not to let them win.
“I’m not scared of you, Hunter.”
His tongue darts out and licks his bottom lip. “You should be.”
A woman walks over, tits spilling out of a red laced corset. At first I think she’s coming to hit on Hunter–or maybe me, but she pulls asmall square of paper from between her cleavage and hands it to him, saying, “From the boss.”
