My reflection in the mirror doesn’t look like Iris Hale, the debutante florist. She isn’t a girl who worries about petal symmetry. She looks like a fugitive.
“Good,” I whisper.
I turn and leave the closet to find him. The gray morning has reduced the storm to a steady drizzle. I find a door at the end of the hall that was locked yesterday. Today, it opens.
Thud. Thud. Thud.
Following the sound, I step into a gym. Mats cover the floor, with racks of free weights and a boxing ring in the corners. At the center, a bag hangs from a steel beam.
Cassian is destroying it.
He’s shirtless, wearing low-slung black sweatpants, his feet bare on the mat. His hands are wrapped in black tape.
Every strike is calculated, brutal, and devoid of wasted energy. A low kick snaps into the bottom quadrant, followed instantly by a driving elbow to the center. The canvas bag groans, swinging wildly, but he steps into the arc and stops it dead with a knee. He unleashes a combination of strikes that are too fast to track. Jab-cross-hook. The bag shudders and bends under the force.
I stop in the doorway. His back is to me.
I trace the muscles shifting under his skin. The broad expanse of his shoulders, the taper of his waist. He’s built like a weapon—lean, hard, scarred.
There’s a network of white lines crisscrossing his back. Old scars. Too straight to be an accident. Too old to be last night. And there, on his left shoulder, is a fresh bandage. Shrapnel from the crash. Or glass from the windshield.
Either way, it happened because he came for me.
He hits the bag again. A roundhouse kick that sounds like a gunshot.
WHAM.
He stops, catching the swinging bag with one hand to steady it without turning around. I glance at the corner of the ceiling. A pinprick of red light. He watched me walk in.
“I found the clothes,” I say, stepping onto the mats. The rubber yields under my boots.
“Good.”
He walks to a mini fridge in the corner, pulling out a bottle of water and downing half of it in one swallow. He reeks of sweat and adrenaline. It shouldn’t be attractive, but it is.
“You said I’m not going back in the box,” I say, keeping my distance.
He caps the water bottle, his dark eyes locking onto mine.
“You aren’t,” he says. “But there are rules.”
“What rules?”
“You have the run of the main house,” he clarifies. “The library. The kitchen. The gym. But you don’t leave the estate walls. And you don’t touch the comms.”
Turning, he walks back to the bag, wrapping his hands around the chain to steady it.
“That’s the deal,” he says. “You stop trying to escape. You stop throwing crystal decanters at my head. And I keep you alive.”
“And if I break the rules?”
“Then the deal is off, and I lock you back in the bedroom,” he says simply. “And you spend the next week staring at the wall.”
I weigh his words. He’s giving me a leash. A long one, but still a leash. But it’s better than the alternative.
“Okay,” I say. “Deal.”
“Good.”
