She shifted again. Her shoulder blade was six inches from his chest. He could feel the warmth radiating off her through the thin cotton of her shirt, and his body screamed at him to close the distance. To curl around her the way he used to, arm draped over her waist, his face buried in her hair, the two of them locked together like a puzzle that only worked when all the pieces were touching.
He didn’t move.
five
The scream cutthrough the apartment like a blade.
Vivi was on her feet before she knew she was moving. No thought. No decision. Just bare feet hitting hardwood and the hallway rushing toward her because that was Sabin, that was her brother’s voice, and her body had been hardwired to respond to it long before she’d had words for anything.
She hit the door at a dead run and slammed her palm into the biometric pad hard enough to rattle the housing.
Beep.
She tried again. Again. Left hand, right hand, both, like she could wear the machine down through sheer repetition. It beeped its flat, bored note and the three locks behind the steel stayed exactly where they were.
She grabbed the handle and pulled. Pulled until her forearms burned and her feet slid on the polished floor.
“SABIN!”
Nothing came back. The apartment swallowed the sound whole — completely, indifferently, like it had never existed.
She clawed at the seam where the door met the frame. Felt a nail bend backward and split. Didn’t care. Sabin was somewherein this building being hurt, and she was standing in borrowed pajamas like a child sent to her room.
A hand closed around her elbow.
The world folded.
She wasn’t in the apartment anymore.
Istanbul. Three years ago. A cramped safe house that smelled like cigarettes and damp plaster, and Dom’s arms locked around her waist from behind while she screamed herself hoarse. Sabin’s name, over and over, tearing her throat raw while boots thundered through the cisterns beneath Sokolov’s compound and she couldhear— God, she could hear — the Turkish police closing in. Dom held her. Held her while she kicked and clawed and begged, held her while her brother was dragged out of those ancient tunnels in handcuffs, held her while the life she’d known came apart at the seams.
Then the safe house door. The sound of the lock engaging from the outside. His voice through the wood, steady and certain and so goddamn reasonable.I can’t let you go back, Vivi. You know what’ll happen.
A week. He’d kept her in that room for an entire week. She’d screamed until she had no voice left. Tried the windows — barred. The vents — welded shut. She’d sat on that filthy mattress and listened to her own breathing and imagined Sabin in a Turkish prison cell doing the same thing, and she’d hated Dominic Wilde with a clarity that scared her.
Because he’d decided. Without asking. Without giving her a vote or a voice or a single shred of the agency that was supposed to be hers by right of being a goddamn human being. He’d calculated the odds and concluded that her freedom was worth more than her choice, and he’d acted on that conclusion with the absolute certainty of a man who believed — really, truly believed — that he knew best.
The worst part, the part that still made her sick three years later, was that he’d been right. If she’d gone back, she’d be in prison. If she’d confessed, she and Sabin would both be rotting in a Turkish cell instead of just Sabin alone. Dom’s terrible, unforgivable choice had handed her everything she had now — the business, the freedom, all of it. He’d stolen her agency and given her a future, and she’d never been able to reconcile those two things. Not in any way that let her sleep.
The elbow. His hand on her elbow.Now.
Vivi ripped free hard enough to feel the socket protest. She spun and shoved him, both palms flat against his chest. He stumbled back a step, caught off-balance, and the shock on his face — raw, unguarded — almost made her feel something she couldn’t afford.
“Don’t youeverput your hands on me like that again.”
Every edge intentional. Every syllable a line drawn in blood, reinforced with three years of fury she’d thought she’d buried deep enough to ignore.
He froze.
She watched the war move through him. She could read Dom the way she’d always been able to read him, the way she hated being able to read him, because it made him human and she needed him to be a villain. Every instinct was screaming at him to close the distance, to fix it, to put himself between her and the thing hurting her the way he was built to do. She could see his arms coil and hold. Could see his jaw lock so tight the tendons in his neck stood out.
His hands came up. Open. Palms out.
He stepped back.
Didn’t argue. Didn’t explain. Didn’t offer any of the hundred reasonable justifications that would have poured out of him three years ago, each one perfectly logical and utterly beside the point.
He just stepped back.
