No careful arrangement of limbs, no cultivated stillness. Just her, sprawled across the center of the bed with one arm thrown over her head and her hair fanned out across the pillow in that specific chaotic way. The glass ceiling above her is doing what it was built to do—clouds moving slow and enormous across the dark, the moon somewhere behind them throwing diffuse silver light across the room, across her.
She’s inside the clouds. The way she wanted.
I stand at the end of the bed, watching her breathe, trying to locate the version of myself that existed before she walked into this house. The one who kept this clean. Operational. The one who understood that wanting her was a thing to be managed, contained, and never—under any fucking circumstances—acted on.
I can’t find him anymore. And I’m not sure I want to.
She shifts in her sleep, an almost imperceptible tension in her brow. Maybe she’s dreaming. I try to imagine what goes on inthere—the restless engine of her mind, the loops and tangles that power her waking self. The inner seams of what makes her so uniquely…her.
What happened in the dining room sits in my body like shrapnel. Not the way the old shit sits—the jobs, the blood, the specific weight of what I’ve done and what’s been done to me. Those, I know how to carry.
This is different.
She was on her knees in front of me, put my hands in her hair, looked me dead in the eye and saidthis is yourslike she meant it. Not as payment. Not as leverage. She gave it to me and kept her eyes on mine the entire time, and for the first time I felt the devastating difference between being used and being wanted.
It almost broke me.
“Pretty violence,”she’d whispered, tracing my scar. The way she said it, like she was naming something she was taking for herself, it made this black thing in my chest twist, fill up and split apart, because if I ever wanted to be anything, it would be to be hers.
I exhale slowly through my nose and look at her sleeping in the clouds I built from her words, and I understand—with the cold clarity of a man who’s spent his life making calculations—exactly how fucked I am.
I am not going to be able to let her go.
That’s the fact of it. I’ve turned it over from every angle, run every operational assessment, applied every ounce of the discipline that’s kept me alive for years—and the answer keeps coming back the same.
She didn’t ask for this.
She doesn’t know what this means. What it costs. What it will cost. She sees the broken man in the shower, the man who made her come while proving to her how powerful her words are. She sees the man who trusted her, the man who gave himself over to the slow descent to devastation in her mouth. She doesn’t see what I do, or what I become when I’m not close to her.
This is no longer an obsession. It’s compulsion, and hell doesn’t know what I’ll do to keep her safe. What I’m already planning to do.
Ian’s not going to like it.
Of course, he’s waiting in the hallway when I exit her bedroom, leaning against the wall with his arms crossed, that look on his face that says he’s already catalogued every variable and doesn’t like the math.
“Cat’s out of the bag, psycho,” he says, falling into step beside me. “You don’t have to stalk around her anymore.”
“Shut up.”
“Old habits. Speaking of old habits…”
I stop at the top of the stairs.
He doesn’t say it directly. He doesn’t have to.
The cocaine. Prague. The dealer. The bar. Andrei dragging me out before the cops showed.
I glance back toward Sophia’s door. “Not while I have her.”
Ian holds my gaze for a long moment. “You sure about that?”
“I’m sure.”
“You weren’t sure in Prague.”
I turn on him, voice low and sharp. “You want to do this right now?”
“I want you to be honest with yourself for once. You almost got yourself killed because you went off the rails. You think Valeria didn’t notice? You think she doesn’t know exactly what triggered it?”
