One word. That word.
My body stills.
“Why?” My voice is smaller than I want.
He holds my gaze. Doesn’t blink.
“We have to match, because you’re mine,” he says, simple as math.
“And if I’m yours—” hepauses, like it costs him to say it, “then you wear what I wear.”
He finishes, steps back, and looks at us in the mirror like he’s checking the fit of something he’s claimed.
“Twenty minutes,” he says. “Then we rinse.”
And just like that, the softness snaps shut again.
He starts wiping the counter, rinsing the sink, gathering hair from the floor with bare hands like he doesn’t care that it’s clinging to him.
Like he wants it to.
I slip back into the bedroom just as my phone buzzes on the bed.
Gabriel
Report. Or I’ll start with Fuentes.
My heart drops so hard it feels like my ribs crack around it.
Air turns thin. My palms go damp. For a second, I don’t hear anything but the thud of my pulse in my ears—loud, frantic, betraying me.
Ricky.
My mind flashes him like a photograph: his laugh, his hands, the way he looked at me like I was still a person. Like I wasn’t just… a leash Gabriel kept around his fist.
No.
Not him. Not because of me.
There’s nothing I can give on Maksim. Nothing Gabriel doesn’t already know. Meetings and moments with Maksim strobe behind my eyes—his house, his mouth, his hands, the way he watches everything like the world is a target.
I have nothing.
I type it and my heart pounds.
The ellipses appear.
Gabriel
Wrong answer.
My fingers hover over the screen. My throat tightens. I swallow and it feels like swallowing glass.
Think.
Think, Ayla.
Something—anything—small, harmless, useless, just enoughto buy time.
