“You said you wouldn’t hurt me,” she whispers. “At the Setai. You said no permanent damage.’
The fear in her eyes is real. She doesn’t know if she can trust me. Good.
I lean in close so my lips are by her ear, and I can smell the sweat on her. “I lied.”
A shiver runs down her neck, and I know the small, involuntary yip of fear that squeaks out of her mouth will keep me up tonight, my hand on my cock, her voice in my head.
I step back.
"Do you understand?" I ask.
She nods. A tiny motion, her whole body part of it.
"Say it."
"I understand."
She's still holding her own wrists. Still pressing her thumbs into the red marks the zip tie left, and she's looking at me like she's deciding whether to run from it. I let her look. I walk to the kitchen, open the refrigerator, close it. Give her something to do with her eyes besides my face.
"The code to get back in is your birthday." I'm already at the elevator. I don't turn around. She'll understand what that means — what it tells her about how thorough my research has been. I wait until the doors begin to close before I speak again.
"There's food in the refrigerator. Don't leave the building tonight."
The doors close on her face.
I watch it happen — that last image, her standing in the center of the marble floor with her wrists wrapped in her own hands, the Miami skyline behind her — and then the doors seal and the elevator begins its descent and I'm alone.
Forty floors.
I look at my hands.
They're shaking. Both of them, a fine persistent tremor I didn't notice until now because I was busy being something else, busy wearing the mask that gave me permission to be what I've spent thirty years pretending I'm not. I stare at them until the shaking doesn't stop.
What the fuck did I just do.
I kidnapped her. Bound her wrists. Dragged her to a van floor while she screamed and fought and cried without knowing who I was, and I drove her across the city and walked her into a penthouse and told her I would kill her if she left. I said it and I meant it — that's the part I can't rationalize into something else. For one moment I saidI will kill youand searched for the line between threat and truth and couldn't find it with any certainty.
And if she talks — if she finds someone in that building who asks the wrong questions — I've handed them a weapon pointed directly at La Sirena. I've handed them me. There aren’t that many assholes rich enough to buy a penthouse apartment in cash, so it wouldn’t take long for the cops to find me.
The thought surfaces, gets assessed, gets dismissed, because I don't actually believe she'll talk. Which is its own kind of certainty I have no right to.
Just like my father.
That's what surfaces underneath it all, in the silence after. My father coming through the front door with his unpredictable energy, the kind you learned to read from thirty feet away, the kind that kept young Logan calibrated and quiet and very, very careful. Fear as a management strategy. Force as love.I do this to keep you safe, mijo.The protection that was, at its core, a way of owning. The reasoning arriving after the action, always, to make it coherent.
I protected her tonight.
I protected her the way he protected us.
With fear. With force. With whatever the situation required, and the requirement defined entirely by what I wanted. I gave her a penthouse. I gave her a rooftop pool and security she can't see and forty floors between her and the motel with its broken lock. I thought of everything.
He always thought of everything too.
The elevator doors open to the parking garage. Fluorescent concrete and nothing to look at.
Some lines shouldn’t be crossed. I'm standing with a blank white mask in a shaking hand and I cannot locate, with any precision, the version of myself that knows where those lines are.
7 - Wren
