I watch the crowd adjust. They don't know they're doing it — just the unconscious shift of living bodies near something they categorize as a weapon. The pressure in the room moves where he moves.
Logan leans in. His shoulder almost touches mine.
"Gunner," he says. Just the name. One word delivered quietly, and then he leans back again, like that's sufficient. Like the name alone closes the question.
I watch Gunner move through the crowd toward a door at the back of the room. He doesn't look at anyone. Nobody looks directly at him. He passes through the main floor like a weather event. Then he pushes through the back door and he's gone.
The room fills back in. The noise normalizes.
I sit with what I just saw.
I've been here all evening. I watched Logan break a man's hand without changing his expression. I met warmth and cool assessment and Isa's surgical dismissal. I've been looking at this room and thinking I was beginning to understand what I was seeing.
“Why did you bring me here?” I blurt out.
He blinks once, like a computer screen refreshing. “What?”
I lean forward, the words boiling in my chest. “You just watched me walk in wearing this ridiculous dress, insulted my clothes and luggage, then ignored me for the rest of the evening. Until you snapped that guy’s hand like it was a breadstick. And then you kept ignoring me.”
His stare is flat. “You think I ignored you?”
My throat is tightening. I want to run, but my legs are crossed and I’m pinned in place by the table’s edge and the weight of what I have to say. “I’ve been here for hours while you did your rounds. You made me watch you.”
He shrugs. “That’s how this place works.”
I sit back, digging my nails into my palm, and try to sound casual. “So it’s just you walking around, chatting to people, and occasionally breaking the bones of poor, innocent men?”
He gives me a look that’s all predator, no mask. “He wasn’t innocent,” Logan says, voice lower now, more intimate. “He wanted to sleep with you. He wanted to buy you drinks until you lost your senses and then take you back to his big vulgar house and screw you like a jackrabbit until he was bored. Nothing innocent about it.”
The way he says it, screw you like a jackrabbit, makes my face burn. “You still didn’t have to hurt him.”
“He touched you.”
“So? Maybe I wanted to go with him. Maybe I wanted to drink his vodka and let him fuck me until I couldn’t walk straight. Maybe that’s exactly what I wanted.”
He doesn’t blink. “No, you didn’t.”
“You don’t know me,” I say, but the words sound like a plea.
He leans back, crossing his arms. “I know exactly what you want. You want to surrender. You want to be ruined by someoneyou can’t outsmart or shake off. You want to see how close you can get to the edge before you fall.”
I feel it then, how brutally he’s read me. It’s not even the words themselves; it’s the certainty in his voice, the unshakable conviction that leaves no room for denial. My whole body feels exposed, as if he’s pressed his hands under my skin and found the place where I am softest and most ashamed.
I try to laugh, but it’s brittle. “That’s a lot of projection for someone who spends all his time controlling people.”
He shrugs, as if to say, so what. “You’re not mad because I broke his hand. You’re mad because I made you watch me do it.”
It’s true. I am mad. But the anger is only a cover for the thing underneath, which is hunger, which is terror, which is the sick thrill of knowing I belong to something much bigger and meaner than myself.
He sees it all on my face, and his eyes go black with satisfaction.
He leans in, close enough that I feel his breath against my ear: “You will never sleep with another man again,” he says.
A chill rakes through me, the kind I always felt as a kid when a dog would lock eyes with me through a fence and I knew it would bite if the chain ever broke. I try to swallow it down, but my body is already reacting; my thighs clench, my nipples stiffen, and I can’t decide if I want to slap him or slide under the table and let him do whatever he wants to me.
I force myself to stand. It takes effort, like moving through water, but I do it, forcing my chair back over the plush carpet. “You’re joking, right? That wasn’t part of our agreement.” I spit the word at him, like I want him to gag on it.
He stands too, so fast the chair nearly topples. He’s at my side in a blink, one hand at my wrist, and the contact is electric, a live wire pressed to my skin. I freeze.
