"I should go back," I say.
He nods. Still not quite meeting my eyes. A polite distance, as if he gave something last night and isn't sure he wanted to.
The day suspends itself between morning and night and refuses to move.
Back in my penthouse, the sketchbook comes out. Pencil already worn to a stub, pages halfway through another cheap spiral-bound that will be thrown away when it's full.
I draw his head on my lap, his soft hair, trying to get the angle right as seen from above. The boy. That’s the version I’m trying to draw, but I can’t get it right. Can’t capture the innocence and loneliness behind his stern, handsome face.
When he comes next, which version will it be? The fixer, the monster, or the boy?
Dusk arrives finally. I don't turn on the lights. I sit in the cooling apartment and feel the uncertainty thickening around me. Will he punish me for what I heard last night?
Night falls.
He doesn't come.
I keep waiting.
I don't hear the elevator.
One moment I'm standing by the floor-to-ceiling windows looking past my reflection to the city doing its ten-PM brightness, and the next moment he's in the room. Standing near the kitchen. No mask. His face — the actual face, blond and sharp-jawed and giving me nothing. His suit jacket is still on. His eyes are on me.
And there is a knife in his hand.
I whirl around to face him fully.
It isn’t a folding knife this time. A fixed blade, four inches, black handle, purpose-made. He holds it loosely, familiarly. Not raised, not threatening. Just present. Just there. The gauze on his right hand catches the ambient light from the city below — white against the dark handle, still neat.
My body decides before my brain catches up.
I step back. Then again. My heels find the base of the window and there's nowhere left to go, nothing behind me but forty floors of city and my own reflection, and I stand against the glass while he crosses the room toward me.
Punishment. That's the first thought, arriving fully formed before I can weigh it:he shook in front of me, he told me about his father, he let me see the boy under the armor, and he has spent all day thinking about how weak he looked, and now he's here with a knife.Men who show softness and then punish you for witnessing it — I've known that type in the drifting years. The door swings one way and then comes back the other direction fast.
But underneath that thought, crowding in before I can commit to it:he came back.He could have stayed away. He could have handled last night by simply disappearing, letting the arrangement dissolve.
He came back. But he brought a knife.
The safeword is right there behind my teeth —red, one syllable — and my mouth won't form it because my body has locked up entirely. Not a decision. Not a choice. Just a body that has stopped being available for speech.
He doesn't tell me to stay still. He doesn't explain what happens if I move. He gives me nothing — no words, no context, no instruction. His silence fills the room the way a roar would.
He reaches me.
The flat of the blade presses against my throat.
Cold metal. Not the edge — the flat side, smooth — but cold in a way that makes every nerve send up a flare. My pulse hammers against the steel. I can feel my own heartbeat reflected back from the knife's surface, the most immediate confirmation that I am alive.
The breath I try to take gets stuck halfway.
He moves the knife. Not away — across. Down my throat, between my collarbones, to the first button of my shirt. The blade pops the thread, the button falls. Another. Another. He works downward, the knife a substitute for fingers, the cold of it leaving a trail of goosebumps up my spine. I am too afraid to look down. I am too afraid to look anywhere but at his face, which is unreadable, which has gone somewhere I can't follow.
My shirt falls open.
He looks at me. Slow assessment. No haste. The blade dips lower — between my breasts, along the line of my sternum, the cold tracing a path that ends at the waistband of my jeans.
I am wet. I am terrified.
