He steps back.
I hear it — small, metallic — the knife disappearing. Sheathed then placed on the dining table. Then there is no knife. Just him, standing in front of me in his dark suit with his face unreadable.
He looks at me for a long moment.
He reaches for my hand.
Not grabbing. Not commanding. A flat palm and slightly extended fingers and no instruction attached.
Asking without asking. In a way he never asks for anything.
I take his hand.
The gauze is smooth under my fingers.
“You okay?” he asks, voice low and quiet.
He's standing over me, a shadow backlit by the city glow slicing through the window. His hand is still in mine, our fingers half-laced, the other hand hovering in the air as if uncertain whether to touch me or let the moment pass unmarked. I can still feel the echo of the knife, the weird, inverted tenderness of it.
I shake my head, sharp-edged and honest:
“No.”
He smiles slightly at my answer. He knows he’s just broken me.
He lets go of my hand slowly, peeling away from me like he’s worried he’ll tear something delicate if he moves too fast. The air between us is charged, full of all the things that neither of us can say. He bends and picks up the knife from the table.
For a weird second I think he’s going to kneel down, maybe scoop me up, maybe say something that would reset the world. Instead he straightens and slips his hands into his pockets, standing there with every muscle pulled tight enough to snap.
He turns on his heel, heads for the elevator, his suit jacket settling back into its sharp, precise lines. I'm still half-falling out of the chair, jeans tangled at my ankle, the sweat cooling on my skin and the words buzzing in my head like wasps. He reaches the door and pauses, not looking back.
"Neither am I," he says, voice almost too soft to make it across the room. Then he steps through, and the door hisses shut behind him, and I am alone in the aftermath, the night humming around me like a live wire.
14 - Logan
La Sirena on a Friday night is a living thing. Two hundred people and their perfume and their money, the stage lit gold, the bar three deep, the sound system threading something jazz-adjacent through the noise. I know where every exit is. I know which of the floor staff called in a favor to get Saturday off and which vendors are waiting on a callback before end of week. I know the precise location of every moving part in this building.
I know exactly where she is.
She's at the far end of the mezzanine, one elbow on the railing, a drink in her hand she's barely touched. The dress is deep green — bottle green, a clean line from shoulder to knee, nothing theatrical about it. Simple. Well-chosen. She bought it herself. I can tell from the way she's wearing it: no awareness that it was selected by someone with an opinion about her body, none of the slight self-consciousness a woman carries when she knows she's been dressed by a man with intentions. She chose it. Walked into a store somewhere in this city, looked at the rack, picked the green one.
The irritation arrives before I can stop it, and I know it's disproportionate. She's a grown woman. The penthouse is hers. The money I transfer every week is hers to spend however she wants. She doesn't need me to provide the clothes, doesn't need me to dress her, doesn't need any part of her life curated by my preferences. She's demonstrating this clearly in bottle green silk,looking extraordinary, and I am deeply, irrationally irritated by all of it.
I track her across the room. The red dress was mine — a claim on her, chosen to match handwriting on a mirror, my vision of her body in my color. The word that finally surfaces, watching her lean against the mezzanine rail while I run a quick read on a man three tables over who's been watching the service entrance for the last ten minutes — not a threat, just a patron who doesn't know what he's looking at — ispossess.I want to provide for her. Dress her. Claim her through beautiful things and the giving of them.
I watch her, involuntary as breathing, aware of exactly where she stands in relation to every door and every person. Her eyes move along the railing below her in that slow systematic sweep she applies to everything — the crowd, the bar, the geometry of the room. She reads spaces like text. The man at the service entrance has moved on; I file him and forget him without looking away from her.
I gave her access to the penthouse. The building codes, the elevator, all of it handed over three weeks ago. La Sirena followed naturally — I added her to the system a week after she first came here, noted it and filed it away. She's here because I extended that access. Because at some point the distinction betweenguest I summonandperson who belongsstopped being one I wanted to maintain.
Movement at the edge of my vision. Gunner.
He crosses the main floor with that bulldozer effect, no acknowledgment of the people who step aside for him. He's heading somewhere, handling something. He always is. When he reaches the stairwell he pauses, one hand on the banister.
He doesn't look at me. He looks at where I'm looking.
Across the room, Wren has tilted her head slightly at something happening on the stage below. Her profile clean against the low light.
Gunner looks back at me.
