Not like possession. More like being seen. Being placed, definitively, on a pedestal.
“Let’s go,” Logan says, then walks through the crowd without waiting to see if I will follow.
The town car is dark leather and climate-controlled, the city sliding past the windows in neon.
“Where are we going?”
I'm in the back seat next to Logan and the space between us is charged, residual heat from the kiss in the office.
Mineis still in the air. I can feel it the same way I can feel the warmth coming off his arm through his jacket.
The neon slides away behind us. Streets narrowing. The driver at least seems to know where we’re headed.
He completely ignores my question, but he shoots me a glare, eyes narrowed, no levity behind them at all.
Oh fuck. The heat between my thighs is immediate and embarrassing, and I bite my lip to keep from making a noise. What is wrong with me?
He leans forward.
One sentence to the driver. Quiet. The car slows, pulls right, stops.
We are not at my building.
We have been moving away from the city for some time — the neon fell away blocks ago, the street lights thinned, and now the road is dark and the windows on both sides show nothing but trees. Mangroves, I think. Dense, pressing close. A stretch ofroad that shouldn't exist this near to Miami but does, a pocket the city forgot to develop, and the nearest light is somewhere I can't locate from where I'm sitting. No ambient glow. Just the car's interior and the dark outside.
Logan leans forward and exchanges a word with the driver. Brief. He's used to being understood. The driver nods, then gets out of the car without shutting his door and walks away, footsteps on gravel, purposeful, moving back toward the city. Not waiting. Not lingering.
This was planned.The thought arrives and settles and I don't push it away.
The footsteps on gravel fade.
Silence.
Logan turns to me.
The monster is staring out at me through his eyes.
My body already knows. It registered the forested road, the dismissed driver, the way he is looking at me now — and it knows before my mind does. It has known since I answered an ad at two in the morning and flew toward a stranger and felt, for the first time in five years, that I was about to be somewhere real.
The precipice is here. The dark outside is very deep.
16 - Logan
The car ticks as it cools. The salt smell of the causeway is still faintly on the air — we turned off it twenty minutes ago, the water open and black on both sides back there. Here the mangroves press close. Dense, salt-rooted, their canopy low and interlocking overhead, blocking the ambient city light completely. The smell is tidal mud and wet bark.
Wren is beside me on the leather seat.
I look at her.
I know what comes next.
A predator doesn't improvise. He scouts the terrain. He waits. When the moment arrives, it isn't a surprise — it's an arrival.
The shift happens. It moves through me like a current — the man who kissed her gently in his office steps back. Makes room.
The predator surfaces.
She sees it happen. I watch her watch it —her breath changing, the slight widening of her eyes, the color rising in her throat. She knows me now. She knows what's underneath the suit and the careful control.
