“Good boy,” he whispered, leaning down to press a kiss to my forehead. “Perfect, pretty siren. My most precious possession. My Cove.”
Afterward, he lay beside me, arm draped over my waist, his breath warm against the nape of my neck.
“You could have anything,” I said, not meaning to speak aloud.
“I have everything I want,” he replied.
I almost believed him.
I drifted in and out of sleep, waking to the faint glow coming from the windows and the distant call of curlews from the cliffs outside. My body was sore, but it was a good sore, the kind that came from being wanted. I thought about the ankle monitor, about the locked doors, about the fact that every comfort in this room was a calculated reward for good behavior. I should have been planning my escape, should have been plotting every second, but instead I found myself calculating the number of hours until the next visit, the next touch, the next taste of something like freedom.
I didn’t know what to call this feeling. It wasn’t love, and it wasn’t hate, and it wasn’t some Stockholm cliché. It was the sensation of being studied, understood, and chosen—not just for my compliance, but for what I was when I wasn’t performing. Ididn’t know if it was enough to survive on, but it was enough for now.
I was still a captive. But for the first time, I started to think of myself as something more than just that. I started to think of myself as part of the system—a variable, a catalyst, maybe even a threat.
I wondered how long it would take Tobias to realize it, too.
24
Tobias
It’s a peculiar pleasure, watching something you’ve acquired begin to acclimate. I’d always taken satisfaction in seeing my specimens settle, their colors brightening, their movements changing from frantic to exploratory, their sleep cycles regularizing as they realized the world would not, in fact, end overnight. But nothing had ever gratified me the way Cove did.
It had been almost two weeks since I’d moved him upstairs. Two weeks of watching him transform from a creature of pure survival instinct into something softer, more pliant, more… mine. He still wore the monitor, of course. He was still, technically, a prisoner. But the distinction had begun to blur, at least for him. I could see it in the way he moved around the home, even more comfortable in the space than when he was working here sans murder-sighting. I could see it in the way he looked at me when I entered his room—not with the sharp,assessing fear of prey, but with something more complicated. Anticipation, need, waiting for something he’d learned I could give him.
I found myself craving those evenings together. Not just for the sex, though that had exceeded every expectation I’d harbored. The way his breath hitched when I touched him. The sounds he made, involuntary and raw, when I found the right angle with a toy. The way he looked at me afterward, pupils blown, skin flushed and slick with sweat, as if I were the only thing in the world that mattered.
It was intoxicating.
This evening, I found him in his room, splayed out on his stomach, reading one of the texts I’d recently given him. He didn’t turn his head to look when I entered, but I saw his shoulders relax, the subtle shift in his posture that meant he knew it was me.
“Good day?” I asked, settling onto the edge of the bed, and placing his feet in my lap to massage out any lasting stress.
He shrugged, still looking at his book. “Yeah. You didn’t join me for dinner though.”
“I’m sorry, precious. My work call ran over.”
Cove’s toes curled against the inside of my knee and I made a show of kneading the arch of his foot until he squirmed.
“Are you going to make it up to me, Daddy?”
“Sweet siren, of course I am,” I said, working up his feet to his calves, lightly tickling the faint red hairs that covered his legs. Slowly, my hands climbed, petting the back of his knees, then his thighs until he gave up the pretense of reading and leaned into the pressure, pushing his hips up and out in a way he knew would drive me mad.
“Do you think,” he said, voice studiously neutral even as he let out soft sighs in response to my wandering touch, “that I’ll ever see the ocean again, outside this house?”
It wasn’t a question I’d expected, especially not right at that moment, though perhaps I should have. Cove had grown soft and attentive, but never unobservant, and though he rarely spoke anymore of leaving, it had to still itch at him.
I forced the smile, the unhurried confidence of a man who believed love—affection, at the very least—could sedate anything, even captivity.
“Of course you will. We could go for a drive this weekend, if you’d like. There’s nothing that says you have to stay inside.” I let my hands drift lower still, to the softest crease right beneath his ass, and he made a sound like a yelp disguised as protest.
He twisted around, looking up at me with his messy halo of copper hair, mouth set in a line that was both challenging and hungry. There were times—mostly at night, when I thought I heard him pacing the floors in the dark, or found him staring at the dark water through his windows—that I wondered if he was simply waiting for the opportunity to run. Other times, he seemed perfectly satisfied with his new reality, happy, enriched, and addicted to my attention.
Tonight, though, he seemed less restless, and more… restless in situ. Hungry for change but unwilling to trade his comforts for it.
“You mean that?” he asked, voice flattened and careful.
I rolled my eyes. “What am I, a politician?”
