Lily bites her lip. She looks at me. "That's as far as we got. Daddy caught me staying up late. Julianna? What's the secret for twelve?"
The question finds the room. Finds me. Forest stops moving, his eyes narrowing.
Thorne's fingers flex, his nails digging into my skin. "Go ahead." A terrifying challenge vibrates in his low voice. "Touch her mind again."
"For twelve, Lily—you use the partner numbers. You double it, then add the neighbor." My voice trembles as I offer the pattern. "Try twelve times twelve."
Lily scrunches her face. "One hundred and forty-four?"
The needle goes in. She watches it. Her arm doesn't move. She and Theodore both know exactly what this is.
"All done." Lily presses the cotton ball to her arm. "That was nothing. Theodore has had worse. Did I get it right?"
"Yes." My confirmation is barely a breath.
"I did it!" Lily bounces. Then, she looks at Thorne. "Daddy? Can Julianna teach me all the secrets?"
The room goes silent. Thorne's jaw works. "Julianna will show you the rest later; right now, she and I need to have a little talk."
He doesn't just walk me back to the cell; he marches me like a prisoner to the gallows. The moment the heavy door clangs shut, he pins me to the wall.
"Shut up," he growls before I can speak. He sounds frustrated, almost frantic, his hands already at his belt. He realizes how it looks, fucking me again so soon, and he hates it. "Just—shut up."
The shirt comes first. He grips the fabric at my waist and drags it upward in one steady motion. His gaze drops, slow and appreciative, and the way his chest rises tells me he's not unaffected. Not even close.
"I hate you." Thorne's voice breaks as he hitches my hips higher. "But thank you … For showing her she isn't broken. For showing her she's brilliant."
The admission triggers something. He crashes his mouth against mine. A bruising kiss, desperate and intentional. He shifts his weight, the movement sudden and jarring, and drives into me with a rhythmic, punishing force that is also,undeniably, the most honest thing that has happened between us.
The pleasure building, a sharp, electric coil in my gut that I didn't ask for. It's a betrayal of my own body. My release breaks me fully open: the kind of shattering that leaves the jagged edges visible.
He buries himself deep and follows me over the edge with a sound he will probably spend the rest of the day resenting. The silence afterward is heavy.
At the door, he stops with his back to me. The heavy steel handle is already in his grip, but he doesn't pull. The silence between us isn't empty; it's vibrating with the same dark, kinetic energy that just wrecked us both.
"She didn't cry." The confession is a raw, jagged edge in the quiet. "For six months, every time I sat her down with a workbook, she ended up in tears. I'm her father. I'm supposed to be her hero, and all I did was make her feel small. And then you …" His shoulders heave under the weight of his tactical vest, his jaw hitching with a physical ache. "She doesn't see the numbers as monsters anymore. She sees the patterns, and it finally makes sense."
He hates it. I can feel the poison of that realization leaking out of him.
"I want you to teach her," he commands, though the authority in his voice is thinning, stripped back by the desperation of a man who has stopped fighting the inevitable.
I stay against the cinder block, my legs trembling from the fire of the belt and the weight of him. We can't hide anymore. This isn't about debt or strikes or names on a list. It's about the way my body hums for the exact moment he breaks me, and the way he can't find enough air to breathe unless he's taking it from my lungs.
I look at his broad back, at the tension in his neck, and realize that I don't want him to stop. I don't want a way out. I want him to come back and carve every sin I've ever committed into my skin until there's nothing left of me but the marks he's made.
He finally pulls the door open, but he doesn't look back. He doesn't have to. The tether is already pulled taut, a dark, pulsing wire connecting my heartbeat to his.
I have forty-eight hours. And for the first time, I'm terrified of what happens when the clock runs out.
23
The Map
JULIANNA
Forest has beenat the table for half an hour.
He sits with the stillness of a very large person who has learned stillness is the courteous option, and he looks at my work the way you look at something you're reading rather than seeing. Not the outputs. The logic underneath them.
