The words come out stripped bare, the command gone. My eyes stay locked on hers, trying to say everything I can’t afford to voice, the fear, the urgency, the truth I’m choking back.
She doesn’t answer. She doesn’t look away.
I lean in before I can stop myself.
The kiss is brief. Controlled. Not hunger, desperation. A collision of everything I’m holding back, pressed into a single moment I know I shouldn’t take. It’s slow, careful, as if I’m asking without words.
She bites my lip sharply and shoves me away.
Hard.
She storms past me, fury rolling off her in waves. I reach out on instinct and catch her wrist, pulling her back just enough that she spins and collides with my chest.
“Let. Me. Go. Khai,” she grits out. “I want to shower.”
Anger hums through her, hot and unyielding.
I release her immediately.
She doesn’t look back as she heads for the bedroom. Just before the door slams, she throws the words over her shoulder like a demand.
“I want my clothes and my essentials.”
The door shuts with finality.
Only then do I let myself breathe.
Every choice I’m making, the lies, the boundaries she never agreed to, the control I keep justifying, is built on one unacceptable truth:
If I give her complete freedom right now, I might lose her.
And I’ve already decided that’s a risk I won’t take.
Even if it makes me the villain in her story.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Emmy
The door slams behind me, the sound sharp and final, and fury floods my veins.
He’s infuriatingly cryptic, offering half-truths wrapped in silence, explanations stripped down until they mean almost nothing. And then, as if that isn’t enough, he decides my life for me. No work. No leaving. Trapped in his penthouse untilhedecides the world is safe enough for me to exist in it again.
I don’t slow as I storm into the bathroom. I strip out of my clothes with shaking hands, letting them fall where they land, a careless heap on the marble floor. Every nerve in my body hums with the need todo something, to scream, to throw, to break,
But exhaustion wins.
I step into the shower and crank the water hot. Too hot. Steam blooms instantly, curling around me like a living thing. The sting against my skin grounds me, a small, controlled pain I welcome until my body adjusts.
I scrub at myself harder than necessary, not really paying attention. My thoughts are too loud, spiralling too fast. Anger tangles with confusion, with something far more dangerous, doubt.
When I reach for the shampoo, I freeze.
Only his things line the shelf.
Of course they do.
I sigh and wash my hair anyway, already resigned to the fact that I’ll go to bed smelling like him. Like his space. His presence. The scent wraps around me, unsettling in how easily it seeps in, how it steadies me when it shouldn’t.
