Nathan's voice, casual and warm, drifted down the hallway. My blood turned to ice.
I had maybe thirty seconds before he came looking for me. Maybe less if he noticed the study door was open. I shoved the photograph back into its folder, closed the desk drawer with a soft click, and scanned the room for anything else I'd disturbed. The laptop was untouched. The server was still humming. The only evidence of my intrusion was the unlocked door and the frantic hammering of my heart.
I slipped into the hallway just as Nathan's footsteps rounded the corner from the kitchen. He stopped when he saw me, his expression shifting from curiosity to something warmer. Something hungrier.
"There you are." His eyes traveled down my body, and I realized with a jolt that I was wearing only his shirt—a white button-down I'd thrown on after my shower, the hem barely brushing my thighs. My hair was still damp, my feet bare, my entire appearance screaming lazy domesticity.
I looked like a girl who'd been waiting for her man to come home. Not a girl who'd been breaking into his locked study.
"I missed you," I said, and the words weren't entirely a lie. I had missed him—the version of him I'd believed in, the version I'd loved. I missed that version even as I began to suspect he didn't exist.
"I was only gone two hours." He moved closer, his hands finding my waist.
"Two hours too long." I stepped into him, pressing my body against his, letting him feel the warmth of my skin through the thin cotton of the shirt. His breath caught. His pupils dilated. I watched his control slip, just slightly, and felt a surge of dark satisfaction.
You're not the only one who knows how to use distraction,I thought.
"I need you," I whispered against his mouth. "Right now. Right here."
He didn't argue. He'd never argued when I initiated—it was one of the patterns I'd catalogued about him, one of the tells I'd filed away without consciously meaning to. Nathan liked being wanted. Nathan needed to be needed. It was his weakness, the crack in his armor, and I was learning to exploit it the way Gabriel had once taught me to exploit the weaknesses of others.
I pushed him against the hallway wall, my hands working his belt with frantic urgency. The shirt I was wearing rode up, exposing the curve of my hip, and Nathan's hands found the bare skin with a possessiveness that would have thrilled me a week ago. Now it just made me wonder how many other women had felt those hands, how many other "assets" he'd retrieved and conditioned and kept.
"God, Bunny." His voice was rough as I freed him from his pants. "What's gotten into you?"
"You." I kissed him hard, biting his lower lip just hard enough to draw a gasp. "You've gotten into me. You're always in me. I can't stop thinking about you."
The words were a performance. The desire was real—my body responded to him the way it had been trained to respond to dominant men, the way Gabriel had programmed it and Nathan had reinforced. But underneath the arousal, my mind was cold and clear, watching the scene from a distance. I was using sex as a weapon. I was using my body as a tool. I was doing exactly what Gabriel had taught me, and I was doing it to the man who might be Gabriel's brother.
The irony would have made me laugh if I hadn't been so terrified.
I lifted one leg, hooking it around his hip, and guided him inside me with a practiced ease that felt almost mechanical. The stretch of him, the fullness of him—it was familiar now, a sensation I'd experienced hundreds of times. But today it felt different. Today it felt like a transaction. I was paying for my escape from the study with the currency of my body, and Nathan was accepting the payment without knowing it was being offered.
"Look at you," he breathed, his hands gripping my hips. "So desperate for me."
"Always." I rolled my hips, finding a rhythm that made his eyes flutter closed. "Always desperate for you."
He fucked me against the wall with the same intensity he brought to everything—controlled but passionate, dominant but not cruel. He was good at this. He'd always been good at this. And I'd always believed it was love.
Now I wasn't sure what I believed.
When he came, it was with my name on his lips and his face buried in my neck. I held him through it, stroking his hair, murmuring the words I knew he wanted to hear.I love you. You're everything to me. I'm yours.
The performance was flawless. The performance was all I had left.
Afterward, he carried me to the bedroom—gentle now, solicitous, the caring partner who'd saved me from myself. He drew a bath and added the lavender salts I liked, and he washed my hair with the same reverent attention he'd given it a hundred times before. And I let him. I let him take care of me, let him believe he was still my savior, let him think the cracks in our foundation were invisible.
But when he left the bathroom to make dinner, I slipped out of the tub and retrieved the photograph from its hiding place in my underwear drawer. I'd smuggled it out of the study in the waistband of my panties—the only thing I'd been wearing under his shirt, the one place he wouldn't have thought to look.
I studied the faces of the two boys in the fading light. Gabriel, who'd broken me. Nathan, who'd saved me. Brothers, standing together in front of the building where my life had ended and begun.
What else had Nathan lied about? What else was hiding in the locked study, the encrypted server, the files I hadn't had time to examine? What else had I been too foggy to notice?
I hid the photograph again and returned to the bath before Nathan could notice I was gone. The water was still warm, the lavender still fragrant, the scene still perfect. And when he came back to check on me, I smiled at him with the face of the woman he'd made me into.
"Feeling better?" he asked.
"So much better." I reached for his hand, lacing our fingers together. "Thank you. For everything."
