I pushed him onto the bed and climbed on top of him, my hands pinning his wrists above his head.The position was dominant—Gabriel would have approved—and I watched Nathan's pupils dilate as I settled my weight onto his hips.
"God, Bunny." His voice was already rough. "What's gotten into you?"
You,I thought.You've gotten into me. You've been inside me since the beginning, and I didn't even know it.
But I didn't say that. I said, "I love you," and I lowered myself onto him, and I rode him with a fury that made him gasp.
The sex was brutal. I set a pace that bordered on punishing, and he met it with an enthusiasm that would have been flattering if I hadn't known what I knew. His hands gripped my hips. His head fell back against the pillows. He was completely, utterly vulnerable—and I could have killed him right then, could have wrapped my hands around his throat and squeezed until the light left his eyes.
But I didn't. Because Matt was right. I needed a plan. I needed leverage. I needed to understand the full scope of what Nathan had done before I decided how to make him pay for it.
I leaned down and bit his shoulder—hard, harder than I'd ever bitten him, my teeth breaking skin. He cried out, his body arching beneath me, and I tasted copper. Tasted his blood. Tasted the truth of what he was.
That's for Monika,I thought.That's for every girl you collected and sold. That's for me.
"Fuck," he gasped. "Bunny, that was—"
"Good?" I licked the blood from my lips.
"God, yes. Do it again."
I did it again. I bit him until his shoulder was marked with the imprint of my teeth, until the blood ran down his chest in thin red rivers, until he was so lost in the mixture of pleasure and pain that he didn't notice the coldness in my eyes.
When he came, it was with my name on his lips and my teeth still buried in his flesh. I held him through it, my tongue tracing the wounds I'd made, memorizing the taste of his betrayal.
That's what you taste like,I thought.That's what a liar tastes like.
Afterward, he held me with a tenderness that made my skin crawl. "I love you," he murmured against my hair. "I love you so much."
"I love you too." The words came automatically, and they tasted like ash.
But I kept playing. Kept smiling. Kept being his good girl, his perfect partner, his Bunny. The performance was all I had left.
And somewhere beneath the performance, a plan was forming. A plan that would make Gabriel proud and Nathan sorry and me... me something new. Something neither of them had anticipated. Something that belonged to no one but itself.
The hunt was changing again. The prey was in my bed, and I was memorizing the shape of his throat.
11
The Goodbye Performance
The idea came to me not as a flash of inspiration but as a cold, methodical calculation—the kind Gabriel would have admired, the kind Nathan had spent months teaching me to apply to other people without realizing I might one day apply it to him.
I needed to leave the apartment. Not for an hour, not for an afternoon, but for long enough to follow the threads I'd uncovered without his surveillance trailing behind me like a shadow. I needed to find Gabriel—the real Gabriel, not the monster Nathan's files had painted him as, not the savior Nathan pretended to be. I needed to hearthe truth from the only person who knew both sides of the story and had no reason to lie to me.
But Nathan would never let me go alone. He was too careful, too controlling, too invested in maintaining the cage he'd built around me. If I asked directly, he'd find reasons to refuse. If I pushed, he'd become suspicious. If I ran, he'd hunt me.
So I wouldn't ask. I wouldn't push. I wouldn't run.
I would make himwantto let me go.
I set the stage at dinner, three nights after the files had shattered my world. The apartment was warm with candlelight and the scent of rosemary lamb—a recipe I'd perfected over weeks of careful practice. Nathan had just returned from a meeting, his tie loosened, his expression tired but satisfied. He looked like a man who'd had a productive day. He looked like a man who trusted the woman pouring his wine.
"I've been thinking," I said, setting the bottle aside.
"Dangerous habit." He smiled, reaching for his glass. "What about?"
"The network. Volosin's intel. The Mercy Logistics connection." I sat across from him, my posture open and earnest. "We've been hitting low-level targets for months, but we're not getting closer to the source. Every time we think we've found a lead, it dead-ends or the trail goes cold."
