"Everything's a prize." I stood and walked toward her. She didn't back away. She never backed away. "The question is who's willing to pay the price."
I stopped inches from her. Close enough to smell her—soap and coffee and something underneath, something that was just her. Close enough to see the pulse beating in her throat, the way her breath came faster, the way her pupils dilated.
"You're playing a dangerous game," I said.
"So are you."
I reached out and touched her face. Just a brush of my fingers against her cheek—the same gesture I'd used in the library, weeks ago. She shivered. I felt it travel through her body like an electric current.
"I'm going to have you," I said. "One way or another."
She didn't say anything. She just looked at me with those steady brown eyes, and I saw something there I hadn't seen before.
Not fear. Not desire.
Challenge.
"We'll see," she said.
She walked away. I stood in the kitchen with my heart pounding and my hands shaking, and I watched her go.
She was going to be mine.
She just didn't know it yet.
I spent the rest of the day in my office, making calls.
Dmitri had given me the basics—the farm, the mother, the father, the sisters. But I needed more. I needed the things that weren't in the file. The secrets. The weaknesses. The cracks in the armor.
"Her father," I said into the phone. "Henry Cross. He's in Scranton. I want someone to visit him. Ask questions. Find out what he knows."
"He won't talk," the voice on the other end said. "He's ex-military. Retired. Tough."
"Everyone talks eventually. You just have to find the right price."
"And if he doesn't have a price?"
"Then find the right threat."
I hung up and stared at the wall. The hole was still there, the one I'd punched last night. I'd have to have someone fix it. My father couldn't know. Not yet.
Not until I was ready.
That night, I dreamed of her.
She was in my bed, not my father's. Her hair was spread across the pillow, and she was looking at me with those steady brown eyes, and she was saying my name.
Nathan.
I woke up hard and sweating, my sheets tangled around my legs, my heart pounding.
I lay in the dark and stared at the ceiling and thought about the way she'd looked in the kitchen. The way she'd saidmaybe I wanted you to watch.
She was lying. She had to be lying.
But what if she wasn't?
What if she wanted me the way I wanted her—with hunger, with obsession, with something that had no name and no boundaries?
