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That was the plan. Take what she agreed to, scratch the itch that started the moment I saw her in that ridiculous bunny costume, and walk away before morning.

No attachments.

No complications. No weaknesses for our enemies to exploit.

My father built the Winter Empire on that doctrine. Emotional distance as armor. Caring about nothing that could be used against you. I have lived it for twenty-three years, worn it like a second skin, and in one night…in one fucking night…with a girl with dull brown eyes and a body too thin from skipped meals, I feel it starting to tear.

I move a little faster to test her, the whole time reading her reactions the way I read business negotiations and territorial disputes. Every gasp, every shift of her hips, every time her fingers curl back into the sheets…I catalog it all and adjust accordingly. When she arches into me, I angle deeper. When she stills, I slow down, wait, and let her catch up.

I reach between us, finding her clit with my thumb, still slick from her first orgasm. I circle it slowly, matching the rhythm of my hips, and her whole body jolts.

“Easy,” I say, the same word I used before, and it comes out almost tender. I don’t do tender. I don’t know how. But my hand is steady now, my thumb working her with a patience I didn’t know I possessed, and she is responding to it…responding to me…her hips rolling into my touch despite the intrusion still stretching her, still burning.

I feel the build in her before she does. The tightening of her inner muscles around my cock, the quickening of her breath, the way her head presses back into the pillow, exposing her throat in a gesture of vulnerability that makes me want to mark her, claim her, ruin her for anyone who isn’t me.

She comes with a cry that sounds like something breaking open that she’s spent years keeping locked down. Her pussy clamps down on me so hard I see stars, but I keep moving through it, stroking her, fucking her with the same relentless gentleness until she’s shaking, sobbing, her hands coming up to grip my shoulders.

And then I feel it…my own control fraying at the edges, the coil in my gut tightening past the point of return. I should pull out. The thought surfaces through the haze of sensation, reminding me of consequences and all the reasons this is already a disaster.

I don’t pull out.

I come inside her with a groan that sounds like it was ripped out of me, my hips stuttering, my cock pulsing as I fill her with everything I shouldn’t be giving her. The release is violent, endless, draining something from me that I didn’t know I had to give.

When it’s over, I don’t move. I let my forehead drop to her shoulder, my breath ragged, matching hers. The mask is still on. I should take it off and let her see the face of the man who just took her virginity and her trust in the same breath.

But I can’t let her see me. Not yet.

Because if she looks at me with the same emptiness she’s showing now, then I might have to face the fact that I am exactly the monster she thinks I am.

Noah and Ryker haven’t moved, haven’t spoken, and I know without looking that they’re feeling it too. The thing that just happened that wasn’t supposed to and cannot be undone.

Fawn lies there still and quiet, and I feel the moment she starts to retreat. Not physically, but internally.

Survival mode. The only mode she knows.

I lift my head, searching her face for something I don’t have words for. Her eyes are closed, her lashes dark against her cheeks, making her look younger than nineteen. But a girl who has been paying debts that aren’t hers for too long, and who just paid another one with her body. Not knowing what the interest will be.

I should say something.

Instead, I pull out slowly, watching her face for any sign of pain. Nothing. She’s too good at making herself invisible when it matters most.

I settle beside her on the ruined white sheets, still wearing the fucking mask. My hand finds her hip, and she doesn’t pull away.

Ryker settles on her other side, his zombie mask still in place. Noah sits at the foot of the bed, the skull watching us with hollow eyes. We are three monsters in costumes, surrounding a girl we took from a parking lot. None of us know what happens next.

“You’re not leaving,” I tell her.

Fawn opens her eyes, staring at the ceiling, and I watch her throat work as she swallows.

“The deal was one night,” she says, her voice flat and exhausted.

“The deal has changed.”

The words are out before I can stop them.

She turns her head, looking at me for the first time since I came inside her. Up close, I can see the flecks of gold in her brown eyes.

“Changed how?” she asks.