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I kept my face still. He was watching for the flinch, the calculation, anything he could use. I gave him the blankness he deserved as I waited for him to continue.

“You don’t contact anyone without my permission.” That one he said slower, and I understood it was the one that mattered most to him. “No phones. No notes passed to staff. No messages tucked into laundry. I’ve seen the voicemail you left your friend. The orchid was a nice touch.”

So he had intercepted it. I’d suspected it the moment I saw the flower in the foyer, but hearing him confirm it didn’t make me feel any better.

“You eat. You sleep. If you need something, you ask.” He paused. “If you run, I’ll respond. If you disobey, there will be consequences.”

“Consequences,” I repeated. “You’ll have to be more specific. I don’t respond well to vague threats.”

“I know you don’t.” Something in the way he said it told me he meant it as a compliment. “You respond to precision. You always have.”

I crossed my arms, partly because I was cold and partly because I needed to do something with my hands that wasn’t reaching for the necklace again. “Then be precise. What happens if I break one of your rules?”

He studied me for a long moment. The exhaustion was creeping in and I knew it, but I held his gaze. “That depends on which one,” he said.

“Pick one.”

“You try the elevator.” He tilted his head. “You make it to the lobby, somehow, past the men you’ve already counted.” So he had watched me count them. “I’ll bring you back here. And then I put you over my knee until you understand that running has a cost.”

“You’re not serious,” I said, though I already knew he was.

“I never say things I don’t mean.” He held my gaze, unhurried. “You should know that about me by now, but you can try me if you want to.”

I almost said what I was thinking just to get a potential reaction out of him. So I imagined it instead. The image was of me, in the elevator, clawing at a panel that needed his thumb or card access. Then it was a visual of me somehow making it past the man in the foyer and the man at the glass door and however many others I hadn’t seen. Then it was me, in the lobby, and then being brought back up, and then his hands on me.

Let me repeat that again: his hands on me.

My body did something I hadn’t and would never approve of. I could feel a flush crawling up my neck that had nothing to do with the cold and everything to do with part of me still being attracted to Cain Ashcroft. The part of me that replayed the memory of the alley where he fucked me as Bradley died mere feet away. The part that had swung a paperweight at his skull and still, somewhere underneath the rage, had felt something else when he’d opened the passenger side door of the SUV just hours ago.

I hated that part of me that had been thinking about him on this level. I’d been hating it for weeks, but there seemed to be no way to stop it or slow it down. Not even the time we spent apart did the trick because for most of the time I’d been on the run, it had been thinking of ways that I could outsmart him.

And all of that was for naught.

But he didn’t need to know any of that. Although I didn’t know how much of a flush appeared on my face or what other body language he might have caught, I decided to take control of the situation.

I uncrossed my arms slowly and let them fall to my sides as if I was completely at ease. I forced myself to release the tension in my body and I hoped I looked more relaxed than I actually felt. “Noted,” I said.

Just one word. It was a victory in its own way because I’d kept everything else off my face that I could.

Cain studied me for a moment longer. “Good,” he finally said. “You’ll find the bathroom stocked. There’s food in the kitchen, but the staff will prepare whatever you’d like. You only have to ask.”

“I’m sure asking comes with its own set of rules.”

“Everything does.” He moved toward the door, then paused with his hand on the frame. “Rest, Sutton. We have time.”

Before I could say anything else, he left me alone in the room that had now become my prison. There were a million and one questions that were swirling around in my mind but the one that sat at the forefront was what did he mean by “We have time?”

9

CAIN

Most people would think that what I was doing was creepy in some capacity. Lucky for me, I didn’t care what most people thought. What I was doing in the privacy of my own home, sitting at my desk in my office, was no one’s business but my own.

There were three screens in front of me and I had no issue watching all of them at once. Each cycled through a different feed, rotating on a schedule I had set myself: the main living area, the hallway outside her room, and the kitchen. I’d debated putting a camera in her room, but thought it might be better to give her a sense of privacy, even if in reality she had none. I had spent a fortune on this system precisely so that I would never have to choose which part of her to watch and I would never tell her I had it set up months before we officially met.

It was the next morning and I knew that she had not slept. This became evident because the feed from the hallway camera showed her door had not opened until 6.14 a.m., and the woman who emerged at that hour did not move like someone who was even close to well rested.

She moved like someone who was serving under very strict guidelines rather than a woman who could breathe easier because things that needed to be done were taken care of. Sutton walked into the living room in a light blue blouse, navy slacks, and with her feet bare. The sight of her in the clothes I bought her inside my home should have satisfied me.