I was ready for the light to go out.
I looked at the barrel of his gun and said,"Do what you came to do."
But he didn't. He forced me to keep breathing. He dragged me out of the silence and into this place, into this room, and now he's dragging me into a version of myself I don't recognize.
I can still feel the heat of him. Not the memory of his breath against my ear, but the way he looked at me through that glass.
I was the one under the water. I was the one stripped bare, the bruises from Phoenix's men standing out like dark, ugly stains on my skin. Violation should have crushed me. I should have been cowering. Instead, I stood there and watched him watching me. I recognized the way his eyes didn't flicker, the way they stayed fixed on the curve of my waist and the slope of my hip.
I noted the betrayal in his own body. The heavy, unmistakable evidence that he wanted the very thing he hates.
"I can want to fuck a woman and still loathe the air she breathes."
The words are a brand on my skin, hotter than the scalding water. He thinks he's punishing me by staying "that man": the one who holds the leash but refuses to pull it. He thinks denial is the sentence. He doesn't realize that the real torture is the sight of him. The proximity of a man who is so dangerously alive while I'm a ghost inhabiting a body I've already signed away.
I want him to be the one to end it. I want him to take the debt I owe and collect it in the only way that makes sense: by force, by fire, by the kind of impact that leaves nothing but dust.
He called me a tool. He called me a prisoner. But when he leaned down and whispered that he could take me on this floor, and no one would hear me, my heart didn't stutter with fear.
It spiked with a dark, terrifying hope.
I want to be ruined by him. Because if I'm ruined, I don't have to remember the names. If I'm broken under his weight, the architecture of what I built doesn't matter. There is only the sensation of him, the judgment of him, and the final, crushing weight of a consequence I can finally feel.
I close my eyes, but I can't escape the image of the bathroom. I see him standing by the door, arms crossed, his gaze a physical weight on my bare skin. I see the tension in his shoulders and the way the air in the room crackled and burned between us.
He said I didn't deserve his bed. He said I wasn't worth the stain on his soul.
I press my palms against the concrete floor; the chill seeping into my skin. He's right. I'm not worthy of his touch. I'm the architect of the nightmare, and he's the man holding the gun. A gun I'm still waiting for him to fire.
I sit and wait. I don't count the mortar lines. I just listen to the safe house breathe, waiting for the bolt to slide back, waiting for the predator to return and finish what he started at the dam.
The silence is the longest sentence of all.
I don't remember falling asleep, but there's something different about the safe house this morning.
The amber glow of the recessed lights has been replaced by a cooler, clinical white, but the smell remains: bacon, coffee, and the faint, sweet scent of the laundry detergent Thorne's mother uses.
Thorne dragged me out of the cell at dawn, his grip on my arm like a manacle, his eyes averted as if looking at me would burn him. He didn't speak. He just deposited me at the longtable, told me to stay put, and disappeared into the tactical hub with the rest of the team for an emergency briefing.
Now, I'm alone in the kitchen with Martha.
She is at the counter, a mountain of clean laundry piled in front of her. She doesn't look like a guard, but I know better. The way she positions herself, blocking the path to the residential wing, is as tactical as any of the men's maneuvers.
I don't like the silence. It leaves too much room for the images of the shower to resurface. I reach for a pile of dish towels and begin to fold.
"You don't have to do that, Julianna." Martha doesn't look up from the mountain of clean laundry, but her voice is even, devoid of the jagged edge Thorne uses when he speaks my name.
"My hands need to be busy." My voice feels rusty. "It helps the processing."
I fold the first towel. Then the second. I align the edges with mathematical precision, creating a stack that is perfectly plumb. Martha watches me for a moment, then slides a basket of clothes toward me.
"Help yourself then." Martha sits down across from me and begins matching socks, her movements fluid and practiced. "I'm Martha. My son hasn't exactly been formal with the introductions."
"He calls me Stratton." I smooth a crease out of a T-shirt. "Or 'the asset.'"
Martha sighs, a small, tired sound. "Colt has a way of turning people into missions when he's afraid of them. It's his armor. He's been wearing it since his wife walked out on a sick four-year-old and left him to hold the sky up by himself."
I pause, a pair of small, denim leggings in my hands. "He isn't afraid of me. He loathes me."
