“Welcome home.”
The words scrape on the way out. Ash in my mouth.
She takes it in, the minimalist lines, the sterile surfaces, the absence of anything that suggests a life lived here. No photos. No warmth. No softness.
Then she looks at me.
“This isn’t a home. It’s a cage.”
The word hits low. Hard. A blunt, visceral punch straight to my gut.
A flash of heat answers it before I can stop it. Dark. Immediate. The kind having as much to do with sex as it does with ownership and control. With doors locking. With boundaries holding.
Warden.
The thought lands fully formed, unwelcome. My body reacts like it recognizes the role.
I shut it down instantly. Clamp iron around the response. Bury it under training, law, and the oath I swore to protect, not possess.
Not like this.
Not her.
Never her.
“It’s the only place on earth where you stay alive. Get used to it.”
I keep my voice level, professional, and unyielding.
Because if I let myself examine the way that wordcagestirred something primal inside me, I’m no better than the men hunting her.
And I won’t become that man.
I walk past her, checking the perimeter sensors on the wall panel. Green lights. Secure.
I don’t look back. I can’t. Because standing there, wrapped in my jacket, shivering in the dark with her bruised arm and her stolen chart, she looks like something I might actually want to keep.
And that is the most dangerous variable of all.
5
The Glass House
IRIS
The door lockswith a sound like a tomb sealing.
Thud.
The noise reverberates through the vast, empty space, ricocheting off walls of ballistic glass and polished concrete. It’s a final sound. A heavy, mechanical period at the end of a sentence I didn’t write.
I stand shivering in the center of the foyer, rooted to the spot by a paralysis that feels less like fear and more like thermal shock. The jacket he gave me, Boyd’s jacket, weighs me down like a shield I’m not strong enough to carry. It swallows me whole, the leather sleeves hanging past my fingertips, engulfing my hands.
But it’s the smell of it that wrecks me.
I pull the collar up, burying my nose in the lining without meaning to. It smells of cured leather and the sharp, acrid tang of gun smoke, the scent of violence. But underneath that, deeper, woven into the thermal lining, ishim.
Musk. Cedar. The raw, salt-heavy scent of male sweat.
