“Didn’t ask if you were hungry. Said you need to eat. Fuel the machine, Doctor.”
He turns away, dismissing me. He moves to the kitchen island, a massive slab of white marble looking indestructible.
He starts unpacking his gear.
I should go. I should walk down the hall to the “master suite,” lock the door, and collapse. I should hide.
But I don’t. I stay. Rooted to the spot. Watching.
Paralyzed by a strange cocktail of fear and fascination that I can’t name and definitely shouldn’t be feeling.
First comes the shoulder holster. He unclips the straps, the leather creaking softly. He shrugs out of the harness, the movement rolling through his shoulders, expanding the fabric of his shirt. He places the rig on the counter.
The SIG P226 slides free from the holster, and he positions it with deliberate care, a man handling his primary weapon like it’s an instrument that deserves reverence. The Glock he draws from a hip mount next is heavier, a weapon made for a different purpose. My knowledge of guns derives purely from extracting projectiles from shattered femurs and perforated livers, but even I can read the ritual of a man who knows what each weapon is for.
Clack.
The sound of metal on stone rings loud in the silence.
Then the spare magazines. He pulls them from pouches at his belt.
Clack. Clack.
Then a knife pulled from a sheath at the small of his back. It’s black, serrated, ugly. A tool meant for ending things close up.
Clack.
He’s stripping layers of violence off his body, placing them on the white countertop like instruments on a surgical tray. It’s a ritual. A methodical deconstruction of the soldier to reveal the man beneath.
And the man beneath is overwhelming.
Underneath the tactical gear, he wears a black thermal shirt fitting him like a second skin. With the bulk of the vest and harness gone, the truth of him is exposed. The way the fabric strains across the deltoids. The taper of his waist. The corded, sinewy strength of his forearms as he rolls up his sleeves, exposing thick veins and pale scars.
He’s terrifyingly physical.
In my world, bodies are soft things. Fragile vessels for disease and trauma. They break. They bleed. They fail. I spend my days trying to hold them together with sutures and staples, fighting entropy one body at a time. Vulnerability is obvious in everyone.
But him.
His body looks like it was engineered to end fights before they begin. It looks like it was built to withstand the entropy I fear.
The thought should repulse me. Should send me running.
Instead, it ignites something low and heavy, a slow pulse of heat sinking into my core and settling there like ballast. A want I can’t argue with. Gravity.
I want him.
The realization hits like a slap. Sharp. Disorienting. Wrong in every way that matters.
I’m not supposed to want the man who dragged me out of my life and locked the door behind us. I’m the victim here. He’s the danger. So why am I standing in this glass-and-concrete fortress imagining what it would feel like to be at this man’s mercy?
Stop.
My gaze betrays me anyway.
I track his hands as he moves, large, scarred, precise. Hands built for endings. For control. For deciding when something stops struggling. The memory of their weight on me in the parking garage flickers, the way he pinned me, the way he shielded me, and my body responds before shame can catch up. A tight, aching awareness blooms low in my belly.
The fantasy creeps in uninvited: what those hands could do if he chose to use them on me instead of against the world. Taking. Holding me exactly where he wants me and not letting go until I stop pretending I don’t want it.
