Then she’s gone, disappearing into the dark hallway, leaving the scent of vanilla and trouble in her wake.
I stay outside.
I stand on the porch, staring into the dark house.
The wind cuts into me, vicious and cold, needling exposed skin, biting through layers. I welcome it. Let it punish me. Let it try to burn the heat out of my blood, the tension locked tight in my body.
It doesn’t work.
The ache remains: deep, insistent. A reminder of just how close I came to losing control. How badly I want to reclaim it before I step back inside.
I drag in a lungful of cold air. Then another. The cold air burns my throat.
My short-wave vibrates against my ribs. One pulse. Hutch’s burst protocol. I pull it from my jacket and thumb the screen, reading the clipped shorthand we use when sentences are a luxury.
Mercer’s crew is working the valley. Two clinics canvassed. Her cards flagged. A gas-station camera two towns back put eyes on the first vehicle before I ditched it.
He hasn’t found the house. He’s found the county, and the distance between those two facts shrinks by a frozen mile a day. I kill the screen and let the dark swallow the glow. The wind isn’t the thing out here that should worry me. It’s the man patientlyerasing every road between this mountain and the rest of the world.
Emergency reset.
Lock it down.
Because when I go back in, I need to be the man keeping her alive.
Not the one ordering her to bed and finding out exactly how far she’s willing to follow my rules.
And the fact that I’m not sure which man would win.
That’s the real threat.
7
Cabin Fever
IRIS
I stand there for a long,suspended moment after the door closes behind him. The heavy tread of his boots fades into the wind.
My skin still hums. Every nerve lit, taut, awake. The air in the foyer feels charged, ionized, as if I’ve brushed against a high-voltage line and barely evaded the lethal arc.
Adrenaline. Shock.
The inevitable physiological crash of trauma catching up now that I’m not actively running for my life across a sheet of black ice.
It’s a lie.
I replay the scene anyway. His voice, low and certain, vibrating deep inside me. The way he stepped close without touching me, invading my personal space until his heat bled into mine. The rules laid out like a promise and a threat braided together. The way my body answered before my brain had a vote.
I press my palm to my chest, grounding myself in the steady, frantic beat beneath it.
Inhaling. Exhaling.
This isn’t the time to unravel. I’m not the kind of woman who confuses fear with desire.
I’m not the kind of woman who wants to be caged.
It’s a story I’ve told myself for years. One buttressed by independence, intellect, and carefully negotiated scenes in dimly lit rooms where everything is itemized in advance, and nothing is truly surrendered.
