Page 29 of Suite 7

“I’m fine.”

“No concerns about anything we did?” he asks, focused on collecting his belongings.

“I said I’m fine, Kane.”

He pauses. Studies me, really looks at me for the first time since getting up. “Aftercare isn’t just physical. If you need to process —“

“I don’t need to process. It was one night. We agreed. We’re done.”

He nods. “Of course.”

The silence stretches between us, heavy with everything unsaid.

He checks his watch.

I’ve seen him do that before. At Sloane’s dinner table when an argument goes somewhere he didn’t expect. In doorways when he’s deciding whether to stay.

He crosses to the door. Pauses with his back to me.

“Vera.”

I look up.

“If you need anything. Questions about the scene. Processing support. I’m available.” He still doesn’t turn around. “That’s my responsibility.”

Responsibility.

Just responsibility. Like I’m an obligation he’s dutifully fulfilling.

“I’m fine,” I say.

His hand tightens on the door handle until his knuckles go white.

“Good. Then... thank you. For trusting me with that. It was an honor.”

The door closes behind him with quiet finality.

I sit there in the empty suite, wrapped in a blanket that smells like him, and try to figure out how to be normal again.

Seven AM and coffee isn’t helping.

My shoulders ache with a sweet soreness from being bound overhead. My inner thighs are tender, sore in a way that catches me every time I move.

I still can’t believe — Kane Sinclair made me scream his name. That I surrendered so completely I stopped thinking.

I pace my apartment, mug clutched like a lifeline.

In three hours I have brunch with Sloane. I need to be normal. I need to look like someone who slept and didn’t spend the small hours of the morning staring at her ceiling replaying every moment of being taken apart by her best friend’s brother.

My wrists don’t have marks. He’d checked circulation twice, shifted the silk with two careful fingers, voice dropping: Too tight?

The care underneath the control. I hadn’t expected that. The way he held both things at once — the certainty and the checking, the command and the quiet I’ve got you — like my safety wasn’t an afterthought but the whole architecture of it.

Professional Dom. That’s what he is. That’s what last night was.

One night. Not personal.

Except it had felt personal when he held me after. When he pressed his forehead to mine in the quiet, his hands still warm on my face, and the tenderness of it was so specific and so careful that I almost let myself believe it meant something.