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Then I watched it again.

And again.

And again.

I told myself I was looking for a seam, a splice, a frame that didn’t sit right. But my eyes kept going to her face when she came apart. Her hands fisting in the sheets, the exact way they always did with me.

On the fourth pass I pulled the audio out and ran it on its own, listening for a cut—a hard edit, room tone that changed mid-sentence, anything that said the track had been stitched together out of pieces.

It was clean. All it did was turn up the volume on every sound she made.

Then I heard the words he said, soft, right before she broke.

Good girl.

That was mine. That was what I said to her. I’d said it to her that morning, and she’d shivered against me the same way she was shivering on that screen.

Those words gutted me a little deeper every time I hit replay.

I’d gotten as far as the audio and quit. Frame-by-frame analysis, metadata, source trace—all of it sat there undone.

I didn’t need software to tell me what I was looking at. “I see everything,” I whispered to the empty room. “I see everything. How did I miss this?”

I don’t remember leaving the ops room. One moment I was staring at the frozen frame of Wren’s face twisted in pleasure, and the next I was at the bar in the common room, a bottle of whiskey in my hand, drinking straight from the neck.

“Glitch? What’s going on?”

Handful. The man had a radar for trouble, probably because he caused most of it. Although he had settled down since meeting Austen.

“Nothing. Leave me alone.”

“You look like shit, brother.”

“Leave me alone.”

He held up his hands and backed off, but I could feel him watching me. Could feel all of them watching me, the brothers scattered around the common room, their conversations trailing off as they clocked that something was wrong.

I drank fast trying to blunt the image of Wren with another man. Nothing would ever be enough to erase it.

“Seb?”

Her voice cut through the fog in my brain. Soft and confused and so fucking innocent, like she hadn’t been spreading her legs for another man while I thought she loved me.

I looked up and there she was. Standing in the doorway in that blue dress I’d told her I liked.

Then the video ran through me again. Her face. Her body. Her voice moaning for someone else.

The whiskey stopped doing anything. I pushed off the bar and stood, my hands already curling into fists at my sides. “Well, well.” My voice came out cold. “Look who decided to show up.”

“Seb, what’s…” Her eyes moved over me, over the bottle, over my face. “What’s going on?”

“Save it.”

“Save what? I don’t understand…” She trailed off, clutching her purse against her chest. “What’s happening?”

“I saw the video.”

She blinked. “What video?”