5. The Glass House #2
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.
I swallow hard, my throat dry.
This isn’t attraction.
It’s hunger. It’s the biological imperative of life recognizing life in the face of death.
I’ve been waiting my whole life to meet a man who wouldn’t have to pretend to be everything I need.
He turns back, catching me staring.
For a second, the air in the room goes thin. The silence stretches, tight as a piano wire.
His gaze is dark, unreadable, but there’s a flicker of something there. Awareness. He knows I’m watching. He knows how I’m watching. He tracks the flush on my neck, the dilation of my pupils.
He leans back against the counter, crossing his arms. The biceps flex, hard and distinct.
“See something you like, Doc?”
His voice is low, gravel scraping over velvet. It’s mocking, yes. Arrogant, definitely. But there’s an undercurrent there. A challenge. An acknowledgment of the electricity arcing between us.
Heat rises up my neck, burning my cheeks. I pull his jacket tighter around me, as if the leather could hide my thoughts.
“I see a lot of weapons. For a man who claims he’s just ‘security.’”
“Tools of the trade.”
“And what trade is that? Specifically.”
I step closer. It’s a mistake. The closer I get, the more real he becomes. The heat radiating from him is palpable, a physical force pushing against the house’s cold air. I can smell him again, that cedar and sweat scent drugging my senses.
“Protection.”
He picks up a glass from the counter and fills it from the tap. He drinks, his throat working. The movement of his Adam’s apple mesmerizes me.
“I protect things needing protection.”
“Is that what I need? Protection.”
He lowers the glass. He looks at me then. A slow, drag of a gaze starting at my boots and traveling up my legs to the oversized jacket, pausing at my throat before locking onto my eyes.
“You’re compromised.”
The word hangs between us. Compromised. It means in danger. It means exposed.
But the way he says it sounds like ruin.
He sets the glass down with a definitive click, breaking the contact.
“Go wash up. You have five minutes before I start cooking. If you’re not back, I eat your portion.”
He turns his back on me again, opening the refrigerator. The domesticity of the action clashes violently with the guns on the counter and the tension in the room.
I stand there for a heartbeat longer. Something beats a fast, unsteady rhythm between my ribs, fear mixed with something else entirely.
Possibility.
I turn and walk toward the hallway he indicated. My socks slide on the polished floor. His gaze burns a hole in my back, but when I glance over my shoulder, he’s cracking eggs into a bowl, focused, efficient.
I find the bathroom at the end of the hall. It’s like the rest of the house, marble, glass, and austere modernity.
I lock the door.
The click of the latch is the loudest sound in the world.
I lean back against the heavy wood, closing my eyes. My knees threaten to buckle, the adrenaline finally receding enough to let the exhaustion crash in.
I whisper the words into the silence, trying to summon the doctor, the professional.
“Get it together, Iris. He isn’t a date. He’s a Fed. A US Marshal sent to keep you safe.”
But pressing my hands against my stomach, I can still feel the echo of that heat. The visceral, undeniable pull of him.
I push off the door and cross to the sink. I grip the cold porcelain until my knuckles blanch, staring at myself in the mirror.
I don’t recognize the woman looking back.
Her hair is a disaster, tangled and wet, strands plastered to her forehead. There’s a smudge of grease on her cheek, stark against the pale skin. Her lips are parted, swollen-looking. Her gaze is wide, pupils blown black, rimmed with red.
She looks like a victim. But she also looks alive.
Vibrantly, terrifyingly alive.
I inspect the cut on my arm. The butterfly bandage is holding, but the surrounding skin is angry and red. I check my pulse points. My heart rate is still elevated, tachycardic. One hundred and ten beats per minute.
This isn’t just stress. This is a systemic response to a threat. To him.
“No. Focus.”
I reach into my pocket and pull out the chart.
Information. Data. Facts. The antidote to feeling.
I smooth the crumpled paper onto the marble counter. My hands shake, making the text dance.
Patient Doe. Male. Approx 20. Cause of Death: Traumatic Arrest.
Toxicology: Pending.
I force my brain to switch gears. To engage the engine of diagnosis.
I scan the vitals I wrote down in the trauma bay. The erratic heart rate. The pinpoint pupils. The lack of external bleeding despite the blunt force trauma.
And the arm. The image flashes in my mind, clear, high-definition horror. The bruising in the shape of fingerprints. The track marks.
Ketamine. Or Succinylcholine.
Something that paralyzes. Something that stops the heart without leaving a mark, unless you know where to look. Unless you check the injection site. Which I have stored on my phone. Photographic evidence that the young man was murdered.
They killed him. They forced him down, injected him with a paralytic, and then beat him to death to cover the needle track. Or maybe the overdose killed him first, and the beating acted as set dressing.
Bile rises in my throat.
This isn’t a medical mystery. It’s an execution.
And I have the proof.
This piece of paper. This crumpled, blood-stained sheet of proprietary hospital documentation. It proves the vitals didn’t match the story. It proves Mercer lied.
A knock on the door makes me jump. I nearly knock the paper into the wet sink.
“Three minutes.”
Boyd’s voice comes through the wood. Low. Resonant. It vibrates through the doorframe and into my sternum.
“I’m making eggs. Don’t make me come get you.”
The threat, Don’t make me come get you, moves through me like a current.
It should sound like a warning.
God help me, it sounds like a promise.
I shove the paper back into my pocket, deep, jamming it down as if I can hide the truth along with it.
I turn on the faucet, splashing freezing water on my face. It shocks the system. It numbs the heat in my skin. It wakes me up.
I am Iris Kincaid. Attending physician at Denver General. I save lives. I fix what is broken. I do not lust after heavy-handed Federal Marshals who look at me like I’m a complication to be managed.
And right now, the only life I have to save is my own.
I shut off the water. I dry my face with a plush, white towel smelling of nothing.
I look at the door.
On the other side is the cage. On the other side is the wolf.
I unlock the latch.
And I step back out.