Chapter 13 - Wren
There are three versions of Logan Cruz, and I’ve seen all of them now. I’m possibly the only person alive who has.
I know this before I'm fully awake — before I register the unfamiliar ceiling or the winter-thin Miami light coming through windows that don't belong to me or the sound of someone moving in the kitchen. The knowledge is just there, complete, waiting for consciousness to catch up.
Version one: the monster in the mask. Flat white face, arms around my waist in the park before I could process what was happening, the zip tie clicking into place while I screamed against his palm. Pure terror, pure control, the thing that lives underneath the suit and only comes out in the dark.
Version two: the fixer. The man who runs an empire with quiet authority, who breaks hands without raising his voice, who rebuilds himself between midnight and morning so completely that whatever came before might be something you imagined.
Version three: the boy. Last night, on that couch, with his hands trembling and his voice stripped raw. He wore a ring, and he liked to use it as a teaching method. The version he doesn't show anyone. The version he'd been holding alone for his whole life.
I came. I saw all of it. And now there is coffee being made in the next room, and I have to go find out which version is making it.
He's already dressed.
That's the thing I register when I get to the kitchen doorway — suit, open collar, the armor rebuilt so completely overnight that last night might be something I imagined. He pours my coffee without asking, sets it on the counter, does not quite meet my eyes.
"Good morning," he says. Polite. Controlled.
There he is. The fixer. Clean-shaven, immaculate, already twelve moves ahead.
I take the coffee. I look at him while he looks at the counter.
The white gauze on both his hands is visible against the dark of his suit jacket — neat wrapping, careful even layers, still intact.
My own work from several nights ago. His knuckles beneath it still swollen at the joints, the skin split in lines I cleaned and covered.
He holds his coffee cup with a slight adjustment, the right hand angled differently, and says nothing about it, and neither do I.
This is the part that frightens me — not the monster and not the boy but this. The distance he reassembles between midnight and morning. Last night he shook in front of me. Last night he told me about a childhood spent in fear. This morning he acts like we’re in a business meeting.
Men who feel exposed sometimes come back tender. Sometimes they come back ready to make you pay for witnessing it.
The apartment confirms everything I suspected about him. No photographs. No books cracked from rereading. No coffee rings or signs of use. The furniture is perfect, and it gives me the same feeling as a hotel room where the decorators tried very hard to simulate a life.
He lives here the way I live in sublets.
"I should go back," I say.
He nods. Still not quite meeting my eyes. A polite distance, as if he gave something last night and isn't sure he wanted to.
The day suspends itself between morning and night and refuses to move.
Back in my penthouse, the sketchbook comes out. Pencil already worn to a stub, pages halfway through another cheap spiral-bound that will be thrown away when it's full.
I draw his head on my lap, his soft hair, trying to get the angle right as seen from above. The boy. That’s the version I’m trying to draw, but I can’t get it right. Can’t capture the innocence and loneliness behind his stern, handsome face.
When he comes next, which version will it be? The fixer, the monster, or the boy?
Dusk arrives finally. I don't turn on the lights. I sit in the cooling apartment and feel the uncertainty thickening around me. Will he punish me for what I heard last night?
Night falls.
He doesn't come.
I keep waiting.
I don't hear the elevator.
One moment I'm standing by the floor-to-ceiling windows looking past my reflection to the city doing its ten-PM brightness, and the next moment he's in the room.
Standing near the kitchen. No mask. His face — the actual face, blond and sharp-jawed and giving me nothing.
His suit jacket is still on. His eyes are on me.
And there is a knife in his hand.
I whirl around to face him fully.
It isn’t a folding knife this time. A fixed blade, four inches, black handle, purpose-made. He holds it loosely, familiarly. Not raised, not threatening. Just present. Just there. The gauze on his right hand catches the ambient light from the city below — white against the dark handle, still neat.
My body decides before my brain catches up.
I step back. Then again. My heels find the base of the window and there's nowhere left to go, nothing behind me but forty floors of city and my own reflection, and I stand against the glass while he crosses the room toward me.
Punishment. That's the first thought, arriving fully formed before I can weigh it: he shook in front of me, he told me about his father, he let me see the boy under the armor, and he has spent all day thinking about how weak he looked, and now he's here with a knife.
Men who show softness and then punish you for witnessing it — I've known that type in the drifting years.
The door swings one way and then comes back the other direction fast.
But underneath that thought, crowding in before I can commit to it: he came back. He could have stayed away. He could have handled last night by simply disappearing, letting the arrangement dissolve.
He came back. But he brought a knife.
The safeword is right there behind my teeth — red, one syllable — and my mouth won't form it because my body has locked up entirely. Not a decision. Not a choice. Just a body that has stopped being available for speech.
He doesn't tell me to stay still. He doesn't explain what happens if I move. He gives me nothing — no words, no context, no instruction. His silence fills the room the way a roar would.
He reaches me.
The flat of the blade presses against my throat.
Cold metal. Not the edge — the flat side, smooth — but cold in a way that makes every nerve send up a flare. My pulse hammers against the steel. I can feel my own heartbeat reflected back from the knife's surface, the most immediate confirmation that I am alive.
The breath I try to take gets stuck halfway.
He moves the knife. Not away — across. Down my throat, between my collarbones, to the first button of my shirt.
The blade pops the thread, the button falls.
Another. Another. He works downward, the knife a substitute for fingers, the cold of it leaving a trail of goosebumps up my spine.
I am too afraid to look down. I am too afraid to look anywhere but at his face, which is unreadable, which has gone somewhere I can't follow.
My shirt falls open.
He looks at me. Slow assessment. No haste. The blade dips lower — between my breasts, along the line of my sternum, the cold tracing a path that ends at the waistband of my jeans.
I am wet. I am terrified.
Both, at once. There's no untangling them.
He uses the knife to flick open the button of my jeans. One precise movement. Then the zipper, the blade angled flat against the metal, sliding down. My jeans loosen. He doesn't pull them off. He waits, the blade still resting against the open zipper, and looks at me.
I push them down myself. Slowly. Step out of them one foot at a time, the knife following the movement, never quite touching but always near.
He drags the knife around my hip, slowly, positioning it carefully between my legs.
My ankles are still caught up in the legs of my jeans, so I can barely move.
And that blade is sharp, so I don’t dare to.
He edges my legs apart, holding me steady so I don’t trip over my jeans, and then one foot is free of the denim.
His gaze is focused on my panties. He moves the knife, so the handle presses against my core and a sound comes out that I don't recognize as mine.
Not quite pleasure. Not quite fear. Both wires twisted together so tightly they share a current — the fear rushing through the same channel as the want, each one making the other louder.
The warmth between my thighs is immediate and I am wet, slick and aching, and the handle of a knife is pressing against my pussy through the thin cotton of my underwear and I am so far past the woman who answered a forum post at 2am that she is barely a memory.
He drags the cotton aside.
The textured grip of the handle meets bare skin and the sound I make is no longer quiet.
His eyes drop for a half second, and I follow their path — the hungry assessment, the way he looks at me as if this is an experiment and also something holy.
I can feel him gauging my reactions, the micro expressions, my thighs tensing, the desperate keening noise I cannot quiet.
He doesn’t say anything, he just looks back up at my face.
He wants to see me come apart, and not just to watch it — to be the one drawing the lines and then making me walk them.
I see it in his posture, in the set of his jaw, in the absolute focus of his gaze.
He is present in a way impossible to fake — so completely it sews my body to his, even if he barely touches me.
The first pass is exploratory. He drags the flat side of the handle along my slit, back and forth, gentle at first, like he is mapping new territory.
I am already wet enough that the sound of it is audible, slick and obscene, and his eyes flicker at the sound.
He experiments with pressure, pushing a little harder, then lighter, then rotating the handle slightly so the next ridge catches and drags and sends a spark straight through my hips to my spine.
I can’t decide if I want to close my thighs around it or force them farther apart.
My body vibrates somewhere in between, in a holding pattern of helpless anticipation.