Chapter 15 - Wren
The floor is the same floor.
Music, crowd, the chandelier light finding everyone's cheekbones. I surface back into it from his office and for a moment the normalcy is almost offensive — the audacity of the world continuing while everything in me has shifted.
My mouth still feels like him. Tastes like him. My lips are slightly swollen and my heartbeat hasn't settled and the noise of the club is suddenly too much.
A man approaches from across the club, and Logan's posture does something I haven't seen it do before. A fractional loosening in his shoulders.
I've seen this man before. He's tall, dark-haired, and still.
Lean and broad-shouldered, with a jaw that looks like it's been held against pressure for years and set that way permanently.
He's not like the others. Not Nico's military economy or Gunner's weaponized silence.
There's a gravity to him, the look of a man who has reckoned with himself.
“Wren, this is Gabriel Delgado. Marisol’s brother.”
Oh, this is the ex-priest. I googled the family and he came up first, the prodigal son who left the family to join the seminary, but came back for a woman.
Gabriel Delgado. Jorge’s son.
"I'm so sorry for the loss of your father," I say.
"Thank you." He says it the way priests must say it a thousand times — automatic, kind, a sentence that has done this work before.
Then he stops. The pause is longer than it should be, and he doesn't pretend it isn't. The bass throbs between us. When he looks at me again it's different — as if I've stopped being a question with an obvious answer.
"And you?" he says. "Who are you?"
There’s no hostility in his voice, but even so, Logan steps between us protectively.
“She’s mine.”
Two words. Flat. Factual — the tone he uses for numbers. He doesn't give my name. Doesn't qualify or explain. Doesn't glance at me to check if I'll object. Just: mine. As simple as a closing entry in a ledger.
Gabriel's surprise is brief and genuine — a flash in his eyes, there and then managed. Something goes still in his face before the recovery, smooth and quick. He looks between us once, then settles on me with something that might be reassessment.
"Wren," I offer, because he deserves a name even if Logan didn't give him one.
The corner of Gabriel's mouth moves. "Gabriel."
A small silence. He glances across the floor — something on the far side pulling his attention for a half second, Logan's gaze flickering there and back in the same reflex, two men reading the same space — and then it passes. Gabriel looks at me again.
"How long are you in Miami?"
"I don't know yet," I say.
He nods once. Then something in his eyes settles, some small assessment completing itself. He says something brief to Logan — tomorrow or later, a piece of operational business I don't catch — and moves away, back into the club, the crowd absorbing him.
I stand there.
Mine.
I could have corrected it. I could have given my name and pushed back on being claimed like something in his inventory.
He would have let me — Logan Cruz makes a cage and hands you the key, that's what he does, he offers the exit and waits to see if you take it.
I didn't take it. I stood beside him and let the word settle over me and said nothing.
What I didn't expect was how it felt.
Not like possession. More like being seen. Being placed, definitively, on a pedestal.
“Let’s go,” Logan says, then walks through the crowd without waiting to see if I will follow.
The town car is dark leather and climate-controlled, the city sliding past the windows in neon.
“Where are we going?”
I'm in the back seat next to Logan and the space between us is charged, residual heat from the kiss in the office.
Mine is still in the air. I can feel it the same way I can feel the warmth coming off his arm through his jacket.
The neon slides away behind us. Streets narrowing. The driver at least seems to know where we’re headed.
He completely ignores my question, but he shoots me a glare, eyes narrowed, no levity behind them at all.
Oh fuck. The heat between my thighs is immediate and embarrassing, and I bite my lip to keep from making a noise. What is wrong with me?
He leans forward.
One sentence to the driver. Quiet. The car slows, pulls right, stops.
We are not at my building.
We have been moving away from the city for some time — the neon fell away blocks ago, the street lights thinned, and now the road is dark and the windows on both sides show nothing but trees.
Mangroves, I think. Dense, pressing close.
A stretch of road that shouldn't exist this near to Miami but does, a pocket the city forgot to develop, and the nearest light is somewhere I can't locate from where I'm sitting.
No ambient glow. Just the car's interior and the dark outside.
Logan leans forward and exchanges a word with the driver. Brief. He's used to being understood. The driver nods, then gets out of the car without shutting his door and walks away, footsteps on gravel, purposeful, moving back toward the city. Not waiting. Not lingering.
This was planned. The thought arrives and settles and I don't push it away.
The footsteps on gravel fade.
Silence.
Logan turns to me.
The monster is staring out at me through his eyes.
My body already knows. It registered the forested road, the dismissed driver, the way he is looking at me now — and it knows before my mind does.
It has known since I answered an ad at two in the morning and flew toward a stranger and felt, for the first time in five years, that I was about to be somewhere real.
The precipice is here. The dark outside is very deep.