Chapter 16
The night air bites at the fresh cuts on my skin, but it’s almost welcoming after the damp humidity inside the warehouse.
I lean against the cool brick wall, sucking on another cigarette I’d fished from my own pocket—miraculously unbent—and watch the show.
Suha’s guys move with a quiet, grim purpose, hauling bodies wrapped in tarps out the back loading doors of the warehouse.
It’s like watching a particularly morbid ballet, all heavy lifts and silent coordination.
The only sounds are the scuff of boots on concrete, and the low rumble of a van engine.
Suha stands a few feet away, rolling his sleeves back down over his forearms. He’d handed his jacket off to one of his men, and now he’s meticulously fastening his cufflinks, the platinum catching the weak yellow glow of the security light above the door.
He looks like he’s just finished a board meeting.
The only evidence is the faint spatter of dark red across the stark white of his dress shirt, high on the chest, like a macabre boutonniere.
He finishes with his cuffs and his eyes land on me, doing a slow, assessing sweep from my busted lip down to my scuffed boots. “Are you alright?”
I take a drag, letting the smoke burn the cut on the inside of my cheek. “I’ve had worse.” It’s not a lie. The throbbing in my ribs is a familiar song, the ache in my jaw an old friend. The ring leaves a different, deeper kind of hurt. This is just surface noise.
His gaze zeroes in on my left hand, which I’m cradling loosely against my stomach. Blood wells sluggishly from the deep gash across my palm and trickles in a sticky line down my wrist. “And that?”
I hold it up, turning it so the wound catches the light. It’s a nasty slice, clean and deep. “A souvenir from your dearly departed uncle.” I grin, tasting copper. “Must run in the family, huh?”
Suha doesn’t smile. He just stares at me, his expression unreadable in the half-light. The chaos of the cleanup continues around us, but in this little bubble of space, it goes quiet. “You knew it was him,” he says finally. Not a question. A statement, flat and sure.
I affect my best look of wide-eyed innocence. “I’m not sure I follow.”
“Don’t.” The word is a shard of ice. He takes a step closer, and the scent of him washes over me.
He doesn’t touch me. He just looks down, his dark eyes picking me apart.
“I’ve watched you take down some of my best guys.
I’ve watched you give my trained trackers the slip more times than I can count.
There’s no way you let a bunch of second-rate loan sharks get the jump on you.
Not unless you wanted them to.” His voice drops. “You let them catch you on purpose.”
The act drops. I shrug, the movement pulling at the cut on my palm. A fresh bead of blood swells and drips onto the asphalt. “You wouldn’t accept my help when I told you I could find your uncle.”
For a second, something hot and furious flashes in his eyes, there and gone so quickly I might have imagined it. His jaw tightens. “So you gambled your life that I would come rescue you, just to lead me to him?”
I can’t help the snort that escapes me. It makes my ribs protest. “There was no real risk involved. I know you by now.” I tap my temple with my good hand.
“The tracker, remember? The moment you saw me heading somewhere suspicious on your little screen, you’d be on it like flies on shit.
” I take a final drag and flick the cigarette butt into a dark puddle.
“Honestly, I was expecting to have to endure your uncle’s charming hospitality a little longer.
You got here faster than I expected.” I tilt my head, studying him.
The perfect suit, the impeccable hair, the utter lack of sweat or strain.
“Were you already following me or something?”
He ignores my question. His focus is absolute, a laser pointed right at the heart of my little scheme. “How did you know?” he asks, his voice dangerously soft. “How did you know it was my uncle?”
This is the part I’m proud of. I let a slow, smug smile spread across my face, feeling the split in my lip stretch.
“Saw a picture online. Your dad’s funeral.
” I watch his expression, but it’s carved from stone.
“When I first took the money from the sharks, years ago, it was him who signed off on it. I never forgot a face that smug. Put it together a few days ago.”
Suha lets out a slow breath through his nose. He looks away, over the scene of his men working, and for a moment he just seems tired. The anger bleeds out of his posture. When he looks back at me, there’s a faint, incredulous shake of his head. “It was suicidal, but you did solve a problem for me.”
For a long moment, he doesn’t say anything.
He just holds my gaze, and I watch something unfamiliar move behind his eyes.
It’s not anger or even that cold amusement he gets when he’s about to do something particularly creative to me.
It’s the same flicker I caught a glimpse of in his bedroom, when he’d accused me of pretending to care.
It’s vulnerability, laid bare for a heartbeat before he shuts it down.
But he doesn’t shut it down completely this time. A trace of it lingers in the set of his mouth, in the slight softening of the severe lines around his eyes.
“I’m not going to chase you anymore,” he says, and his voice is quieter than I’ve ever heard it outside of the dark, just before sleep takes him. “If you want to go, you can go.” He pauses, and his next words land with a quiet certainty that makes my breath catch. “But I don’t think you do.”
My heart suddenly kicks into a wild, frantic tempo. I go completely still, the smirk freezing on my bloody lips.
He continues, his voice steady but weighted.
“I’m going to give you a last chance. The choice has to be yours.
” He gestures vaguely toward the dark street beyond the warehouse alley.
“You can walk away today. Right now. I will stop coming after you. I will stop sending my men. But,” and here his eyes lock onto mine, unblinking, “I will also turn you away if you come back to me. That door will be closed.”
He takes a small step closer, not invading my space, but making his presence utterly inescapable.
“But if you choose to come back with me now, then you stay. Permanently. You will follow my rules. You will move out of that cardboard box you’re living in and into my home.
As mine.” He lets the word hang there, heavy with implication.
“But you must make the choice. After that, there is no going back. No more games. No more running. You are either in, or you are out.”
He tips his head slightly, studying my face as if trying to memorize it. “Think carefully,” he says, and the command is soft, almost gentle. “I’ll be in the car.”
Then he turns. Just like that. His expensive shoes make a soft, deliberate sound on the wet asphalt as he walks away, his broad back a dark silhouette.
He doesn’t look back. He just gets into the back of the sleek black sedan idling at the mouth of the alley.
The door closes with a solid, final thunk.
And I am left alone.
The silence he leaves behind is heavy.
I’m not going to chase you anymore.
The words aren’t a threat. They’re a gift. A grenade with the pin already pulled, handed to me gently.
He’s giving me my freedom. Actually giving it.
No more games, no more henchmen appearing out of shadows, no more furious phone calls lighting up my screen.
I could walk away right now. I could go back to my shitty apartment, back to the ring, back to the restless, empty searching that defined my life before I saw him in that alley. I could be free.
But that’s not what he’s really offering, is it?
He’s offering me a choice. A real one. The first one he’s ever given me that didn’t involve which toy he was going to use next.
Walk away, and the door slams shut. Permanently.
No coming back when the bond aches too much, no sneaking in through his window, no more of this electric, terrifying dance. It would be over.
Or get in the car. Go back with him. Stay. Permanently.
As mine.
Not as a pet. Not as a temporary distraction. Not even as a bonded obligation. He said as mine. The way he said it... it wasn’t the cold command of a boss claiming property. It was quieter. It was a statement of fact, and beneath it, a question he would never, ever voice out loud.
I look down at my hand. The blood is starting to congeal at the edges of the cut, but the center wells fresh and red when I flex my fingers.
I think about the other marks. The faint scar from his knife, the deeper bites on my shoulders that still ache in the morning, the fresh, angry burns on my thighs.
The cool weight of the nipple bars, the oppressive, humiliating confinement of the cage.
The tracker, a tiny, cold secret buried deep inside my ass.
Ownership written on my skin and under it.
I think about the cage beside his bed. The collar. The way he looks at me sometimes, not with anger, but with a focus so intense it feels like he’s trying to see the wiring underneath.
It should terrify me. It does terrify me. The thought of handing over every last shred of my hard-won independence, of signing up for a lifetime of his brutal whims, his obsessive control. I’ve spent my whole life running from people who wanted to own me, in one way or another.
But.
I also think about the sheer, unadulterated boredom of my life before him.
The empty victories in the ring, the hollow encounters that left me more frustrated than before, the constant, itchy sense that I was built for a kind of intensity that the world kept denying me.
I think about the way my body doesn’t just respond to his, it recognizes it.
Like a key finally finding its lock, even if the turning hurts.
I think about tonight. He didn’t have to come.
He saw the tracker moving into a bad part of town.
He could have assumed I was getting myself into my usual mess and left me to it.
A lesson in what happens when I don’t obey.
But he came. He saw me on that floor, bleeding from his uncle’s knife, and the fury in his eyes wasn’t just about a challenge to his authority.
It was personal. It was possessive in a way that went beyond owning an asset.
And just now... the tiredness in his voice. The way he said, I don’t think you do. He sees me. He sees the part of me that craves the chain as much as I fight against it. He sees the hunger that all his pain has only ever fed, never satisfied.
Can I live without it?
The question isn’t even fair. It’s not about living.
I’ve been living. Breathing, eating, fighting, fucking.
It’s about being alive. The cage was a prison, but it was also the only place where every nerve in my body felt truly, painfully awake.
His dominance is a shackle, but it’s the only thing heavy enough to hold all my chaotic, reckless parts in one place.
Walking away would be the sane choice. The safe choice. It would also be a lie. A denial of the deepest, most fucked-up truth of who I am.
I don’t want safe. I never have.
I want the fight. I want the challenge. I want the man who is strong enough to put me in my place and ruthless enough to enjoy it. I want the brutal honesty of his hands on my skin, the unflinching certainty in his eyes when he tells me what I am. His.
I push myself off the wall. I take a step, then another, my boots scuffing softly on the wet asphalt. The black sedan sits at the curb like a predator at rest, its windows tinted and opaque.
I don’t hesitate. There’s no dramatic pause, no last look back at the freedom of the dark alley. That freedom was always an illusion. This feels more like coming home than any apartment I’ve ever skulked away from.
I reach for the door handle. The metal is cool under my uninjured palm. I pull it open.
I get in the car.