CHAPTER THIRTY EIGHT
The silence is louder than his anger.
I sit there, bare legs tangled in sheets that still hold the heat of his body, my breath uneven.
The soft hum of the air vent is the only sound, yet it might as well be a scream.
My mind races in jagged lines, looping the dream I just had like it was a reel on fire—Captain Shoomaker’s face, unmasked and kind, pulling me from the compound.
His hand in mine, whispering that he had me.
Then the mask.
The same voice. The same hands.
But when I looked up in the dream, the Warden’s face had been his.
No—not his. Not the man who just slammed the door behind him.
Captain Shoomaker’s face had been behind the mask.
And I had whispered his name.
The name still echoes against my lips as I slip out of bed and pad toward the door. My legs feel unsteady, not from exhaustion or soreness, but from unease. Nothing about this is adding up. Not the way he touches me. Not the way he stares. Not the flicker of restraint he wears like a shackle.
And certainly not the anger I saw flash in his eyes when I murmured that name.
I crack open the door and peer down the dimly lit hallway. No sign of him. Just cool tile, flickering fluorescents, and that suffocating scent of antiseptic and musk. Like a hospital disguised as a luxury prison.
I slip into the hallway, not bothering to dress. Let him see me bare. Let him see the damage.
I find him standing at the far end, hands gripping the railing of the spiral stairwell that leads to the floor below. His back is to me, the robe loose around his broad shoulders, the mask still on.
Like a coward.
"Why does that name make you so angry," I say, my voice breaking the stillness.
He doesn’t turn. His voice is gravel when it comes. “Leave me and go get dressed, Starling.”
I step closer. “I would like answers, Sir.”
His shoulders tense. His fingers tighten.
“You ask too much with the position you are in. Do as I say and leave me, so help me God.”
I don’t move.
I don’t flinch.
I don’t obey.
“I signed myself over to this,” I say quietly, stepping closer, each word deliberate. “I auctioned myself off like property. I let you—him, The Warden—take me. And now I’m standing here asking why the name of the one man who once saved me makes you furious enough to run.”
His knuckles whiten on the railing, the robe pulling tighter across his back like it is struggling to contain the fury brewing beneath.
“I deserve to know,” I whisper. “The Warden that bought me at that auction would not get pissed off and run away. He would punish me for the things I did and said.”
He spins around, fast and furious, the robe whipping like smoke in the air. He crosses the distance between us in several strides, towering over me. The shadows of the corridor seem to cling to him like second skin.
His hand snaps out—stopping just short of touching me.
His hand trembles in the space between us, fingers twitching like they don’t know whether to grasp my throat or my waist. The robe gapes slightly at his chest, exposing the hard rise and fall of breath beneath.
And that’s when I see it—
The scar across his chest.
A jagged line of pale, raised skin slashing diagonally from beneath his collarbone toward his ribcage. I know that scar. I was there when it happened. I had seen the metal beam fly through the air and the crimson bleed through the shirt.
Montgomery.
My breath catches. The hallway spins. For a second, I’m not standing in this sterilized corridor. I am back in that compound, shoved to my knees, made to watch a man I was falling in love with be beaten and tortured and killed.
I remember screaming his name as they dragged me away. As they allowed me to think he was dead.
My gaze shoots up to the mask.
“You lied to me,” I breathe.
He stills. Completely.
Just watches me.
“I thought you were dead,” I whisper, stepping back like the space between us has become radioactive.
“Honestly, Starling, I should’ve stayed dead.”
My hands ball into fists at my sides. “Then why the mask? Why the games? Why pretend to be the Warden?”
“Because I had to be someone you didn’t trust,” he says, voice thick. “If you trusted me too soon—if you remembered what we were before—it would have torn this entire operation apart. And this time, I wouldn’t have found you.”
Emotion tears through me—rage, grief, longing—all sharpened by betrayal.
“You let me think you were someone else. You let me suffer. ”
His jaw clenches. “Because I needed you to continue to believe I was him to find the others that were never captured.”
I swallow hard, my voice barely a breath. “If you would have told me, I would have continued to play along.”
That undoes him.
His body sinks slightly, like my words carve through something he can no longer hold together. Slowly this time, his hand lifts toward the mask, the movement unsteady with hesitation, almost careful in a way I’ve never seen from him before, as his fingers brush the edge of it.
But before he can pull it off, four hard knocks come from the front door. Loud. Impatient.
His head jerks toward the sound.
“Go,” he rasps. “Now. Before they see you like this.”
But I don’t move.
“Starling, my rose,” he says, more urgent now. “Please.”
The desperation in his voice cracks through me like thunder. And still, all I can do was stare at that scar. That mask. That man.
Montgomery.
The man I had trusted.
The man I had mourned.
The man I had just let touch every part of me…without knowing it was him.
I turn away.
Not because I want to.
Because if I don’t, I might never be able to walk away again.