Chapter Three — Isla #3
Both hands, flat against his chest, a shove that had far more behind it than physical force—twelve hours of fear and the fury of being reduced to a bargaining chip by people who had never once considered what that cost the person being bargained with.
I felt the solid wall of him under my palms for one startled second, and then his hands were around my wrists—not hard, not painful, just fast and controlled—and he stepped into the movement rather than away from it, which meant that instead of creating distance I had somehow created the opposite.
He’d pulled me forward to stop me from stumbling.
We were—
Close.
The closest we’d been. Our faces were inches apart.
I could feel the warmth of him through the fabric of his suit, and his grip on my wrists was firm but careful, and I was aware with the full, mortifying clarity of an exhausted and terrified woman who had not slept enough that my breath had done something embarrassing—a stutter, small but audible, the kind that happens when the body registers something the mind isn’t ready to address.
His face was inches from mine.
For one completely unreasonable second, the anger drained out of me entirely and was replaced by something I had no framework for, something that had no business existing in this room between these two people under these circumstances.
Something that noticed the grey in his blue eyes and the controlled tension of his expression and the way he wasn’t looking away.
Then, for another reckless second, I thought he was going to kiss me.
He released my wrists and stepped back in one smooth motion.
The distance returned like a cold front.
He straightened his jacket—both hands, precise, the automatic re-armoring of a man who had just been briefly and visibly off-balance and had no intention of leaving evidence of it.
“Eat,” he said. His voice was the same as it had been.
Controlled. Deliberate. If the last thirty seconds had cost him anything, I couldn’t find where. “Sleep if you can. Stay in the suite.”
“And if I don’t?”
“Then you don’t.” He moved toward the door. “But the building is staffed around the clock. You won’t reach the street.”
The rage came back then because rage was easier than the alternative. “I would rather take my chances on the street than spend another hour being owned without any freedom of my own.”
He paused at the door.
He had one hand on the frame and his back to me. The pause was long enough that I thought—for just a moment—that something I’d said had actually moved something in him. That somewhere behind that glacial, infuriating competence was a person who felt the weight of what he’d done.
Then he spoke.
“Freedom,” he said, quiet and even, without turning around, “is a luxury you lost the moment you were put on my table.”
The door closed.
I stood in the middle of the room for a long moment, listening to the silence settle around me like sediment.
The breakfast tray sat on the coffee table with its empty plates and its single white ranunculus in its small vase, which I was only now registering as absurd—a flower, in all of this, as though beauty were a form of apology.
I made it to the couch on legs that had decided they were done cooperating.
I sat. And the shaking that I had been holding back since I woke up—since the warehouse, if I was being honest, since the loading bay and the zip tie and the hood—moved through me in one long, quiet wave that I didn’t have the energy to stop anymore.
I wasn’t crying. I was shaking, which was different.
Shaking was what happened when you’d been running on adrenaline and fury for twelve hours, and the adrenaline had finally clocked out without warning.
It was your body filing a formal complaint against everything that had happened to it and presenting the bill.
Shaking was, in my experience, survivable.
What was less survivable was the awareness of him that wouldn’t settle back down.
The smell of his cologne was still faintly on my palms where they’d pressed against his jacket.
The way his grip on my wrists had been controlled rather than punishing, precise in a way that felt more alarming than roughness would have.
The pause at the door. The line he’d delivered without looking at me, and the way it had landed not just as a threat but as something else—something that understood how much the word freedom cost me personally, which meant he’d been paying more attention than his expression let on.
I pressed my fingers against the mark on my wrists and breathed.
I had survived this far. From the loading bay and the warehouse to the poker room and waking up in a stranger’s penthouse several floors above a city that couldn’t hear me. I had survived twelve hours of being treated as a thing, which was its own kind of damage.
What I hadn’t survived—what I was only beginning to understand I was going to have to survive—was him.
Not his power. Not his rules.
The man himself.
The man who had looked at me like I was a problem he couldn’t categorize. Who had caught me when I shoved him and let go the moment he’d steadied me, as though holding on was a line he’d decided not to cross.
I was in serious trouble.
And for the first time since the loading bay, it had absolutely nothing to do with Siroc White.