Chapter 5
five
The scream cut through the apartment like a blade.
Vivi was on her feet before she knew she was moving. No thought. No decision. Just bare feet hitting hardwood and the hallway rushing toward her because that was Sabin, that was her brother’s voice, and her body had been hardwired to respond to it long before she’d had words for anything.
She hit the door at a dead run and slammed her palm into the biometric pad hard enough to rattle the housing.
Beep.
She tried again. Again. Left hand, right hand, both, like she could wear the machine down through sheer repetition. It beeped its flat, bored note and the three locks behind the steel stayed exactly where they were.
She grabbed the handle and pulled. Pulled until her forearms burned and her feet slid on the polished floor.
“SABIN!”
Nothing came back. The apartment swallowed the sound whole — completely, indifferently, like it had never existed.
She clawed at the seam where the door met the frame. Felt a nail bend backward and split. Didn’t care. Sabin was somewhere in this building being hurt, and she was standing in borrowed pajamas like a child sent to her room.
A hand closed around her elbow.
The world folded.
She wasn’t in the apartment anymore.
Istanbul. Three years ago. A cramped safe house that smelled like cigarettes and damp plaster, and Dom’s arms locked around her waist from behind while she screamed herself hoarse.
Sabin’s name, over and over, tearing her throat raw while boots thundered through the cisterns beneath Sokolov’s compound and she could hear — God, she could hear — the Turkish police closing in.
Dom held her. Held her while she kicked and clawed and begged, held her while her brother was dragged out of those ancient tunnels in handcuffs, held her while the life she’d known came apart at the seams.
Then the safe house door. The sound of the lock engaging from the outside. His voice through the wood, steady and certain and so goddamn reasonable. I can’t let you go back, Vivi. You know what’ll happen.
A week. He’d kept her in that room for an entire week.
She’d screamed until she had no voice left.
Tried the windows — barred. The vents — welded shut.
She’d sat on that filthy mattress and listened to her own breathing and imagined Sabin in a Turkish prison cell doing the same thing, and she’d hated Dominic Wilde with a clarity that scared her.
Because he’d decided. Without asking. Without giving her a vote or a voice or a single shred of the agency that was supposed to be hers by right of being a goddamn human being.
He’d calculated the odds and concluded that her freedom was worth more than her choice, and he’d acted on that conclusion with the absolute certainty of a man who believed — really, truly believed — that he knew best.
The worst part, the part that still made her sick three years later, was that he’d been right.
If she’d gone back, she’d be in prison. If she’d confessed, she and Sabin would both be rotting in a Turkish cell instead of just Sabin alone.
Dom’s terrible, unforgivable choice had handed her everything she had now — the business, the freedom, all of it.
He’d stolen her agency and given her a future, and she’d never been able to reconcile those two things. Not in any way that let her sleep.
The elbow. His hand on her elbow. Now.
Vivi ripped free hard enough to feel the socket protest. She spun and shoved him, both palms flat against his chest. He stumbled back a step, caught off-balance, and the shock on his face — raw, unguarded — almost made her feel something she couldn’t afford.
“Don’t you ever put your hands on me like that again.”
Every edge intentional. Every syllable a line drawn in blood, reinforced with three years of fury she’d thought she’d buried deep enough to ignore.
He froze.
She watched the war move through him. She could read Dom the way she’d always been able to read him, the way she hated being able to read him, because it made him human and she needed him to be a villain.
Every instinct was screaming at him to close the distance, to fix it, to put himself between her and the thing hurting her the way he was built to do.
She could see his arms coil and hold. Could see his jaw lock so tight the tendons in his neck stood out.
His hands came up. Open. Palms out.
He stepped back.
Didn’t argue. Didn’t explain. Didn’t offer any of the hundred reasonable justifications that would have poured out of him three years ago, each one perfectly logical and utterly beside the point.
He just stepped back.
It was nothing. Two feet of additional space in a night that already included kidnapping and torture and a brother being hurt on a countdown clock. It should have meant nothing.
But she saw what it cost him. The way his whole body vibrated with the effort of staying still. The white-knuckle clench of his fists at his sides. The way he looked at the floor instead of at her, because if he looked at her, he might break.
Something cracked open in her chest.
She turned back to the door and hit it. One, two, three, four — until her knuckles split and pain bloomed hot up her wrists. The steel didn’t care. It would never care. She hit it anyway, because stopping meant accepting, and she wasn’t ready to accept a goddamn thing.
The fifth hit sent a bolt of pain through her right hand that folded her fingers inward.
She pressed her forehead against the cold metal and breathed.
In. Out. In. Focused on the contrast between the heat of her skin and the indifference of the door until the roaring in her ears dropped to something she could work with.
Then her legs gave out.
She slid down until she hit the floor, spine scraping steel, knees pulled to her chest, damaged hands wrapped around her shins. Same position as the Istanbul safe house. Curled inward. Making herself small. Holding her own body together because no one else was going to do it for her.
Across the hallway, she heard Dom lower himself to the floor.
Slow and careful, the way you’d move around a wounded animal.
She didn’t look up. She tracked the sound — the creak of his weight settling, the soft exhale as his ribs protested, the small shift as he found a position against the opposite wall.
Close enough to hear him breathing. Far enough that she couldn’t feel his warmth.
He didn’t speak. Didn’t offer comfort or platitudes or promises. Didn’t tell her it was going to be okay, that Sabin was strong, that they’d figure it out. He just sat there on the other side of the hallway and gave her space.
The minutes stretched. The ventilation hummed. The cameras watched with their red eyes. Somewhere beyond these walls, her brother was in pain, and she was sitting on the floor in an apartment she couldn’t leave, guarded by a door she couldn’t open, accompanied by a man she couldn’t forgive.
She looked at him. Finally.
He sat with his forearms on his knees, head bowed, staring at his own hands. In the dim light leaking through the reinforced glass at the end of the hall, she could see a bruise spreading across his cheekbone, the dried blood still in his hairline, the exhaustion carved into every line of his face.
He looked wrecked, but not from the beating. From staying still when every instinct he had would be screaming to help. To fix. To soothe.
But he stayed still. He let her hurt.
Damn him. He was doing exactly what she’d needed him to do in Istanbul.
Back then he’d stepped in, decided, acted.
Locked the door and called it love. Now he was sitting on the other side of a hallway with his hands open and empty, and the difference between those two things was something she didn’t have the energy to examine right now.
It wasn’t enough to make up for what he’d done.
It wasn’t close to enough.
But it was something. And right now, something was all she had.