The scent of him was everywhere. It was in the steam of the bath he had drawn for her, on the impossibly soft pajamas she wore, and woven into the very fibers of the bedsheets where she now lay, a prisoner in a gilded bed. The sedative the doctor had given her wrapped her mind in thick, suffocating cotton, but it couldn't mute the memory — the screech of metal, the cold mud, and Alistair's voice cutting through the rain. She belongs to me. The words should have felt like a chain, but in the face of those impersonal, violent men, they had felt like a shield. The contradiction was a fresh wound.
He entered her room without a sound, a phantom in his own home. The door clicked shut, sealing them in the lamplit gloom. He had shed the soaked clothing from the roadside and was now dressed in a dark sweater and trousers, the casual attire doing nothing to soften the lethal intensity he radiated. He looked like a man who had stared into an abyss he thought he'd closed long ago.
He didn't approach the bed. He stood near the foot of it, his gaze a physical weight on her.
"The sedative should have you asleep by now," he stated, his voice low, stripped of its usual mocking cadence.
"I'm fighting it," she whispered, her own voice slurred. She needed to hear it. She needed to understand the new rules of the game. "Who were they?"
He was silent for a long moment, his eyes tracing the faint bruise already blooming on her temple. A muscle feathered in his jaw. "They were professionals. The car was untraceable. A ghost."
"But you know who sent them." It wasn't a question.
He moved then, coming to sit on the edge of the bed, the mattress dipping with his weight. The proximity was unnerving. This wasn't the seducer or the tormentor. This was the warden. The guardian. He leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, and when he spoke, his words were for her alone, a brutal, unwanted confidence.
"Their methods point to the Sable Group," he said, the name dropping between them like a tombstone. "A rival. A shadow from my father's era. More a syndicate than a company. They were… pacified after his death. Or so I believed."
Elara's foggy mind struggled to piece it together. "Your father's problem. So why come for me?"
He turned his head, his silver eyes capturing hers, and in their depths, she saw the terrifying truth. "Because you are my weakness," he said, the admission stark and unadorned. "And I have been careless, letting the world see it. They couldn't touch me. Not directly. So they targeted what I had made visible. They targeted you."
The confession should have been a victory. It was the very vulnerability she had tried to claw out of him. But hearing it now, in this context, felt like a death sentence. She was no longer just a pawn in his game of revenge; she was a pawn in a much larger, more dangerous war.
"What do they want?" she asked, her voice trembling.
"What all predators want. Leverage. Destruction." He held her gaze, his own utterly serious. "You can hate me for the rest of your life, but you will do it alive. To ensure that, you will not leave my side. You will pretend to be mine, willingly, until this threat is neutralized."
The command was absolute. It stripped her of the freedom she had just seized, replacing one prison with another, far more lethal one. To leave was to be a target in the open. To stay was to be bait in a gilded trap. But it was bait with the devil himself as her protector.
The sedative was pulling her under, the edges of her vision darkening. She fought to keep her eyes open, to hold onto her defiance, but it was a losing battle. Her thoughts were slow, heavy. Survival, an instinct deeper than pride, deeper than hatred, began to whisper a treacherous logic.
To her own horror, through the thickening haze of the drug, she heard her own voice, soft and resigned, give him his answer.
"Yes," she whispered, the word a surrender that tasted like ash. "I'll stay."
His expression didn't change, but something in the air between them shifted, a new, fragile, and terrifying alliance forged in the space of a single, breathless word.