FORTY FOUR

FORTY FOUR
I slept badly.

Not the kind of sleep that restored anything, only the kind that dragged me under for an hour at a time and threw me back up again with my heart pounding. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw the same thing. The man on the floor. The gun in my hand. Wesley’s face giving me nothing. Then that quiet, devastating line.
To see if you’d kill for me.
By morning I felt scraped hollow.
Thin grey light slipped through the tall windows of Wesley’s suite, turning the room cold and colorless. I lay still for a moment, staring at the ceiling, hating the fact that I felt safer here than in the bedroom I had used before the fire. Hating even more that my body had learned the difference. His rooms had guards closer by, heavier locks, fewer blind corners. My fear had started sorting safety by his presence, and I resented it more each day.
I pushed back the covers and sat up. My head ached. My mouth was dry. I had dreamed of brakes screaming and glass bursting again, and even awake I could still feel the phantom jolt of impact in my bones.
When I changed, I checked the seams of my clothes before putting them on.
I hated that too.
By the time I stepped downstairs, Wesley was already in the breakfast room, dressed in a dark shirt with the sleeves rolled neatly to his forearms, a cup of coffee at his elbow and a tablet in one hand. He looked composed, perfectly awake, perfectly controlled, as if the night before had been a meeting and not a line crossed so hard I still felt raw from it.
He glanced up once when I entered.
That was all.
No tension in his face. No sign that he had spent even one second thinking about what he had done.
Something hot and immediate flared under my ribs.
“You look rested,” I said.
His gaze flicked back to the tablet. “You do not.”
I wanted to throw the coffee pot at him.
Instead I walked to the sideboard, poured myself coffee with a hand that only shook a little, and turned to face him. “Are we pretending last night did not happen?”
“We are having breakfast.”
“Answer the question.”
He set the tablet down then, slow and deliberate, and looked at me properly. Those dark eyes of his were as unreadable as ever.
“No,” he said. “We are not pretending.”
“Good.” I set my cup down harder than necessary. “Then tell me how you justify it.”
His expression did not change. “You already know how.”
The arrogance of that nearly made me laugh.
“You brought me into a room with a bound man and put a gun in my hand.”
“I did.”
“You watched me while he begged for his life.”
“Yes.”
My fingers curled around the edge of the table. “Do you hear yourself?”
“I hear you,” he said. “Sit. Eat. Training starts in ten minutes.”
For a moment I thought I had misheard him.
“Training?”
His gaze dropped once to my untouched plate, then returned to my face. “If you intend to argue, do it while walking. You are already late.”
I stared at him.
No apology. No backtracking. No trace of uncertainty.
He was not retreating from what he had done. He was stepping straight over it as if I were expected to follow.
“You do not get to order me around after last night.”
“Marco’s men were seen near the south road before dawn.”
That stopped me.
Wesley rose from his seat with smooth, infuriating calm. “The estate is not sealed as tightly as it should be. You can be angry later. Today you learn.”
Then he turned and walked out.
I stood there with my pulse jumping in my throat, fury warring with the cold spike of fear his words had planted. Part of me wanted to stay exactly where I was, just to prove I could. Another part, the sharper and more frightened part, was already replaying his sentence.
Marco’s men were seen near the south road.
By the time I realized I was following him, I was halfway down the corridor.
He was waiting near the side entrance, sunlight cutting across the marble floor at his feet. Roy stood with two guards several yards away, speaking quietly into an earpiece. Wesley glanced at his watch when he saw me.
“Eight minutes,” he said.
“I was not aware we had a schedule.”
“You do now.”
I folded my arms. “Do all your lessons start the day after attempted psychological torture, or am I receiving special treatment?”
His mouth did not move, but something sharpened in his eyes. “Walk with me.”
He started across the rear hall. I stayed where I was.
He looked back once. “Catrina.”
“No.”
One of his brows lifted.
“If you think you can drag me back into line because you snapped your fingers, you are even more delusional than I thought.”
He came back to me then, stopping just close enough to make the space feel charged. “This is not about line. It is about survival.”
“Your favorite word.”
“My most useful one.”
I laughed without humor. “Useful. Is that what this is? You are making me useful now?”
“Alive is useful.”
“The dead do not get principles?” I said sharply.
For the first time a faint shadow crossed his face, not guilt, not quite annoyance. Recognition.
“Yes,” he said. “Exactly that.”
The brutal simplicity of it knocked into me harder than a more elegant answer would have. I hated that there was truth in it. Hated that part of me had already started learning that truth the hard way.
He held out a hand toward the corridor. “Walk.”
This time, after one long second, I did.
He took me through the back half of the estate first, not to the gym or the range but through ordinary spaces, corridors, service passages, side stairwells, a glass-lined gallery overlooking the gardens. Places I had already moved through dozens of times, which I realized almost immediately was the point.
He stopped without warning near the west foyer and turned to me.
“How many guards did you pass between the breakfast room and this hall?”
I frowned. “What?”
“How many?”
“I do not know.”
“Wrong answer.”
I glared at him. “That is not an answer at all.”
“It is the only one that matters. How many?”
I tried to think back and came up with fragments. One by the archway. Another near the stairs maybe. The rest blurred together.
“Three,” I guessed.
“Five.”
My jaw tightened.
“Which of the service doors was not fully latched?”
“I was not checking doors.”
“You should have been.”
We kept walking.
“Who crossed the rear corridor before you entered the side hall?”
I exhaled sharply. “No one.”
“A maid with a silver tray.”
“I did not see a maid.”
“I know.”
The words were calm, almost mild, and somehow that made them worse.
He led me outside to the stone terrace behind the estate, where the gardens fell away toward clipped hedges, gravel paths, and the tree line beyond. Two men were posted at the lower steps. Another stood near the fountain. Wesley rested a hand on the balustrade and looked out over the grounds.
“What car was parked at the south gate when you came down?”
I stared at him. “You cannot be serious.”
He turned his head slightly. “Black sedan, left side, license plate partially obscured by mud. You walked past the window that faced it and never looked.”
The humiliation of that stung because it was so effortless for him. He was stripping my carelessness apart piece by piece and laying it out between us.
“You are enjoying this.”
“No.”
I did not believe him.
He pushed away from the balustrade. “You move through rooms like you are waiting to be protected in them.”
I stiffened. “And that offends you?”
“It endangers you.”
The wind stirred loose strands of my hair across my cheek. I tucked them back too sharply.
“I am not one of your men, Wesley.”
“No,” he said. “You are not. Which is why I am trying to make sure you do not die like one.”
I opened my mouth, then closed it.
He began walking again, and I followed because I hated how much more alert I had already become. The next hallway we entered, I counted the guards before he asked. Four. One at either end, two by the central junction. The maid this time I noticed before she crossed in front of us. So did the slight pause of a footman near the salon doors, as if he had not expected us to come that way.
Wesley glanced at me. “What changed?”
“The footman looked at you, then at me, then at the door.”
“And?”
“He was waiting for someone to leave.”
A beat.
“Good.”
That one word went through me like heat.
I hated that. Hated the small, involuntary lift inside my chest at his approval. Hated even more that he must have seen it flicker across my face, because his gaze lingered on me for half a second too long before he looked away.
By late morning he took me to the smaller training room off the gym, the one with padded flooring, mirrored walls, and a weapons cabinet that made my stomach tighten the second I saw it. He opened the cabinet and chose a knife first, then another, setting them both on the table with methodical care.
“No guns yet,” he said.
“Thought you preferred a faster moral collapse.”
His eyes lifted to mine. “Still angry.”
“Is that surprising?”
“No.” He picked up one of the knives and turned it so the handle faced me. “Take it.”
I did.
“Again,” he said, stepping closer. “Like you mean it.”
My grip shifted.
He shook his head once. “Too loose.”
“It is a knife, not a teacup.”
“Exactly. Hold it accordingly.”
He showed me where to place my thumb, how to keep my wrist aligned, how not to waste motion. Then he moved me through angles, targets, distances. He did not teach flourish. He taught ugly practicality. Soft places. Vulnerable places. How to slash if I could not stab, how to stab if someone came too close, how to use my elbow, knee, teeth, and the hard edge of anything within reach.
At first my body fought him. Not physically, but in hesitation. Every motion caught half a beat too late because I was still recoiling from the idea behind it.
He noticed, of course.
“You pause,” he said.
“Because I am not eager to fantasize about eviscerating strangers before lunch.”
“If a stranger gets close enough, he is not a stranger anymore.”
I nearly threw the knife at him then. Instead I reset my stance.
He circled me once. “Again.”
I moved.
“Faster.”
I moved faster.
“No. You are thinking about how it looks. Stop.”
“I am thinking about not slicing open my own hand.”
His mouth almost twitched. Almost. “Then try harder.”
The challenge in his voice got under my skin. I hit harder on the next pass just to prove I could, and when he corrected my shoulder I jerked away from his touch on instinct.
That pause sat between us for one beat too long.
Then he stepped behind me.
My whole body went taut.
His hand closed lightly around my wrist, firm enough to control, careful enough to remind me he could have used more force and had chosen not to. His other hand settled at my elbow, adjusting the angle. Heat from his body pressed along my back, not fully touching, just there, enough to make every nerve wake up.
“Breathe,” he said quietly near my ear.
My grip tightened.
“I am breathing.”
“No. You are bracing.”
His thumb shifted once against the inside of my wrist, finding the pulse there as if to prove it. Mine kicked hard beneath his skin. Mortifyingly hard.
“Shoulders down,” he murmured. “If you lock, you lose speed.”
The room felt suddenly too small.
I hated how aware I was of him. Of the controlled line of him at my back, of his voice lowered for me alone, of the fact that after everything, my body still reacted before my mind had caught up enough to stop it.
“Is this another test?” I asked, keeping my voice flat through sheer effort.
His hand did not leave my wrist. “No.”
“How generous.”
He adjusted my stance again. “Move.”
I did, and this time the strike landed cleaner. Quicker. More direct.
He let go.
“Better,” he said.
I turned too fast, needing space, needing to see his face. “How many people have you done this to?”
His expression cooled. “What?”
“Tested. Pushed. Broken down and rebuilt because you decided softness was a flaw.”
For the first time since morning, real silence opened in him.
Not the tactical kind. Something older.
Then he looked away from me, just briefly, toward the mirrored wall. “Enough.”
The answer was quiet enough that I almost missed it.
I swallowed. “And you learned this how? From birth?”
A faint muscle ticked in his jaw.
“No one survives long in this world by staying soft,” he said. “I learned that early.”
There was more under it. I heard it and knew better than to reach for it. Whatever had shaped him into this, it sat too deep to name lightly. He had given me a sliver and I knew instinctively that was all I would get.
He picked up the second knife. “Again.”
So we did.
By the time afternoon light had shifted gold at the windows, sweat dampened the back of my neck and my muscles burned. I was tired enough to forget being angry every second, which only made me angrier when I noticed it. But I was also better. I could feel it. I tracked doors when I entered rooms now. Counted footsteps. Noted patterns. When he threw questions at me without warning, I had answers more often than not.
He was teaching me to survive in his world.
That realization sat badly in my chest because it was impossible to separate from a worse one.
Part of me was letting him.
We were crossing the rear hall again when one of his men approached from the east corridor, posture straight, voice low.
“Boss. Movement near the outer line by the south woods. Black vehicle on the access road twice in forty minutes. One of the perimeter guards thinks he saw a spotter on foot.”
Wesley changed instantly.
It was subtle if you did not know him. A stilling. A sharpening. The kind of focus that made the entire air around him feel honed.
“How long ago?”
“Ten minutes.”
“Any breach?”
“None confirmed.”
“Double the south line. Rotate the west patrol so nobody keeps the same route twice. Check every camera between the lower road and the service entrance. I want plates, faces, and timestamps.”
The guard nodded and turned away at once.
I heard myself speak before I had planned to. “One man on foot or more?”
Wesley looked at me.
The question hung there between us.
“The guard only saw one,” he said. “Which means there may have been two.”
“Scouting?”
“Most likely.”
“Or testing response time.”
His gaze stayed on mine a second longer. “Yes.”
Something cold settled under my ribs. Not just fear this time. Pattern.
Because now I could see it. The circling. The pressure. The way Marco never struck only once. The way Wesley had been training me all day not for some distant possibility but for this exact reality, this constant live wire state where danger never fully went away, it only moved farther out and waited.
“Is this how it always is?” I asked before I could stop myself. “Always scanning, always assuming the next move is already in motion?”
Wesley’s face gave nothing away. “Yes.”
No comfort. No lie. Just yes.
There is no peace in your world, I thought.
Only pauses.
Before I could say it, fast footsteps sounded from the far corridor. Roy came into view, moving hard enough that every guard in sight straightened. One look at his face told me the news was bad.
He stopped in front of Wesley, chest rising once. “The convoy was hit.”
Everything in me went still.
Wesley’s voice dropped lower. “Where?”
“Halfway to the holding site. Two vehicles boxed them in from the service road. They knew the route.”
A horrible chill crept over my skin.
“Killed?” Wesley asked.
“One guard dead. One in surgery.”
Roy looked at me then, only for a fraction of a second, and I knew before he said the rest.
“The prisoner is gone.”
The floor seemed to tilt under me.
For one dizzy instant all I could see was the man on his knees in the range, blood on his mouth, relief breaking across his face when I lowered the gun. Then that image twisted into something worse. A roadblock. Gunfire. A dead guard. An open door.
Mercy had not ended the danger. It had only moved it.
“He escaped?” I heard myself say, though Roy had already made that obvious.
“During the attack,” Roy said grimly. “Either Marco’s people intercepted the transport, or someone inside tipped the route. Maybe both.”
Wesley went utterly still.
Not shocked. Not chaotic. Just cold in a way that made the room feel smaller.
The prisoner I had spared was loose. He knew the estate. He knew I had hesitated. He knew Wesley had put the choice in my hands.
And suddenly the worst part was not Roy’s grim face or the dead guard or the realization that Marco’s reach was still curling closer.
It was the thought that slid into me right after.
Wesley would never let me forget this.
I looked at him, and for the first time since I had lowered the gun in the range, I hated that a question had begun to form beneath my horror.
What if he had been right?