THIRTY-SEVEN

THIRTY-SEVEN

The morning light in the hallway felt wrong. Too quiet, too filtered. Like the air itself knew something had happened.

I stood near the chipped wall, staring at the small divot where the bullet had lodged. The tile beneath it was scuffed. A smear of metal glinted faintly in the grout, like the house itself had been trying to hide it.

The guards were tense, radios clipped to their shoulders, voices low. One of them was crouched, measuring angles with a flashlight and a digital tool I didn’t recognize. Another paced near the stairwell, hand resting on his weapon. The whole floor had turned into a war zone overnight.

Wesley stood to the side, arms crossed, jaw tight. He hadn’t said a word to me since I came out.

“It was real,” one of the guards finally said. “Nine millimeter. Subsonic. Suppressed fire. Close range.”

No one asked how that was even possible.

No one needed to.

I wrapped my arms around myself, feeling the thin chill seep through the air. “So someone got that close. Fired a weapon. And no one heard it?”

“That’s the point of a suppressor,” the guard replied without looking at me.

Wesley’s gaze didn’t shift, but something about him changed. I saw it in his neck first. The tension pulled tighter, like a bowstring about to snap.

“This was not a missed shot,” he said quietly. “It was a warning.”

The hallway went silent again.

He didn’t wait. Orders started falling from his mouth like bullets. More sensors. Pressure pads along the back perimeter. Window contact alarms on every level. Thermal imaging near the east wall. Sweep the roof. Cross-check every staff member. No exceptions.

I stood still, watching the machine in him take over. Efficient. Brutal. Controlled.

And terrified.

Not of the threat. But that it had come this close.

“Don’t you think this is a little much?” I asked, trying to force a thread of normalcy into my voice. “You’re building a fortress.”

Wesley turned his head slowly. His eyes found mine.

“This is restraint,” he said. Not loud. Not angry. Just final.

My stomach turned.

Because I believed him.

He was holding back.

And that was somehow worse than if he had lost control.

I looked back at the bullet groove. Small. Almost easy to miss if you weren’t looking for it. But that wasn’t the part that chilled me. It was the precision. The confidence it took to fire and leave, all without anyone knowing.

“They knew exactly where we were,” I said softly.

Wesley nodded once. “That’s what scares me.”

He didn’t say the rest. That it meant someone on the inside helped. That no amount of alarms could fix betrayal.

And for the first time since I stepped into this house, I wasn’t sure which scared me more. The person hunting me from the shadows.

Or the man standing beside me, ready to burn the place down before letting them win.

Wesley’s office was colder than the rest of the house, all stone walls and black wood, with no windows except for the tall, narrow ones behind his desk. The kind that made it impossible to see in, but easy for him to see everything out.

That part didn’t surprise me.

What did was the chaos layered beneath his calm.

Three monitors lined the desk. One cycled through surveillance feeds. Another displayed a map of the estate’s floor plan with pulsing red sensors. The third showed lines of code running too fast for me to track. He was doing something with digital forensics—tracing, backtracking, scrubbing timestamps. Hunting ghosts.

“Wesley,” I said from the doorway, already tense.

He didn’t look up. “I’ll be done soon.”

“That’s not what I came to say.”

He glanced over his shoulder then. Just a flick of his gaze, but enough for me to see it. The thing he was hiding under all that control. He wasn’t fine. Not even close.

“You’ve got twenty men crawling the estate,” I said, stepping into the room. “I counted five outside my door this morning. Are you seriously going to tell me that’s reasonable?”

“No,” he said, turning back to the screens. “It’s necessary.”

“For what? A message that already came and went?” I walked around the desk until I could see his face again. “You’re spiraling. You’re trying to cage me in again like I’m some fragile object. I’m not.”

He didn’t flinch. “You’re not a soldier, Catrina.”

“No,” I snapped. “But I’m not your possession either.”

The words landed like a slap.

His jaw tensed. The air shifted.

“You think this is about ownership?” he asked quietly.

“I think this is about control. And fear. And whatever the hell this thing is between us that neither of us is willing to admit exists.”

His eyes snapped to mine.

And there it was again. That pulse. The thing beneath everything. Heat wrapped in fury, straining between us like a live wire.

“You think I’m afraid of them?” he asked.

“No,” I said, voice sharp. “You’re afraid of what happens if you can’t protect me. You’re afraid of what that says about you.”

He stood. Not fast. Not threatening. Just with enough force to make the chair groan under him. “You don’t get to analyze me.”

“Someone has to.”

His mouth parted like he was going to answer, but nothing came. Just more silence. Thick. Pressurized.

We were too close now. Only the desk between us.

He looked down at my hands, clenched at my sides. Then back up to my face.

“You’re not weak,” he said finally. “But you don’t understand what you’re up against. Not yet.”

“Then explain it. Instead of locking every door around me like I’m a liability.”

That struck something in him. I saw it.

He ran a hand through his hair, then let it fall. “I don’t have time to explain what men like Marco are capable of. But if you keep pushing me like this, I’ll show you how ugly it gets.”

I stared at him.

And in that moment, I hated him.

Not because of what he said.

But because he meant it.

And because some awful part of me wanted to see what that looked like. Wanted to understand the monster everyone feared so I could stop being afraid of shadows.

“I’m not staying in this room like a prisoner,” I said, stepping back.

“You already are,” he said.

That broke something in me.

“I should never have trusted you,” I whispered. “Not even for a second.”

I turned before he could see my face crumble.

He didn’t stop me.

Didn’t say a word as I walked out, past the guards, down the stairs.

But I knew he was watching.

I could feel it in the way my skin burned.

The silence between us was louder than any fight. It said everything we were too scared to say.

The bedroom was too quiet.

The kind of silence that didn’t soothe. It scraped.

I sat cross-legged on the bed, the necklace Wesley gave me still around my neck, burning against my skin like it had a heartbeat. I’d meant to take it off hours ago, but something about removing it felt like admitting he had power. I wasn’t ready for that.

So I did the only thing I could—I scrolled.

My phone screen glowed against the dark. News articles, shopping ads I’d never clicked, an old playlist from before everything went sideways. I let the songs play on low, skipping anything too soft, too sad, too much.

The weight of the last few days pressed behind my eyes. The argument. The bullet. Wesley’s control. And something beneath all of it, rising like smoke.

My thumb hovered over my email icon without thinking. I didn’t use it often, especially not lately, but some part of me craved the mindless routine. Tap, swipe, delete.

As soon as I opened it, the app blinked. Refreshed. Then flickered again.

My brow creased.

The inbox reorganized itself like it was catching up from a long sleep. And then—like water breaking through a dam—they appeared.

Six new subject lines.

No sender name. No preview text. Just titles that made my stomach cave inward.

My breath stalled. My hand went cold.

I didn’t open them. Not at first. I just stared, each word carving into me like a scalpel. My thumb hovered. Shaking now. Trembling like my body already understood what my brain refused to admit.

He was watching. Not in the metaphorical sense. Not in the distant past. Now.

I clicked the most recent one.

There was no text. Just an image.

It loaded slowly, like it wanted to hurt me one frame at a time.

It was a photo of me and Wesley. From earlier today. I was curled in that chair in the library nook, a book in my hands. Wesley sat across from me, leaning forward to touch my hair. The exact moment. The near-touch that short-circuited my heart.

Whoever took it was close.

Inside.

My breath hitched so sharp it whined through my nose. I pressed the phone to my chest like that would make it disappear.

Every instinct screamed to run, to wake the house, to smash something.

But I didn’t move.

I didn’t scream.

Didn’t cry.

I just sat there, frozen in that bed, the necklace digging into my collarbone, the photo burning into my memory.

The walls suddenly felt thinner. The suite no longer secure, no longer anything but a stage. A gilded cage with cracks wide enough for the devil to reach through.

I turned off the screen. Let the dark take over again.

In the silence, I could almost hear him breathing.

Marco.

Somehow, someway—he was still here.

Or someone was.

Someone playing ghost.

Someone waiting for me to let my guard down.

The sickest part? I wasn’t surprised.

This wasn’t the beginning of the nightmare.

It was just the next chapter.

And I didn’t know how to stop reading.