Alaric.
I went still in the way only a predator does. Everything in me narrowed to a point—ears, eyes, fists, the cold anger rushing through me and that never stopped tightening unless she was physically under my hands. The phone casing creaked in my palm.
“Yeah,” Alaric murmured, close enough to sound like hewas standing at the foot of her bed. Smug. “I’m with her now. Sleeps like an angel… pity she’s becoming disobedient.”
Her inhale touched my ear the same second his voice did, and the two sounds shouldn’t exist in the same world. Innocence and trespass. Sanctuary and intrusion.
My jaw locked until it hurt.
He kept talking. Like he had the right to narrate her sleep while she trusted the dark.
“I want a wife that listens,” he said, almost conversational. “Not one who chooses to defy me.”
Wife.
I stared at the ceiling so I didn’t put my fist through it. Wife was a dynasty word, sure. A contract word. A performance word. But from his mouth it was theft.
She wasn’t his wife. She wasn’t his anything.
She was ours.
Ours to watch sleep. Ours to guard. Ours to wake with a kiss and a glass of water and a hand at her nape when her head hurt. Ours to keep soft in a world that worshipped breaking everything.
“You can promise what you want, Alec,” he added, voice pulling back like he was talking to the doorway—quiet, restrained, the kind of careful that told me he was used to getting away with it. “But I’ve been with her for weeks.”
Weeks.
My lungs forgot how to work for a full second. The phone made a small noise under my hand. Bastion stirred at the movement, settled again.
Her inhale again the speaker, soft and unaware.
“She was quieter at dinner,” Alaric continued, almost amused. “Even with cocaine. You hear me? They lined the table with powder and she still sat there like a statue. Onesmile. One sip. Polite. Pretty. But stubborn.” A chuckle. “That won’t hold. She’ll learn.”
Cocaine. Measuring her obedience by whether she laughed for him while men cut lines.
My hand shook once. I looked at it like it belonged to someone else and then willed it still. I don’t shake. I don’tevershake. Not even when I took the backend of an entire social platform just because her video buffered for two seconds and I hated that anything in the world between her and me was unstable.
Her breath. It was still there. It kept me from breaking the line. From waking the whole city to walk to her in the next five minutes and shoot a man for standing too close to a girl who deserved to sleep without men performing power over her like it was theatre.
I switched the phone to my other ear and stared at the ceiling again, cataloging every sound, mapping the room by audio the way I do when I’m in surveillance mode.
The floor creaked near her door, someone shifting their weight. The sound of fabric, his sleeve.
The faintest tick from a wall sensor. We’d installed those. Our men. Our equipment. The small satisfaction of there is nothing here you can use against her that I haven’t already sanitized.
I could see the penthouse in my head. The new blind system Bastion had ordered last year. The fresh paint in the hall. The textured rug we’d sent because she slips in socks when she’s tired.
The nightstand drawer with the anxiety pills she never touches. I replace them before they expire, so no dynasty tribunal will ever use it against her.
The softer sheets we forced in when that brand switched factories and the finish changed by two thread counts.
He didn’t know any of that. He didn’t know he was walking through rooms built with my compulsion, my code, my single-minded, unrepentant need to control everything that might hurt her.
He didn’t even know the camera he thought he’d disabled in the corner was a decoy and the real one was the motion sensor in the thermostat.
He didn’t know the glass wouldn’t shatter for him no matter what he threw, or that the balcony door needed a biometric she didn’t even have because we don’t want her stepping outside alone when she’s lightheaded.
But he knew where she slept. And he was standing there, narrating her breath to someone else, evaluating her obedience like she was a horse he meant to break in front of a crowd.
