Page 39 of Vamp CEO Bit You Where?

"If I stay," I say slowly, "you'll learn the wrong thing."

He stops breathing. "What does that mean?"

I lift my head to see him. "That you can do what you have done. Decide my life. Hide it. Manage it. And then hold me likethis, and I'll come back. It isn't good. I love you — I'm so far past pretending otherwise. But I can feel myself disappearing inside loving you, one decision at a time, and if I stay I'll keep disappearing until there's nothing left in here that's mine."

His arms tighten once, an instinct. Then, he goes loose without saying anything. That breaks me. He doesn't argue, doesn't try to promise. He just lets his hands fall open.

I climb off him on unsteady legs and take a shirt from his drawer. He watches me — memorizing — and doesn't move from the chair, doesn't say my name, doesn't make it harder.

At the door I stop. I don't turn around. "You didn't do this because you're a bad man," I say. "That's what makes it unbearable. You did it because you love me."

"Jasmine."

"Don't follow me," I say. "Please."

He doesn't.

I let myself out into the cold hall and walk away from the only person I've ever wanted this much, and I understand — with a clarity that feels like grief and freedom braided into one — that loving him was never the question. Keeping myself was. And the two have stopped fitting in the same room.

He loves me. I love him. It just isn't enough.

24

SEBASTIAN

Dawn comes three hours after Jasmine leaves. The main entrance stays closed. The entry hall, empty. She's not coming back. I stand with my back to where she stood. My hands open, holding the top of my legs. The bond is pulling north toward wherever she has gone, but I leave the pull.

The predator counts I ignore. The lover, if the word still deserves a body, sits uselessly. I could turn her into data before the next second breaks. I could know the street, the vehicle, the pulse of her phone. Instead I let ignorance keep its chair beside me, bitter and deserved. The one mercy I can still offer her is to stay. So this is what it costs. Not the protection. The control I called protection.

Gideon's name blinkers on the phone. I stare into oblivion, undecided whether I should answer, then I do.

"She's gone," I say.

"Bash. The tower just locked me out of the executive floors. My own card. Reads denied."

"Reset it from the desk?—"

"I'm at the desk. The desk doesn't know me anymore."

I cross to the home node. The wall comes alive at my approach the way it always has, and for one breath everything looks correct—green, ordered, mine. Then I watch a row of permissions blink from my name to a string of administrators I never authorized, and the green begins, quietly, to go dark from the bottom up.

"Elias," I say into the open channel.

He answers already talking. "I see it. I'm trying to—" A pause that lasts too long for him. "I'm being denied also."

"Then someone is unbuilding it from inside."

"No." His calm has a crack down the middle now. "From above us. They didn't break in. They casually walked in. Contractor credentials, permissions, legacy access. They're using the keys we handed them."

On the wall, the cleanup nodes start going dark in sequence—the quiet machinery that buries every incident before a human can see it, releasing one after another to hands that are not ours. Shelter routes blink off the map like a city losing its grid, block by block.

He's attacking. It has to have been prepared. He's been patient, needing only the hour I would not be watching.

"He waited for now," I say.

"Cyrus waited for her," Gid says, blunt. "He knew you'd be distracted. You were."

I was. My ribs feel the admission and stay there. The old instinct surfaces: find Jasmine, mark her position, turn her into a coordinate before grief can finish. The route sketches itself. North, then west, moving fast enough to be angry. My hand lifts toward the secondary search pane. Stops. Her demand was simple. I would prove her right if I act now.