“Sit.”
“I’m not a dog.”
“No,” he said, as if the thought were ridiculous. “You look like you might fall.”
I hate how quickly that softened me.
Not because it was romantic.
Because it was practical.
I sat.
My legs were trembling badly enough that resisting any longer would have been performance, not dignity.
Kai remained standing for a moment, watching the room rather than me, checking windows, exits, whatever invisible calculations men like him do before allowing themselves to inhabit a space instead of merely control it. Then, to my shock, he crouched in front of me.
I flinched.
He noticed.
His voice lowered.
“Don’t do that.”
“Do what?”
“Look at me like I’m going to hurt you.”
The answer came out before I could make it polite.
“Everyone your size can.”
His gaze sharpened, not in offense but in something more dangerous.
“Size means nothing without intent.”
That line stayed with me.
It still does.
Because he was right.
And because no man in my life had ever spoken about power as if it carried responsibility instead of entitlement.
I folded my hands together to stop them shaking.
“Kai,” I said carefully, “why were you really there?”
He stood slowly and moved to the window, giving me space to ask and possibly regret the question.
“Your stalker wasn’t acting alone.”
The room changed around that sentence.
My mouth went dry.
“What?”
He looked out over the street below, one hand resting on the window frame.
“He was waiting for permission. Watching for routine. Testing how quickly you reacted, whether anyone else noticed, whether you’d already told someone specific enough to matter.”
My stomach turned.
“You think someone hired him?”
His answer came without hesitation.
“I know someone did.”
That silence after truth is a very specific thing.
It does not feel empty.
It feels crowded. By memory. By denial collapsing. By all the small moments your body noticed before your mind agreed they were real. The notes. The calls. The timing. The way he seemed to know when I worked late, when I came home alone, when I was too tired to take the long route.
My lips barely moved around the question.
“Why me?”
Kai turned back to face me.
The late afternoon light sharpened the edges of him into something almost unreal — hard mouth, dark eyes, expensive restraint, danger in human form and yet somehow the only person in the room who had not made my fear feel melodramatic.
“That,” he said, “depends on who you left.”
My pulse stopped.
Not metaphorically.
Physically, briefly, enough that I had to inhale twice before my lungs remembered what they were for.
