"He definitely finished," Jake said, almost admiringly. "Multiple tis, knowing him. Ask any woman who’s been with Cruxius. Guy’s a damn rabbit. Don’t trouble yourself with it, darling—emotional love is worth more than physical touch."
He kissed her forehead with the tenderness of a man performing tenderness for an audience.
They passed the reception desk.
Down the corridor, a woman in a white coat moved toward them at a brisk pace—pencil skirt, thin-rimd glasses, high heels, hands at ease in her pockets, the particular posture of soone who had been competent for long enough that they’d stopped performing it.
Jake stopped. Sothing sharpened in his expression.
"Doctor Seleyena. How was your chat with my father?" His smile had a specific quality—the smug comfort of a man who expected the conversation to have already been handled.
She had, in fact, reported him that morning for removing a specific compound from the hospital’s private lab. Unauthorized. Docunted.
Her eyes behind the glasses were not warm.
"Hello, Mister Jake." Her voice was the kind of cool that had never needed to be raised. "I must say, your father truly has no idea what kind of man his son is turning into. And what he’ll beco if left unchecked."
She knew more than she was showing. The CCTV. Every word of the conversation outside. The na Cruxius on Jake’s lips—and what it implied for whoever had been handed to him.
An innocent life delivered to a man like that, gift-wrapped.
"...Do you want to get fired?" Jenny stepped forward—cool, proprietary, the confidence of soone who assud every room belonged to her.
"Fired?" Seleyena’s brow lifted slightly. Not offended. Just—precise. "That’s not how hospital privileges work. I’d suggest you take a course in dical labor law before threatening people in a building your family runs but doesn’t understand." Her eyes moved from Jenny’s face to Jake’s, unhurried. "And for the son of the dean—I would genuinely recomnd choosing a woman with more substance than spite."
"’Y-you—’" Jenny’s face went hot under the sunglasses.
The chaos arrived before Jenny could finish.
A stir from sowhere near the entrance—murmurs turning to whispers turning to the specific excited shuffle of a hospital trying to remain professional while failing to.
"Aren’t they from Blac Corporation—?"
"Huh?"
Thalia blinked, standing outside the building now—though she couldn’t have said when she’d walked through it and out the other side. The airport was ’different.’ The architecture, the road markings, the language on the signs in the distance.
A line of black Rolls-Royces and Range Rovers stood waiting along the pickup lane, surrounded by n whose suits fit too well for anything to be hiding under them. People had already stopped. Phones were out.
And there—stepping into one of the Rolls-Royces—
"W-we were in Spain all this ti?" she muttered, eyes scanning the airport signage. More than an hour on a private jet. She’d lost track sowhere between the car and the plane and the weight of things she was trying not to think about.
"Isn’t it obvious?" Cruxius settled into the car beside Darithi, glancing at Thalia still standing outside with the particular patience of a man who had already decided she would get in. "Don’t think about running. You really don’t want to put a collar on you next ti, do you?"
"Y-you’ll put a collar on ?" The words ca out before she’d processed them. Her feet moved toward the car by themselves.
She reached for the door, hand trembling slightly, and looked back at the airport—guards, local authorities standing with the casual ease of n who’d been told to be visible rather than useful.
Even if she scread, they wouldn’t help.
She knew it the way she knew where his hands had been an hour ago—as a fact, clear and settled, that she’d have preferred not to know.
"Why not?" Cruxius’s eyes found hers as she slid inside. "We already did the doggy."
Her jaw set. She sat down hard, pressed herself to the far edge of the seat, stiff as a board. The dress rode up slightly with the motion and she tugged it down and felt, for the third ti since the car park, the warmth and the slickness she kept trying to ignore.
’Stop it.’
"Drive to Saint Regalia Hospital," he said.
He rembered it precisely—sa hospital, sa private corridors, sa wing where a woman called the Saintess had once awakened powers that rewrote what healing ant.
He’d studied her completely. Faced her once. Killed her eventually, but not easily—it had taken forcing her to exhaust every cell of power she had by healing person after person while he kept shooting. She’d fallen eventually.
He hadn’t forgotten any of it.
He wouldn’t need to do any of that again.
"A hospital?" Thalia murmured, fingers resting against the window glass, eyes drifting closed. She looked like soone holding onto one last thread of sothing.
He leaned in close. His breath ward her ear.
"You might escape the hospital," he said, voice low and unhurried. "But where will you go? I want you. So naturally..." He paused—not for effect, just letting the words land where they were going to land. "...you’ll always be with ."
"...You just want my body," Thalia said, eyes still closed.
She could feel the pain of it sowhere beneath the warmth—the crawl of sothing that wanted to be tears and wasn’t allowed to be. The scholarship. The university. The door she’d been walking toward her whole life, keys finally in her hand. All of it sitting sowhere behind her now in a pile she didn’t know how to walk back to.
She held it in.
"I won’t deny it," Cruxius replied, quiet. "But tell —do you think anyone could resist? After having it once?"
He closed his eyes. Leaned in slightly. Breathed.
Her hair was ssy and unwashed and slled like the perfu he’d put on her this morning over everything else and beneath it—beneath all of it—was just her. Sothing warm and faintly floral and specifically hers.
He stayed there a mont longer than he ant to.
’Swish.’
’Thud.’
"’Y-you animal!’" Thalia’s fist stopped an inch from his face.
Darithi’s hand was around her wrist. Calm. Immovable.
Thalia breathed hard, chest rising and falling, fury shaking through her arms. Being ’talked about’ like an object—like sothing to be owned and ’sampled’—was the one thing she could not absorb quietly. Not with everything else.
"...I wanted to be gentle," Cruxius said. He didn’t flinch. His voice was the sa weight it always was. "Sweet-talk you. Pretend to care. Act like soone you could trust." He t her eyes—the green of them, blazing. "But I thought it was better to be honest. If you hate for it, then fine. I’ll fake being kind."
"You want to ’impress’ ?" Her voice cracked through the sentence. "’After actually raping ?’ You sick—"
"...I’m sorry."
She stopped.
He said it plainly. No performance in it. No delivery. Just two words dropped into the silence between them like stones into still water.
"What?" Thalia breathed.
"I won’t give excuses." His eyes held hers without deflecting. "But I’ve had an inferiority complex. Since my first ti." A beat. "With Darithi."
Even Darithi turned. A small motion—her chin moving a fraction, shoulders shifting—but for her it was the equivalent of audible shock.
"It was childish," he continued, looking at nothing in particular. "I thought I had to prove sothing. That I was man enough. So I started sleeping with won—ones I thought were as beautiful as her. Just to prove it to myself." He exhaled once. "I know how that sounds."
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