The taste of basil from the sauce vierge on the salmon at Alice’s place is still on my tongue as Silas and I walk into the office wing of The Grove. In less than six hours I’ve gone from posing for Alice to returning for an emergency meeting that puts me right back where I was.

Accused.

This would be so much easier if I knew what people assume I’ve actually done.

You might think I’m about to find out, but that’s not how these meetings work. I go in and I’m an object. A thing. A bother. A symbol.

It’s the opposite of how Alice views me. Of how I feel when I am posing.

Here, my physical presence is an indictment of their power. In regular life, you know who your friends and enemies are, mostly. Tara, Mandy, and Jenna were supposed to be my friends, and they turned on Lindsay and–by extension–me. They’re an exception.

In high-powered meetings with politicians and their “people,” you have no idea who is good, who is bad, and who is driven by some agenda you can’t even see.

When I sit in conferences at The Grove, all I know is that I’m about to be managed, sent somewhere new, turned into a hot potato.

And right now, Silas has me in his hands.

He escorts me to the conference room, but no one is there except for Marshall, who has a tighter-than-usual look on his face. In his hands are the ever-present folders he carries, plus a cell phone. When he and Silas exchange nods, I go cold.

Marshall looks at me clinically. “Jane.”

“Marshall.”

“Thank you for coming on such short notice.” Am I imagining that he’s looking me up and down in some sort of robotic fashion? It’s not the look you give a woman you’re evaluating for sexual interest. It’s the same strange inventorying that happens to me whenever I come to one of these meetings.

Usually it’s Monica Bosworth who does it with precision, but Marshall might be taking lessons from her. His eyes narrow and he squints, blinking hard as Drew enters the room, followed by Monica.

Oh, boy.

This meeting just got harder.

Drew doesn’t sit, handing Marshall a slim envelope. “Exam room set up.”

“Exam room?” I squeak, my gut turning to liquid. “What kind of exam room?”

Monica frowns at Drew as if he’s created the conflict. “They’ll explain,” she says.

“Why are you here, Monica?” Drew asks sharply. “You’re too busy to have time for this.” His tone is perfunctory. She’s a problem he’s managing.

Like me.

Her tongue migrates to her upper lip, puffing it out slightly as her jaw tenses. As always, the senator’s wife is perfect. Not a hair out of place, her makeup expertly applied, the wrinkles hidden to the extent that modern technology can manage. A pale cinnamon lipstick with a slightly darker lipliner outlining her mouth looks like an artist painted it on. At the thought of painting, I feel a half smile creep over my face, the right corner of my mouth rising.

“What’s so funny, Jane?” Monica asks, her voice an accusation, acrimonious and taunting.

“Oh–nothing.”

“That’s right. Nothing about this situation is funny,” she spits out, looking pointedly at Drew, who ignores her. She hates to be contradicted but she loathes being ignored.

I look away and say nothing, mimicking Drew.

Lindsay walks in.

“Jane,” she says quickly, looking at her mother when she says my name. “Mom, are you really going to butt in? You don’t need to be here.”

“And neither you nor Drew needs to tell me where I should and should not be,” Monica says through clenched teeth. “I know full well how to allocate my time, and if I think this is important enough to be present, then it is.”

It’s suddenly hard to breathe.

Silas pulls Drew aside. I hear him ask, “Why are Monica and Lindsay here?”

“Lindsay’s here because of Monica. Trying to rein her in,” Drew answers.

“What does everyone here think I have done?” I ask no one, sending the question out into the center of the room.

Marshall clears his throat and answers me. “We have reason to believe you haven’t told us the truth, Jane.”

Because I haven’t. Silas knows more about my informant now, but...

“And that you may be spying via implants.”

“Implants?” I look down at my breasts, which are quite small. “You seriously think these are implants?”

Monica rolls her eyes. “Not breast implants. Chips.”

“You think my body has microchips in it? Like I’m a pet dog? And someone’s spying on you with them? That’s crazy!”

Monica looks at Lindsay. “Drew implanted Lindsay to track her. That’s how she was saved–no thanks to you,” she spits out at me. “It’s absolutely in the realm of possibility that the people you work for have implanted devices on you. And a new tip says it’s more than possible.”

For a split second, I wonder if she’s right. No, it’s not logical. I know I’m not microchipped or implanted or whatever you want to call it. But when you spend so many months being told right is wrong and wrong is right, and when psychological warfare is being used against you in a game you can’t understand, it’s totally inevitable that you’d doubt your own body.

“You think John and Stellan, or–that they implanted me?”

“Or someone else,” she says calmly.

I look around the room, focusing on the men. Why is Monica speaking to me about this? Who made her the spokesperson?

“Did you–do you–what evidence do you have? Who gave you this tip?”

“None. Yet. And you know we can’t tell you that.”

The word yet makes me tighten my gut, an involuntary Kegel closing off my lower body. “Yet?” I remember her words when she first came in.

Exam room.

Marshall sighs and says, “We need to have you submit to a physical exam to search for scars or evidence of implants. It’s possible this was done to you without your knowledge.”

“I think I’d know if someone inserted something into me!”

“Would you? Were you ever kidnapped, or subdued to the point of being unconscious?” he inquires, eyes sharp.

“What? No!” My eyes dart all over the room, processing memory as fast as possible. “I have told you everything. My mother was lied to, and handed Lindsay up to them without realizing until the last second who was really on the helicopter that took Lindsay away. When she knew it wasn’t Mark Paulson, she got a phone call telling her I had been kidnapped. John came to my apartment and calmly explained I needed to be their cell phone mule. They had a complex system of burner phones, designed to prevent being tracked. That’s all I did!”

“But they kept you somewhere,” Silas prods.

“In Stellan’s apartment, for a short time.”

“And you swear they didn’t hurt you? Touch you? Assault you?” Silas’s words are clear. He’s asking if they raped me. He already knows the answer–I’ve testified so many times, telling the story over and over. Why is he asking?

“They didn’t. They kept implying it. Said they’d finish what they started four years ago.”

Silas’s face goes pale.

“Finish?” Lindsay asks in a tone of befuddlement. I realize she’s probably only heard bits and pieces of my testimony. Most of it was behind closed doors, in private congressional and intelligence agency sessions.

“That’s what they kept saying. I thought at the time they meant that they wanted to do to me what they did to you, back then at the party.” I look at her and want to cry. “I didn’t know what they were planning at Drew’s apartment.”

Monica makes a derisive sound of disbelief.

“Lindsay, when I saw you there, I realized how bad it all was. I had no idea my mother put you on that helicopter. I’m so sorry. I really am. And I know you don’t believe me, but–”

“We’ll see,” Monica says, cutting me off. “Once the exam is completed, we’ll know more.”

“Exam?” We’re back to that topic.

“We have a doctor present from one of the intelligence agencies. A specialist in finding implants.”

“Specialist?” I squeak.

Marshall sighs. “It’s routine. In fact, we’re all surprised it wasn’t done sooner. Mrs. Bosworth noted the error and–”

I turn and look at Monica. “You noted it?”

“When it comes to protecting my family, I am careful to do due diligence. You remain a threat. You are lying and have been lying all along. Your Little Miss Innocent act might fool some people but it isn’t fooling me.”

“You’re so determined to find me guilty of something that you want me to submit to a body search?”

“Technically, you don’t need to submit. We have enough probable cause to find a judge who will...” Marshall’s words fade as I realize what he’s saying.

They’ve treated me like an object you move around in a game.

Now they are literally making a claim to my body.

“You have to tell me more than this. It’s too flimsy.” Alice’s defiance is rubbing off on me.

Drew gives me a look with dead eyes. “Fine. I don’t have to tell you, but I will if you insist.”

“I do.”

“We’ve been given new word that the people behind you were responsible for the car crashes that killed my parents and Mark Paulson’s mother and stepfather.”

Silas looks down, face a mask.

Monica gives me a twisted smile. “See? Your whole disgusting web is bigger than anyone thought. You’re just a pawn in it, a lackey, a game piece. But you can kill the leader by getting enough minions.”

“Minion?” I gasp. “I’m no one’s minion.” Numb blood courses through me. My skin feels like so many balloons being inflated. The accusations are unreal.

Again.

“You’re certainly no leader,” she says with a horrid cackle that makes me want to run away. “You’re just a tool. A sad little tool. And that means we need to figure out how to use you.”

“Use me?”

“If we find the implants, we’ll confirm your role in it all.”

“How does that confirm anything?” I ask. Silas gives me a sharp look, as if I’ve said something wrong.

“It shows you’re complicit,” Drew says.

“You just asked me if I’d ever been unconscious around them, that maybe they planted something on me then. How could I be complicit if I never gave consent?” I look around the room, half wild with terror. No one will catch my eye.

“Backpedaling now? How cute,” Monica says, moving behind Lindsay, placing a protective hand on her shoulder. Lindsay’s not looking at me, giving Drew a questioning look instead. Her shoulders hunch as Monica touches her.

“I’m not backpedaling,” I insist. “I’m trying to use reason and logic here.”

“You’re trying to play mind games,” she replies. “And you’re doing it poorly.”

“This is a witch hunt,” I say, my body separating from my mind. The wedge is small but grows by the minute as the dawning horror of what they’re proposing seeps in. “It’s like the drowning test for witches in the 1600s. If I sink and die, I’m innocent. If I float, I’m guilty.”

Baring my body for Alice to paint a work of art is a far cry from submitting to a naked body search for a team of people determined to find me guilty of crimes I’ve never committed.

“No one is asking you to kill yourself,” Monica counters. The words are out of place, incongruent with what we’re talking about.

“Who ever mentioned suicide?”

Her eyes turn sympathetic. “No one, but you know. Your father.”

I inhale sharply, the room filled with confused looks. Very few people know that my father committed suicide while my mother was pregnant with me.

So few that it’s clear Monica is the only one in the room.

Aside from me.

“Depression, anxiety–they’re genetic. They run in families.” Why is she talking about this? What on earth is her point?

“Why are you bringing up my father? He has nothing to do with this!” I say, my breath quickening, fists curling into tight balls.

“You father has everything to do with this,” she shoots back, eyes little fireballs of blue evil. She shakes her head slightly, as if surprised by her own words, and reels it all back in under control. “I just meant that you seem to have a persecution complex. People often do with family histories like yours.”

“You’re not making any sense, Mom,” Lindsay interrupts. Silas is watching Monica with cold interest, while Drew sorts through papers in a folder in front of him, but I can see how tightly he’s holding his body.

“Drew,” I say.

He turns to look at me, impassive but oddly attentive at the same time.

“How solid is this tip that I am somehow connected to the people who killed your parents?” I ask, my voice dropping with pain. Empathy floods me. My mom just died. It’s like someone ripped out all my teeth and expects me to still chew. I can only imagine the need for answers if she’d died in a mysterious car accident.

“From the highest levels of government,” he says, looking down at the table.

I sigh. “And if I let your doctor do a body check, will you believe me?”

“It will strengthen your case,” he says dully. “And discredit the person who tipped us off,” he adds. It’s an unnecessary comment, but it makes Lindsay squeeze his hand.

Monica rolls her eyes and says to me, “Just do it. Make it easy on everyone, including yourself. Do it for the country.”

“The country? I’m doing this because I don’t have a choice! Don’t try to gaslight me.” The longer Monica talks to me, the more I want to push back. Lindsay used to complain about her overbearing mother, and I always thought she was exaggerating a bit.

I was wrong.

Monica reaches for me, Silas shoving himself between us, but she gets my forearm. “Listen here, you conniving little bitch. If anyone is gaslighting, it’s you. Lindsay’s been through enough because of you. Now we have new evidence that your people might be behind Drew’s parents’ deaths, and all you care about is putting me in my place?” Her face is red, eyes so narrow, they might as well be closed, and I have the distinct feeling that if we were alone, she’d have no problem strangling me to death.

“I–I’m not! But you can’t go around saying that I should–”

“Don’t you dare try to tell me what I can and cannot do!” she roars. “You’ve created an impossible situation for Harry!”

Lindsay looks up, craning her neck. “What does Jane have to do with Daddy?”

“What doesn’t she have to do with Harry!” Monica explodes. “She’s at the center of this whole mess, all the way back. Can’t you see that, Lindsay? She’s the cancer that has metastasized into every part of your father’s career!”

Even Drew looks up, astounded.

“You’re giving her a lot of credit for power Jane can’t possibly have,” he says slowly, frowning.

“How do we know?” Monica stresses. “We can’t know until she’s been thoroughly investigated. And we have a tip. We need to follow up on it.”

“What does this exam involve?” I ask Marshall, deciding to ignore Monica at this point.

“Blood work. We need to run some tests. Looking for biologic agents,” he adds vaguely. “And a skin search for implants.”

“Can’t you just do an MRI or a CAT scan?” Silas interrupts. Monica glares at him.

“Not good enough. Some of the implants are designed to self destruct inside the subject’s body if they are subjected to a high-energy scanning technology. Hence the blood work, plus we have a doctor who is a visual specialist,” Marshall says matter-of-factly. “It’s nothing more than what you’d experience at a dermatologist for a skin cancer check,” Marshall assures me.

Monica’s chin goes up, her composure back.

“It’s a twenty-minute process. If you’re really innocent, it should be no problem,” she sniffs, giving me a glare. “If you have nothing to hide, why would you argue?”

“For someone who wants to be First Lady, your grasp of constitutional rights leaves much to be desired,” I reply, struggling to keep my voice calm. A few minutes ago I was afraid she’d strangle me.

Now I’m worried in reverse.

Drew smothers a smile with his hand, while Lindsay stays perfectly still, the only hint of a reaction her twitching nostrils.

“Great!” Marshall declares. “It’s settled then. Jane, Silas can guide you to the exam room. We’ll be here when you get back.”

“Assuming the doctor finds nothing,” Monica adds. “When he finds a chip, you’ll be transported elsewhere.”

I don’t even want to ask where elsewhere is.

Silas moves between me and Monica again, deftly getting me out the door and into the hallway, zigging and zagging down turns until we’re in front of a plain door. He knocks.

The door opens.

A short man with thinning grey hair answers, wearing a doctor’s lab coat, holding a small electronic device in his hand about the size of an iPad mini. He opens the door further and looks at me, one eyebrow going up. Dark brown rheumy eyes take me in. He has no eyelashes, and the whites of his eyes are tinged yellow.

“Jane Borokov, I assume?”

“Are you searching someone else for implants today?” I ask, looking at the clock pointedly. It’s late. Then again, when you work for whatever agency this doctor is with, time ceases to matter.

“You expect me to say no.” His voice is faintly accented, something from a romance language. I cannot tell whether it’s Spanish, French, Portuguese–who knows. Silas motions for me to enter before him, and in the space between us, the doctor starts to close the door, leaving Silas out.

“No. I’m staying,” he says, squeezing into the tiny exam room.

“Absolutely not,” the doctor says.

“Absolutely yes.” Silas’s body grows the way it does when he’s defending me. “Or she leaves.”

“This isn’t protocol.”

“Depends on whose protocol you’re talking about. My orders say I have visual on the client at all times. She’s under death-threat watch.”

“Or you’re a pervert who wants to see her naked.”

“Oh, he already has,” I quickly explain. “Twice.”

“That’s not helping, Jane.” Silas gives the doctor an unblinking look, saying nothing more.

“Fine. Jane, sit here for the dental exam.” He pats the doctor’s rolling stool at the end of a standard exam table, the kind you find in any doctor’s office.

And then I see the folded stirrups. No worries, though. Marshall said it was just a skin check.

“Dental exam?” I ask.

“Implants can be placed in teeth. Easiest, oldest way to use them to communicate,” he explains, though it’s clear he’s annoyed by being asked.

“Oh. Okay.”

“Any crowns? Implanted teeth?”

“No.”

“Fillings?”

“No. My mother had perfect teeth, and so do I.”

“What about your father?”

“No idea. He died before I was born.”

I open my mouth and the doctor pokes around, stabbing my gums, running the sharp metal spike along the edges of all my teeth where they go beneath the gum line. I taste blood quickly.

“Perfectly aligned,” he says.”Braces?”

“Three years.”

“And no cavities?”

“None.”

“Well, that makes this faster. Bloodwork next. Do you have one arm that’s better?” He moves a tray covered with phlebotomy supplies next to the stool.

I extend my left arm. “Here. I have one good vein,” I say, wanting to make this as painless as possible.

The doctor taps it lightly with his glove-covered finger and makes a face of approval. “This will be easy.”

And it is, relatively speaking. Eight vials of blood later, we’re done. He tapes a wad of gauze over the insertion site and scribbles on the tablet.

He turns away, pointing to a folded sheet at the base of the exam table. “Remove all your clothes and we can do the next part of the exam.”

Undressing for a pose at Alice’s is one thing. This–this feels like I’m agreeing to my own abuse. Like I’m offering myself up.

Which I am.

The look on Lindsay’s face when Drew said that I might be connected to his parents’ deaths made me want to cry, to blabber on and on about how I’m so sorry. To prove to them, once and for all, that I didn’t do any of this.

But how do you prove a negative?

My clothes slide off my body as Silas and the doctor–whose name I still don’t know and don’t want to ask for–turn their backs to me. I undress quickly and move onto the exam table, the paper crinkling beneath my bare ass, the plastic underneath cold on my outer thighs and butt as I hold the sheet up under my armpits, waiting.

“Borokov, huh? Is that Russian?”

“Yes. My mom emigrated when she was young.”

“Any family ties back in your motherland?” He presses a hand on my bare shoulder, guiding me back to lie on the table, his face covered by a light-green paper mask, eyes excited.

A cold dread starts to pump through me. “No.”

“Does he really have to be in the room?” the doctor snaps as he yanks the sheet off my body, my completely nude form now stretched out on the exam table. My muscles can’t relax, so everything feels colder, tighter, more painful.

Vulnerable.

“I do,” Silas says, his voice heavy with an emotion that isn’t just about duty.

“You’re taking up room. It’s a tiny exam space.”

“Do your best.”

I can’t explain it, but the doctor gives me the major creeps. Not that it isn’t already awkward as hell, being naked in front of Silas. Out of the corner of my eye, I can see him trying to be discreet, looking anywhere but my direction. My nipples harden and one thigh twitches as I think about the fact that Silas is eighteen inches away from me, sitting on a small examination stool, one simple turn giving him a view of my exposed body.

“You’re warm, aren’t you?” the doctor says, his voice cutting through the handful of seconds where I was transported into my imagination. I shiver, my bladder suddenly pressing, the feeling making me flatten my hips against the paper and vinyl covering the table.

He holds a magnifying glass in one hand.

For the next ten minutes, I am put through a comprehensive body exam, with the doctor searching for a needle in a haystack.

I am the haystack.

He looks everywhere, turning me over, parting my butt cheeks, using the magnifying lens to look at every nook and cranny. He stays on the surface of my skin. I just close my eyes and try to be anywhere but here.

The doctor pokes and prods at every scar, every blemish, eyes scanning my body meticulously, cataloging imperfections.

The stark difference between his gaze and that of Alice painting me is like living in a parallel universe.

As the doctor searches my back, Silas’s phone buzzes. He is turned away from me. I open my eyes a crack to see him pull the phone to his ear, taking a call.

“You can talk in the hallway,” the doctor says crankily.

“I can’t leave the client.”

The client.

The doctor’s cold latex-covered fingers occasionally touch spots on my skin, his breath hot in erratic patches against my back, my ribs, my buttocks. It’s excruciating. Not the touch–the sense of being a specimen. Of needing to “pass” this exam.

Of not knowing why this is really happening.

“Mom, I can’t–slow down. What?” Silas is speaking as quietly as he can but he’s only a few feet away. We can hear it all.

Silas sighs. “Can’t talk now. You know what to do. We’ve talked about it before. She can’t compromise my work.”

She?

“Look,” he says, voice dropping to anger. “It’s more of the same. I know–I know,” he adds, exasperated. “But listen to me. You know what to do. I’ll call you when I have a break at work.”

Click.

He hangs up on his mother.

I’m relieved to have something other than the exam to think about. What’s going on in Silas’s life?

Just then, my legs are forcefully parted. I let out a small sound, a protest I didn’t consciously mount, one that the rough touch and the creepy vibe elicit.

“We’ve been told to do a thorough examination,” he says. I hear the snap of a glove, then feel fingers on my inner thigh. High.

I sit up, fast, and make a growling noise low in my throat, body tightening into a ball, curling all my openings so they are covered.

Except my mouth.

“Whatever it is you think you’re about to do to me, no. I withdraw all consent for this search.”

Suddenly, Silas is between me and the doctor, his wide back dark with his blue suit jacket, the contrast startling.

“You can’t withdraw,” the doctor says from the other side of Silas. “Consent was never needed. Or asked for,” he adds in a disapproving tone, as if I’m the transgressor.

“You heard her,” Silas says firmly. “She withdraws consent.” His body tenses, holding firm.

“She doesn’t have a say in this. It’s like any other strip search. We’re well within our rights to–”

“She said no.” Silas’s voice is low and deadly, with the kind of authority I’ve heard in Drew but never this man, who has literally turned himself into a wall.

For me.

“Your boss says yes.”

“My boss doesn’t know what you’re doing to her.”

“You really think that?” The doctor’s voice is mocking. “I won’t stop the exam without permission from your boss.”

“And I won’t let you touch her again.”

“Then we’re at an impasse.”

Given the doctor is about eight inches shorter than Silas and thirty years older, if this comes to blows, I’m not worried.

My stomach sinks anyhow, because one call to Silas’s boss–does he mean Drew?–means I lose.

And Silas has to stand down.

I know how bureaucracies work. I know how this strange, extra-judicial system works, too. I am only standing up for myself because the doctor is about to cross a line.

“I withdraw consent,” I say again.

“We may need to do this by force if you don’t just accept fate and let me finish,” the doctor says.

“Said every rapist in history, ever,” I snap. “Now I withdraw consent and I’m reporting you to the police! You’re threatening–”

Silas acts quickly, his dark suited arm moving to the right, the doctor’s lab coat trapped in one big hand. The guy is up against the wall, choking.

Silas’s voice is deadly calm.

“You will not threaten her. You will never, ever touch her again. If I hear that you’ve made that fucked-up force threat to a woman submitting for an exam like this, I’ll make sure you’re on the radar screen of people in the government you’ve never heard of–and don’t want to. Understood?”

The doctor just makes a gagging sound.

Silas drops him. Ever see a spider skitter away from a small spray of water?

That’s exactly what he looks like as he leaves.

“He’s right,” I say as I grab the thin sheet, covering myself with it. “If you weren’t here, he could have just made me do whatever he was about to do. Was he really going to search my… there… for implants? For chips?”

Silas reaches up and hands me a hospital gown without turning around. “It’s possible to find them there, yes.”

“Why not do a scan?”

“Because bad guys always seem to find a way to be just savvy enough to be ahead of technology. And also because of intimidation.”

“Intimidation?”

“As a technique. No one wants a cavity search.”

“You knew that was about to happen to me?” I shove my legs hard into my skirt opening and zip up, throwing my arms through my bra loops, snapping fast. I think I’m setting a personal best for quick dressing.

“No. No,” he says forcefully. “Until I came in here I had no idea what they were doing.”

“Drew ordered this?”

“Not Drew.”

“Then who? His boss? Oh, my God, did Harry order this?”

“I can’t tell you who.”

“You can protect me from it but you can’t name the person who ordered it?”

“Welcome to the security industry.”

“It’s all about the secrecy, isn’t it? Give your clients what they want, protect them at all costs, but use those secrets to position yourself at an advantage.” My words come out in a rushed scramble. Fear pushes them through my quivering lips.

He goes quiet.

“Are you decent?” he asks finally.

“No, but I’m dressed.”

His little snort of amusement thaws me, slightly. I know he can’t divulge information sometimes. It’s how this whole world works.

But still–someone ordered a full cavity search on me. Someone high enough up in government to make it happen. Without Silas, I’d be in pain right now.

Or worse.

“Who would do that? I’m a private citizen who is here in protective custody because of the car bomb. No one seriously thinks I’ve done anything, except for Monica.”

Silence.

Oh, no.

“Monica?”

Silence.

I sigh, pacing in the tiny room, narrowing my eyes to shut out the bright, overbearing fluorescent lights above that hover like an annoying alien ship.

“Fine. I get it. You can’t say anything.” It’s easier to be angry with him than to process what just happened.

“No, Jane. I can’t.”

I walk to the door. Just as I’m reaching for the doorknob, so is he. Our hands collide, his grabbing my elbow to support me.

He doesn’t let go when he could. Or when he should.

“I’m sorry you went through that. Are you okay?”

I am holding my breath.

I am holding my breath because Silas is touching me with a gentleness that belies every attitude I thought he had toward me.

He’s blocking out the light, his eyes so kind, so sweet. As I look up, I swear he’s staring at my lips, which gives me a few seconds to look at him. My skin hurts, like someone is stretching it too hard. The tension makes it unbearably itchy suddenly. Physical memories of the doctor’s hand on my inner thigh trigger all my Kegel muscles to clench. I close my eyes, wincing.

“He didn’t actually hurt you, did he?” Silas sounds like the thought hadn’t occurred to him until now, and that if the doctor did, he is a dead man.

“No. I’m just–I’m just–it’s too much,” I say, my body taking this tiny little flash of compassion from him and running with it, taking advantage of the momentary lapse in constant vigilance to relax, to process.

To cry.

“Jane,” he says, sounding helplessly pissed, still angry at the doctor yet unable to help me. “No one deserves what you’ve gone through.”

“But I do!” I say in a bitter, over-the-top voice. “I’m the worst person ever. Don’t you understand, Silas? Everyone thinks they know me. I’m pigeon-holed. I’m screwed whether I’m innocent or not. Sometimes I think it would be easier to just give it up. Tell them they were right all along. Instead of desperately trying to get people to believe my truth, feed them the lie they want. Maybe that’s the secret to life: give in sooner than you want to. It makes all the problems go away.”

“It doesn’t. You just end up with new problems.”

A million smartass replies to that comment come flying through my mouth. They stop at my teeth, the tip of my tongue slipping through lips just long enough for him to see. His body drops, like he’s let go of a burden across the back of his neck. I feel an intimacy with him that is insane considering what I just went through.

And then I’m in his arms, smelling him, my face pressed gently against his chest. Slowly, with an aching hesitation that must take Herculean effort to overcome, his arms wrap around my shoulders, hands flat against my back, fingers planting themselves firmly in the curve of my waist, offering comfort.

I drink it in, the sensation so unreal that I start to dissociate. If I’m going to separate my mind from my body, shouldn’t it be during an assault like I almost experienced from the doctor? Instead, I’m doing this because of an embrace?

Silas’s embrace.

“I shouldn’t be doing this,” he murmurs in my ear.

“No, you shouldn’t.”

“We shouldn’t be doing this.”

“No, we shouldn’t.”

He doesn’t budge.

Finally he says, “But I am.”

“We are.”

“I’m sorry, Jane.”

“Me too, Silas.”

“No. You have nothing to be sorry for. Not to me. Not to anyone.” His breath warms my hair and neck, smelling like coffee. The hard edge of his chest holster presses into my breast, reminding me that he’s hard core. Dangerous. A trained soldier who can turn on all of the selves inside him designed to kill in order to protect.

He thinks I’m the dangerous one?

A stillness settles over us, the air changing. We’ve moved from comfort to something more, a tantalizing potential that expands as time takes over. Every detail of movement becomes more intense, more important, just more. The cloth of his suit jacket scratches against my cheek. His fingers stroke the bones of my shoulder blades, exquisite and satisfying. My hands press him closer to me, his body seeping warmth into mine.

I’m melting.

If I look up, will he kiss me? The attraction is so strong. So intoxicating. I could just pull away and pause time, looking into his eyes to see if he feels this, too.

Silas beats me to it, head tipped down, taking me in with eyes that search mine for answers I can only give using my body as a conduit to the heart.

The same body that was just turned into a rope in a very slick game of tug-of-war.

He bends down and I panic, unsure suddenly, wanting and willing but oh, so uncertain.

When his lips land on the crown of my head, his sigh a breath of promise, I feel two distinct emotions at the same time.

Relief.

And regret.