Chapter Six: A Game Of Masks

The door clicked shut behind Jace.

Rayne didn’t move.

She stayed in the cooling water, arms tight around herself, breath trembling in her throat. Her mind spun too fast to keep up—racing through a thousand possibilities, every memory of every moment she could’ve slipped, could’ve been seen.

And now she had been.

Seen. Exposed. Vulnerable.

She hated that word.

It wasn’t supposed to be her. Vulnerable was weak. Vulnerable got you killed. She’d spent years becoming anything but that. She trained harder. Ran faster. Learned quicker. She broke herself into someone new—someone worthy.

And in two seconds, with one wrong lock and one dumb bath, it all unraveled.

She wanted to scream.

But she didn’t.

Instead, she stood. Toweled off. Dressed quickly in the spare uniform she always kept tucked away in the back cubby of the locker room.

Her hands trembled the entire time.

Not from fear—but from fury. From the ache of knowing she no longer had full control of the game she was playing.

And now Jace