The Hunter Becomes The Hunted

Victor would admit he’d been overbearing. Sandra’s plight was steeped in emotional distress, and a logical solution was the last thing she needed. Four hours had passed since their brief conversation before his phone finally buzzed. He wouldn’t have blamed her for ghosting him, not after his stellar display of unpalatable insensitivity.

Dominance was second nature to him. So was handing out unsolicited advice like orders. Now, self-loathing hummed in his chest as he typed up reports in his office, his phone lying too close for comfort. His fingers moved across the keys at a clipped pace, but his mind barely tracked the words.

He glanced at the device more often than he wanted to admit. Victor didn’t have much experience with women, but the handful of short-lived relationships he’d had gave him a basic idea of how they operated.

He should’ve just taken her side instead of rationalising her boss’s behaviour. But his bad habits had done the driving, and now he’d probably ruined a good thing before it even began.

She wasn’t going to text back. She was—

Ping.

He snatched up the phone. Every fibre of him hoped it was her. She didn’t owe him another word after that exchange, yet here she was. He exhaled a breath he hadn’t realised he’d been holding and read the message.

"You've clearly never had a boss who treated you like an insignificant joke in the wrong place at the wrong time. Never been treated as incompetent, huh? Actually, you're just like him right now."

His eye twitched. The tone was sharp, tactless, cold enough to frost over his thoughts. He knew the barb wasn’t truly aimed at him, but something inside him took the hit anyway. The voice in his head, reading it, was too familiar, like an echo he couldn’t place.

He was at fault. He’d approached her the wrong way from the start.

Ping.

"And the way you act like you know what I should do is exactly like him. I bet you treat your employees the same; you probably barely listen to them, rule them with an iron fist, and see them as nothing but soldiers. Just stroking that imaginary ego, huh?"

Victor shut the phone with a snap and set it down with deliberate care. His hands slid into his chestnut hair, dragging it back from his face. The anger wasn’t new, but its trigger was an audacity that mirrored someone else’s down to the grain.

The message was wrong, of course. He didn’t “rule” his men; he led them as his rank demanded. But it wasn’t the accusation that needled him. It was the tone. That insolent bite, cutting clean into him, was identical to the one person who always managed to piss him the hell off.

He reopened the phone, pulled up the keyboard, and typed:

"I'm sorry if I came off that way. You're right. I overstepped. And no, I’m not anything like your boss."

He set the device aside and reached for the red button on his desk.

"Lieutenant Knox," he said into the mic, his voice low. "Report to my office."

Ping.

Victor’s gaze flicked back to the screen. Another message had slid in.

"Now," he ordered into the mic, finality cutting the word short.

"I didn’t expect an apology, honestly. But it’s accepted."

Victor blinked slowly and withdrew his fingers from the screen. His lips settled into a thin line as a severe rush of blood flooded his head. Victor prided himself on staying composed, even in situations that warranted anger, and this was no exception. He placed his finger down and decided to reply.

"So, Sandra, other than your work problems, tell me more about yourself. I'm dying to know."

The door opened just as he pressed send, and Knox’s boyish, slim face appeared. The freckles across his nose caught the ray of sunlight piercing through the small circular window beside the door. Brown caramel eyes met dark coffee brown in a lock that felt almost tangible. Tense silence clogged the air instantly.

Knox stepped inside, stopping at the desk, his expression joyless, as though this were the last place he wanted to be. He saluted, but no greeting followed. Lately, the man seemed to have acquired a faint air of superiority rather than proving himself worthy of his title.

Victor glanced down at his phone, then back at Knox, who stood there innocently, waiting for the reason he’d been called in. The lack of response to his last message made Victor’s hackles rise with unwarranted suspicion. It was too uncanny that Sandra’s replies had stopped the moment Knox entered the room. That was insane. Too many days at sea must have been messing with his head.

Knox would never—

The door swung open.

Knox stepped in without a word. Sunlight from the porthole struck the freckles across his nose, turning them gold. His caramel-brown eyes locked with Victor’s darker gaze, holding it without so much as a blink.

The air thickened.

He saluted, precisely, but without warmth. No, “Sir.” No sign of eagerness. Just a soldier filling a quota.

Victor didn’t tell him to lower his hand. He wanted to see how long Knox would hold it. Wanted to see if he’d break first. He didn’t.

Victor’s eyes cut briefly to his phone on the desk. Still no reply. Too uncanny. Too neat.

"Knox," he said, pushing himself up from his chair. His palms pressed into the desk, veins straining faintly. The tremor in his fingers wasn’t from weakness.

"Sir," Knox returned, his voice dry enough to scrape.

They stood there, two men on opposite ends of rank but sharing the same taut line of defiance.

Victor studied him. The clean uniform. The squared shoulders. That controlled, steady stare. Not the scared boy he’d once taken aboard. This man had edges. Sharp ones.

The words he’d been trading with Sandra flickered in his mind, and for one terrible second, they overlapped perfectly with the insolence in front of him.

"Answer me truthfully, soldier," Victor said at last, leaning forward over the desk until their faces were caught in the same shallow beam of light. His voice was low, stripped of any pretence of patience.

"What do you think of me?"

Knox didn’t blink. His jaw shifted ever so slightly, as if weighing the risk of answering honestly. The silence between them wasn’t empty; it was alive, crackling like a fuse burning toward something neither of them could name.