Chapter 3: The Wolfe's Den

Five minutes.

That's all Luca Wolfe gave me, five minutes to say goodbye to the life I had before he walked through my door and detonated it. I stood in my bedroom doorway staring at the duffel bag he'd packed, at my clothes folded inside it with the kind of ruthless efficiency that made my chest hurt, and I thought: this is it. This is what the end of your old life looks like. A bag you didn't pack yourself, sitting on a floor you're about to walk away from.

Downstairs I could hear my mom's voice. Low. Scared. The specific scared that mothers get when they know something is wrong but don't know how wrong yet. "Natalie, who was that man?"

I didn't answer. I couldn't. Because the answer was the father of my twins, and I wasn't ready to say those words out loud to anyone else. I could barely say them inside my own head without the floor doing that disappearing trick again.

I grabbed my phone and the hoodie, Bryan's hoodie, my hoodie, the one I had stolen at a bonfire in tenth grade and never given back. I couldn't leave it. If I was walking out of my life, I needed one piece of the old one to take with me, something that smelled like before, something that still made sense.

Luca was by the front door when I got downstairs. Not inside, not outside, on the threshold, exactly like that, like he had calculated the precise point where he could exist in my parents' home without actually being in it. Like he wouldn't step further inside unless he had to burn the place down first.

My mom stood in the kitchen doorway clutching her cardigan. My dad was behind her, silent in the way he got when he was trying to understand something that didn't have an explanation he could hold onto. Bryan was gone. Maya was gone.

"Let's go," Luca said. Not to me specifically. To the air. Like I had already agreed, like the decision had been made and he was simply waiting for my body to catch up to it.

"Natalie." My mom's voice broke on my name. "You don't have to go with him. Whatever happened, whatever this is..."

"It's done, Ma," I said, and my voice came out steady in a way that had nothing to do with how I actually felt. "I'll call you."

A lie. I didn't know when I would be able to call. I didn't know what Luca's rules were about phones and contact and the outside world, and I was too exhausted and too hollowed out to ask right now.

I walked past her. Past my dad's stare, which said everything he couldn't find words for. Out the door and into the cold air and into whatever came next.

Luca didn't touch me. He didn't have to. I followed anyway, the way you follow the current of something when you're too tired to swim against it.

His car was exactly as I remembered it, black, low, engine purring like something alive and slightly threatening. He opened the passenger door for me without a word. I got in. The leather was cold against the backs of my legs and I stared at my hands in my lap and didn't look back at the house because I knew if I looked back I would fall apart completely, and I had made a decision somewhere between my bedroom and the front door that I was not going to do that in front of him.

He didn't speak until we were five minutes from Velmoor, the campus disappearing behind us into the dark.

"You're not going to cry."

It wasn't a question. It was never a question with him.

I kept my eyes on the window, on the streetlights blurring past in long orange streaks. "Wasn't planning to."

"Good." A pause. "Crying doesn't help."

We didn't talk for the rest of the drive.

His house was forty minutes outside the city, past the parts of the road that were smooth, past the gates of other compounds, past the point where the streetlights stopped bothering. High walls. Black gate. No name anywhere, no number, nothing to identify it from the outside. A guard opened the gate from within before Luca even slowed down, didn't look at the car, didn't look at me.

"Out" he said looking at me... I came out looking at the whole building cause it's something I've never seen before.

The house itself was all glass and concrete and sharp angles, modern in a way that felt deliberate, almost aggressive. Big. Too big for one person, which meant either he entertained or he wanted the space to make people feel small. Standing in the driveway looking up at it, I thought: this is a place you bleed in, not a place you live in.

He parked in a garage with three other cars, all of them black, all of them expensive, all of them looking like they had somewhere important to be. I followed him through a side door into the kitchen, stainless steel surfaces, no photos on the walls, no magnets on the fridge, no evidence anywhere that a human being with feelings had ever occupied this space.

He dropped my duffel on the kitchen island. The sound echoed.

"Upstairs," he said. "Second door on the left. Your room."

"My room?" The words came out before I could stop them.

He looked at me then, really looked, the way he did when he wanted to make sure you understood something. "You didn't think you were sleeping with me, did you?"

My face went hot. "No. I just..."

"Second door. Left. Bathroom's inside." He turned back to the sink. "Don't leave the room tonight."

"Why?"

He didn't answer. He just turned the tap on and started washing his hands, slow, thorough, methodical, and I watched him do it and something about the way he was doing it made the hair on the back of my neck stand up, because that was not how you washed your hands after a normal evening. That was how you washed your hands after something else entirely.

And then I saw it.

On the counter beside the knife block. A gun. Not hidden in a drawer, not locked in a case, just sitting there, black and metal and heavy-looking, like it was as ordinary as a toaster. Like it lived there. Like it had always lived there.

I stopped breathing.

Luca saw me looking. He didn't move to hide it. Didn't explain it or apologise for it or even acknowledge that it was unusual. He simply dried his hands on a black towel, picked the gun up, checked the chamber with the practiced ease of someone who had done it ten thousand times, and set it back down.

"Second door," he said again. "Left."

I grabbed my duffel. My hands were shaking. I took the stairs before I could think too hard about what I had just watched him do and what it meant about the kind of man I was carrying children for.

The room was empty in the way of spaces that have been prepared rather than lived in, king bed with grey sheets pulled tight, blackout curtains, nothing on the walls, nothing in the wardrobe. Like a hotel room, except colder. Like no one had ever slept here, but the room had been waiting for someone to.

I shut the door. Locked it. Sat on the edge of the bed and looked at my hands and thought: this is my life now.

A house with guns on the counter. A man who washed blood off his hands like it was nothing. And twins, two small impossible things that were going to need me to be braver than I had ever been in my entire life, and I had absolutely no idea how to do that.

I pressed one hand flat against my stomach. Still flat. Still the same stomach I had woken up with this morning, before everything. But not for much longer.

One knock on the door. Just one, not asking.

I didn't answer.

It opened anyway. Of course it did. Luca stood in the doorway without stepping inside, like there was a line he'd decided not to cross tonight.

"Doctor's appointment tomorrow. Nine am. Don't be late."

I looked up at him. "How did you already..."

"I know everything about you, Natalie." He said it simply, without heat, the way you state a fact that requires no emphasis. "What you eat. Who you call. When your cycle was."

Something cold moved through me that had nothing to do with the temperature of the room. "You tracked my cycle?"

"I track threats." His eyes dropped to my stomach for just a moment, one second, maybe less, then came back up. "They're threats now too."

Threats. He had just called my babies threats, in the same flat voice he used for everything, and the terrifying part was that I understood what he meant, that in his world, they were vulnerabilities, pressure points, things that could be used against him, and that understanding made everything worse.

"Get some sleep," he said. "You'll need it."

He pulled the door shut. I heard the lock click from the outside.

I sat very still for a moment. Then I got up, tried the handle. Locked. Went to the window, bars, decorative and black and wrought iron, but bars all the same. I pressed my fingers against them and stood there in the dark and understood something with the kind of clarity that only comes when you are standing inside the reality of a decision you cannot undo.

I wasn't a guest.

I was an asset.

I went back to the bed and pulled Bryan's hoodie over my head and sat in it for a long time, breathing in the smell of him, soap and fabric softener and Sunday dinners and six years of the safest person I had ever known, and I thought about his face when it broke, and about the way he hadn't turned around at the door, and about the fact that I had done that. I had done that to him.

My phone buzzed.

Bryan: Are you safe?

I stared at the message for a long time. Typed: I don't know. Deleted it. Typed: Yes. Hovered over send.

Didn't send it.

Because I didn't know if Luca could read my texts. And I didn't know what yes meant anymore. And I didn't know how to talk to Bryan like a normal person when the last thing I had done was nod while another man told him I was carrying twins and leaving.

I turned the phone off. Slid it under the pillow.

Then I lay down in a bed that wasn't mine, in a house with guns on the counter and bars on the windows, carrying twins for a man who had just locked me in a room, I cried instantly. Silently, carefully, with my face pressed into a pillow that smelled like nothing, because the hoodie was the only thing in this room that smelled like something real and I wasn't ready to cry into that yet.

Crying doesn't help.

He was right. He was right about that, and I hated him for it, and I cried anyway until there was nothing left.

Somewhere downstairs, a door opened and closed.

Then Luca's voice, low, controlled, dangerous.

"I told you never to come here."

And a voice I recognised answered him.

Bryan's.