Chapter 4
"I know you, Nathan," you breathe, your mouth so close to his that every word brushes his lips. "I've lived in your head for three years. I know who you are."
"Yes," Nathan whispers, raising his hands to cup your cheeks, his calloused thumbs wiping away the cold sweat at your cheekbones. "Yes, Christian. You're the only one who ever did."
Your breath catches. The thirty-six hours of agonizing exhaustion, the years of chasing his shadow through the dark, the unacknowledged, suffocating lust that has poisoned your every thought—it all collapses into this single, crushing point of contact.
You don't pull away.
You lean into his hands, your fingers knotting into the fabric over his chest, feeling the wild, galloping thunder of his heart beneath your knuckles. You have broken him. You have dismantled his impossible crime. You hold his life, his confession, his freedom in the palm of your hand.
You are the interrogator. You have won.
You tilt your head, closing the last fraction of an inch between you, ready to take his mouth, ready to seal his defeat with a kiss that tastes of victory and ruin—
A sharp, needle-thin pain stabs through the base of your skull.
You flinch, your lips stopping a millimeter from his.
A low, oscillating whine vibrates through the back of your jaw, like the high-frequency hum of a medical monitor struggling to catch a pulse.
*Beep... beep...*
You blink, a sudden wave of ice-cold vertigo rolling through your gut. "What...?"
"Christian?" Nathan’s voice sounds suddenly distant, muffled, as if filtered through twenty feet of water.
Above your head, the fluorescent light doesn't just flicker. For an impossible, micro-second fraction of time, the harsh yellow glare shears sideways, tearing like torn film, revealing a flash of deep, pitch-black space and the faint, ghostly silhouette of hydraulic cables before snapping violently back to dull concrete.
You stumble backward, wrenching yourself free of his grip.
The chain slips off your neck with a dry clatter. Your boots hit the linoleum, your legs trembling, your hands flying up to clutch your temples as a blinding star of pain explodes behind your eyes.
"What was that?" you gasp, your chest heaving, the room suddenly tilting around you like the deck of a sinking ship.
Nathan sits quietly across the table. His cuffs are still fastened to the iron ring. His expression is calm, intensely still, watching you with an unnerving, slate-gray gaze that seems far too steady for a man in chains.
"What was what, Detective?" Nathan asks softly.
"The light. The sound in the wall." You press the heels of your hands hard against your eyelids, trying to crush the creeping nausea rising in your throat. "The ventilation. Did you hear that?"
"I hear the same wheezing municipal fan we've been listening to since yesterday, Christian," Nathan murmurs. His voice is smooth, devoid of the ragged breathlessness that gripped him seconds ago. "You're pushing yourself past the redline. Sit down."
You shake your head violently, forcing your eyes open.
The room is solid. The concrete is dull beige, peeling at the corners. The two-way mirror reflects your own pale, exhausted face, dark purple shadows bruised beneath your eyes. Beyond the glass, you know Miller and the Captain are watching. You aren't losing your mind.
*Exhaustion,* you tell yourself, your heart thumping against your ribs in heavy, sluggish beats. *Thirty-six hours of caffeine, nicotine gum, and sensory deprivation. Your optic nerve is misfiring.*
"I don't need to sit," you growl, though your voice sounds thin, rattling in your own ears. You reach for the edge of the steel table to steady your swaying balance. "We're not finished, Sterling. The hoist... the terrace... we're going through the timeline again. From the minute you stepped off the cradle."
Nathan tilts his head, a faint, melancholic smile touching the corner of his lips.
"Whatever you say, Detective," he says softly. "Take all the time you need."
You take a deep, shuddering breath, trying to drag air into lungs that feel suddenly compressed, starved of oxygen. You open your mouth to demand his signature on the transcript—
The room pitches violently to the right.
A high, piercing frequency screeches inside your brain. The light overhead bleaches to blinding, sterile white. The table beneath your fingers loses its texture, turning as slick and weightless as water, and the darkness at the edge of your vision rushes inward like an incoming tide.
Your knees buckle.
The cold steel of the table rises up to meet your face.
Your eyes snap open.
You lurch forward, your forehead slamming hard against the cold, grease-stained steel of the interrogation table.
Pain blooms instantly behind your eyes—a blinding, jagged star of white that leaves you gasping. The cardboard coffee cup at your elbow topples, spilling a dark, lukewarm puddle across the crime scene photos of Gabriel Thorne’s private sanctuary.
Across the table, metal rattles softly.
"Easy, Christian," a voice murmurs, low and smooth as raw silk. "You’ve been pushing yourself hard. Even machines overheat if you never cut the power."
You jerk upright, your hand instinctively dropping to your hip. Your fingers close around the textured grip of your service Glock. Cold leather. Heavy polymer. Reassurance. You draw in a ragged breath, the sour taste of burnt espresso and stale paper clinging to the roof of your mouth.
Nathan Sterling sits exactly where he has been for the last thirty-six hours.
His charcoal suit jacket hangs over the back of his steel chair, his white sleeves rolled neatly to his forearms. The heavy iron cuffs lock his wrists to the welded anchor ring in the center of the table. There is no blood on his cheek. No static in the air. No impossible smile.
Just the pale, exhausted, razor-sharp face of the most dangerous man you have ever pursued.
You scrub a hand over your face, pressing the heels of your palms into your aching sockets until colors swirl behind your lids. "A microsleep," you mutter under your breath. A rationalization, quick and clinical. "Just a goddamn microsleep."
"You were gone for barely four seconds," Nathan says, watching you with slate-gray eyes that look terrifyingly lucid despite the marathon session. A faint, mocking tilt graces the corner of his mouth. "Though you looked genuinely alarmed. What did you see? Did you dream I broke your pretty cuffs?"
"I don't dream about you, Sterling," you lie, your voice rough as sandpaper.
"Everyone dreams about me, Christian," he replies softly, resting his forearms against the table. The iron chain links clink, a dull, grounded sound. "Especially you. You’ve had my dossier on your nightstand for four months. You know the exact caliber of my preferred ammunition. You know the tailor who stitches my lapels. You probably know my resting heart rate better than your own."
"Your resting heart rate is seventy-two," you shoot back, grabbing a handful of rough paper napkins from the plastic tray to mop up the spilled coffee. "Which is absurdly low for a man about to spend the rest of his natural life in a maximum-security penitentiary."
"Seventy-four, actually," Nathan corrects mildly. "The lighting in here is rather harsh. It elevates the blood pressure."
