Fiona's breath shook—no, trembled, quaked, shattered inside her chest like glass tapped too hard. Her back pressed against the door, trapped between solid wood and the overwhelming presence of a man who looked like he had never once been told no in his entire life. The cold surface seeped through the thin fabric of her red dress, sending tiny shivers up her spine, but she barely noticed. All she could feel was him. His heat. His height. The way he filled every inch of space around her until there was no room left to breathe without inhaling his scent, that dark, woody fragrance that clung to him like a second skin, expensive and dangerous and utterly intoxicating.
His hand was still braced beside her head on the door, close enough that she could see everything: the faint blue veins tracing paths under his skin like rivers on a map, the clean, sharp lines of his wrist where his suit sleeve pulled back just slightly, the subtle strength in his fingers that spoke of a man who didn't need to raise his voice to get what he wanted. If he wanted to hurt her, she realized dimly, there was absolutely nothing she could do about it. The thought should have terrified her more. It did terrify her.
His face was calm. Infuriatingly, dangerously calm. The kind of calm that belonged to predators who knew their prey had nowhere left to run. But his eyes, God, his eyes, they burned like slow fire. Deep brown irises that should have been warm but instead smoldered with something darker, something patient and hungry and absolutely focused on her. She had never been looked at like this in her entire life. Not once. Not by anyone. It was terrifying. It was overwhelming. It made her feel like a small animal frozen in headlights, knowing it should run but unable to move.
"...I can't leave?" she asked, disbelief cracking through her voice like thin ice. The words came out smaller than she intended, higher, almost childlike in their confusion. This couldn't be happening. This was some kind of mistake. She had already survived so much tonight: the humiliating entrance at her own party, Jackson holding Natasha like she was made of spun glass, the drunk man in the bathroom chasing her through hallways, the terrified employee begging on his knees. She had nothing left. No strength, no tears, no fight. Her body still ached from the blood loss, her legs still trembled from running.
"Look, I'm sorry," she rushed on, the words tumbling over each other in their haste to escape. "I know I shouldn't have come here. I know. I'm just lost. I didn't mean to. I was looking for the bathroom and then I heard..." She stopped herself, realizing she was rambling, sounding exactly like that pathetic man on his knees just minutes ago. The comparison made her stomach clench with shame. "I'll go back now. I'll just leave and pretend I was never here. Please."
She tried to make her voice steady, tried to sound like someone who deserved to be taken seriously, but it came out breathless and small and achingly vulnerable.
He looked down at her.
That was the thing: he actually looked down at her, his gaze traveling slowly, deliberately, from her wide green eyes to her trembling lips to the way her fingers curled uselessly against her thighs. He took in everything. The too-tight red dress. The flushed cheeks. The slight sway in her stance from exhaustion she couldn't quite hide. The tear tracks she had tried to wipe away but left faint trails on her skin. And something shifted in those burning eyes, not softening exactly, but sharpening. Intensifying. As if she had suddenly become more interesting than he initially thought.
"How did you get here?" His voice was cold, cold in a way that felt far more frightening than shouting ever could. It was the cold of someone who asked questions not because he needed answers, but because he wanted to see if you would lie.
"I just came here," she stammered, lowering her gaze because looking into his eyes felt like staring at the sun, painful, overwhelming, impossible to sustain. "No one was around. The elevator just opened here. I didn't know it was your floor. I swear I didn't know." The words felt pathetically weak even to her own ears. She pressed her palm against the door behind her, seeking stability, and realized distantly that her hand was shaking. Her whole body was shaking. The blood loss, the stress, the fear, it was all catching up with her, making her vision swim slightly at the edges.
"Bro! Where are you! I heard you're here!"
The voice crashed through the heavy silence like a stone through glass, loud and familiar and so impossibly welcome that Fiona's heart lurched violently in her chest.
Her eyes lit up.
Really lit up, the way a candle flares when oxygen finally reaches it, the way drowning people look when they spot the surface. For the first time since this nightmare began, genuine hope flooded through her veins, warm and bright and desperate.
Jackson.
That was Jackson's voice.
Jackson was here. Jackson would explain everything. Jackson would make this terrifying man understand that she wasn't a threat, wasn't a trespasser, wasn't anything to be afraid of. Jackson was her fiancé. They were getting married tomorrow, for God's sake. And surely, surely he wouldn't let anything bad happen to her.
"Please," she said quickly, grabbing onto the hope like a lifeline, lifting her gaze back to his burning eyes even though it made her stomach flip with fear. "Please let me go. He's my fiancé. I'm getting married tomorrow. I just came here accidentally, I swear. I wasn't trying to do anything. I didn't see anything. I won't tell anyone about what I saw earlier. I just want to go home."
She was babbling again. She knew she was babbling. But she couldn't stop. The words kept pouring out, driven by terror and exhaustion and the desperate need to make him understand that she was harmless, insignificant, not worth his attention.
He frowned.
It was the first real expression she had seen on his face, and it transformed him completely, the cool, detached mask cracking just slightly to reveal something underneath. Annoyance? Surprise? She couldn't tell. But his hand dropped from the door, and he stepped back just enough to create a sliver of space between them, enough for her to breathe without tasting his scent, enough for her to remember that she had legs that could still move.
Then he opened the door.
Light spilled in from the hallway, warm and golden compared to the dim, charged atmosphere of the room. And there, striding toward them with that easy, confident walk she had watched a hundred times, was Jackson.