Seduction of the Mind

The Game Shifts

The session began with an almost dangerous kind of politeness.

“Cold day,” Vivienne murmured as she stepped inside, the door closing behind her with the soft hiss of air. She didn’t rush to sit; she glided, each movement measured like a dancer tracing steps she knew by heart. The scent of her perfume drifted across the space—something faintly floral, anchored by a darker note he couldn’t name. Jasmine and… iron, he thought, and hated himself for even noticing.

When she finally settled into the chair, it was with the same elegance as always: spine long, one leg folding over the other in an unhurried sweep. Her blouse was white—crisp, deliberate—tucked into a charcoal-gray pencil skirt that hugged her hips like it had been stitched onto her body. The sharp line of the skirt’s hem cut across the top of her knees, leaving just enough revealed to make it impossible not to look.

“Winter finally remembered what month it is,” Ethan said, his tone neutral, as he opened his notebook. He stared at the page, but his eyes didn’t take in the words. His brain was a fog of static behind the calm mask he wore.

Vivienne smiled faintly, the kind of smile that never truly softened the eyes. “You like the cold?”

He hesitated—just for a beat too long—before answering. “Sometimes. It slows people down. Makes them easier to read.”

That earned him a tilt of her head, a lock of dark hair sliding against the silk of her blouse. “Am I easier to r******w?”

He let the question hang there, heavy between them. He didn’t give her the satisfaction of an immediate answer. Instead, he flipped a page in his notebook, wrote nothing, and finally said, “Not really.”

For a moment, the silence stretched—a taut wire humming between two points. Her smile lingered, curved like a blade just waiting for skin.

And then she cut through it like she always did.

“Are we going to talk about it?” Her tone was smooth as silk stretched over steel.

He looked up slowly, as if the question barely interested him. “Talk about what?”

“The recording.” Her smile sharpened, coiling like smoke from a match. “Or are we just going to pretend your ears didn’t burn when you heard it?”

Ethan didn’t flinch. He let the pause breathe, let it slide across her skin like the chill creeping under the door. Then he said, soft and measured, “I didn’t hear anything.”

That landed like a stone in still water. Something flickered in her expression—too fast for most to catch, but he saw it. A fracture in her perfect calm.

Good. The thought coiled hot and fast in his chest. Take back the control. Inch by inch. Because if he didn’t, she’d own him by the end of the week. She’d take everything—the walls, the air, the very bones of his discipline—and grind them into dust beneath her perfect shoes.

“You didn’t hear it?” Her voice dropped, lower now, colder.

“No.” He leaned back in the chair with calculated ease, one arm draping across the armrest. “By the time I checked my phone, my daughter had already… handled it. She told me she listened before I even knew it was there. And when I tried—” He let his shoulders rise in a lazy shrug, his gaze never breaking from hers. “—deleted. Gone.”

Vivienne stilled. Her fingers tightened around the chair’s arm, the motion so subtle it might have been imagined.

“She also said,” Ethan continued, his tone a blade sliding slow from its sheath, “that you sent… very interesting things. Want to tell me what that was?”

The silence snapped taut. Her jaw flexed hard enough that he could almost hear it grind. When she finally spoke, the word was carved in ice. “Nothing.”

He smiled then—a small, surgical thing, neat and bloodless. “Then nothing it is.”

For a moment, neither moved. The air thickened until it tasted metallic on his tongue. And then Ethan stood, unhurried, and reached for the tray on the side table. He placed it between them like an offering. Blocks of clay sat in muted colors—soft reds, dark blues, earthy greens. They looked harmless. Innocent. Like her smile had looked the first time she’d walked through his door.

“Today,” Ethan said evenly, “we’ll try something different. Sculpt something. Anything. While we talk.”

Vivienne’s brows arched, disdain cutting sharp lines across her beauty. “You want me to play with clay, Doctor?”

“I want to see what your hands say when your mouth is busy.”

The pause that followed pulsed like a heartbeat. Then she exhaled—sharp, irritated—and slid the tray toward herself. Her fingers tore into a slab of cobalt blue, rolling it with unnecessary force. The clay squelched faintly under her grip, taking the shape of her mood with every press.

Ethan watched, his expression carved from calm while inside his pulse pounded like war drums. This isn’t therapy anymore. It’s strategy. It’s survival.

And then the phone vibrated. Once. A low, muted hum, but it split the silence clean.

He glanced down. Detective Bennett.

Another body. This time, Doc, I want you on scene. Address below.

The text burned into his vision. His throat tightened, and for one ragged second, his breath stuttered. Slowly, he looked up again.

Vivienne was bent over the tray, shaping something long and narrow, the edges sharper than they had any right to be. Her nails left grooves on the surface, like scars pressed into flesh. The cobalt clay darkened under the pressure of her fingers.

Ethan fought to steady his breathing, but his ribs felt like a cage with bars bending inward. He nodded faintly, the mask holding by a thread while the ground tilted under his feet.

She was here, perfectly calm, her perfume laced with that faint metallic note. And somewhere else, another man’s blood was cooling on a floor.

The thought slammed into him like shrapnel: Weeks ago, she sat in this very chair and told me she’d started seeing a woman. He’d even seen them once—Vivienne and that girl—laughing in a café like the world couldn’t touch them. She said she wanted something softer, quieter. Something that didn’t bruise her skin. So why did I hear her last night—gasping under a man’s weight? And now, today, someone else is dead.

He broke the silence, his voice smooth as glass, even as his chest burned. “How are things with your girlfriend?”

Vivienne looked up slowly, her lips curling like the edge of a blade. Her eyes glittered with something that made his bones cold. “Over,” she said, almost gently. “Last night… I slipped.” A smile ghosted her mouth, and her voice dropped into a low hum. “I missed something only a man could give me. So I had to let her go.”

The words sank like poison in water, rippling through the room until he felt them under his skin.

Ethan sat very still, his pen poised over the page, though he hadn’t written a word in the last ten minutes. Her voice wrapped around him like smoke, and in that moment, he knew—whatever this was, it wasn’t therapy anymore.

And God help him—he wasn’t sure who was really holding the knife.