(Hailey Miller POV)
The next time the door opened, I was ready. I hadn't eaten everything on the tray, but I had taken enough—bread, a piece of fruit—and drank water. I brushed my hair and slipped into a silk robe I’d found in the closet: it clung and slid against my skin, soft and treacherous, carrying the faint, familiar scent of him. Every small action had been practiced in my head a hundred times, a careful choreography meant for the one pair of eyes that mattered.
Liam stepped in and his look came slower this time, measuring. He hesitated at the tray, then let his gray gaze travel up to me, cold and precise as a surgeon's light. He was searching—not for wounds, but for the seams of my performance.
“I see you’ve found your appetite,” he said, voice flat, probing.
“Survival instinct
