(Hailey Miller's POV)
The safe house was a glass urn. Every polished surface, every guarded silence, kept shouting the same thing: my freedom was an illusion. Liam had confessed with the cold precision of a surgeon. He knew. He’d engineered almost everything — the harassment, the messages, the photograph — all of it framed to shelter me from an uglier truth.
Ethan hadn’t left because he wanted to. He had left because he was desperate, a pawn in a game where Liam was both accomplice and captor. Anger sat in my throat like acid.
And beneath that storm, something else stirred: a sharp, treacherous attraction to Liam Romano that the truth did not kill but honed, making him into a dangerous vulnerability my body wanted to explore.
That night the stillness felt like pressure. I went to the k
