(Liam Romano's POV)
The door to Hailey’s suite clicked shut behind me — a small, polite sound that sealed her off from the world and left the apartment smelling faintly of lavender and something else: the lie she’d just performed. Her surrender lingered in the air like a perfume. For a breath, a useless, stubborn corner of me — the soft, stupid part that still entertained the idea of redemption — almost believed it.
Then I reminded myself who I was. I am a man of facts, not fantasies. Hailey Miller was not broken so much as sharpened into a tool; her compliance was deliberate, a strategy as precise as any move I’d ever made. That lean toward me when I’d been close enough to feel her breath — that held breath, that tiny concession — was her opening gambit. It was clever. Dangerous. It alm
