Callie’s POV
What Jonas said didn’t surprise me.
It unsettled me, yes—because there was something in the way he said it, that calm precision, that certainty that didn’t need to impose itself to be valid, that made it harder to reject without feeling like I was denying something obvious—but it didn’t surprise me. Because deep down, I already knew. I had felt it from the moment those men appeared, from the way they looked at me, from the way they didn’t hesitate—as if I weren’t an unknown to them, but a piece already identified long before I began to understand what was happening to me.
“I’m not a secret,” I repeated quietly, more to myself than to them, letting the words take shape in my mind, settle into that new, uncomfortable, shared space where I was no longer alone—where every thoug
