Entangled with the Hot Stranger

Vulnerable

Fressia’s POV

Moments after Iker had left to attend to ‘an emergency’, a scream tore through the apartment.

Jordan, who had come back upstairs because he forgot his umbrella, was standing over the kitchen island. He had leaned in to admire the extravagant bouquet of crimson roses I had just received. And as he reached out to touch the flower petal, he saw the bullet resting inside.

Jordan practically threw himself backward, knocking over a barstool.

"Is that—is that a bullet?!" Jordan shrieked, clutching his chest as if he’d just been shot by it. "Who sends a bullet in a flower?! Fressia, call the police! Call the FBI! Call the Avengers!"

I couldn't move. My blood had turned to ice water. I stared at the small piece of metal nestled innocently among the velvet petals. Nobody needed to tell me that this was a subtle threat. A promise of violence, and something worse.

With shaking hands, I bypassed 911 entirely. I pulled out my phone and dialed the number I had gotten from the black business card.

Iker answered on the first ring. I barely got the words "flowers" and "bullet" out of my mouth.

"Don't touch it," Iker ordered. "I'm coming up."

Up?

Less than ten seconds later, my reinforced door swung open.

Iker strode into the apartment. He wasn't breathing hard, meaning he had been outside my building the entire time. The realization hit me like a physical weight—he had never left.

The moment Iker laid eyes on the flowers, the atmosphere in the room violently shifted. He stared at the vase.

"Who touched this?" Iker demanded, his voice dropping to a quiet register.

Even Jordan, who usually couldn't stay quiet for more than ten seconds, swallowed hard and nervously raised a hand. "I... I just moved a petal, I swear. I didn't touch the actual... projectile."

Iker pulled a burner phone from his jacket. He pressed one button.

"My location. Now. Bring the sweepers," he ordered, hanging up immediately.

Within five minutes, the apartment was flooded.

I stood in stunned silence, watching half a dozen men in dark suits systematically tear through my home. They weren't just bodyguards. They were tech specialists sweeping for listening devices, checking the sightlines from my windows to the neighboring rooftops.

Iker commanded them with nothing more than a flick of his wrist, standing in the center of my living room like a warlord coordinating a defense line.

I couldn't take it anymore. The claustrophobia of his world was suffocating me.

I walked up to him, grabbing his arm and pulling him into the narrow hallway away from the men. Iker let me, his eyes never leaving my face.

"What kind of life are you involved in, Iker?" I demanded, my voice shaking with a potent mix of fear and anger. "You said you handled money! Accountants don't have men hunting them in the streets, and they certainly don't get bullets delivered in roses!"

Iker stared down at me.

"The kind where people get hurt standing too close to me," he said softly.

The honesty of his words hit me straight in the chest. I searched his icy silver eyes, looking for any trace of the man who had bought me breakfast this morning. All I saw was darkness.

I took a shaky breath, wrapping my arms around myself.

"Maybe this fake dating thing was a mistake," I whispered.

The moment the words left my mouth, Iker went entirely still.

The silence between us became agonizingly heavy. The sounds of the technicians sweeping the living room seemed to fade into nothing.

Iker looked at me, the muscle in his jaw feathering. The impenetrable mask dropped, revealing something so raw and vulnerable I almost gasped.

"This is the last time I’ll ask you this, and I need you to be very honest. Do you want me to leave?” Iker asked quietly.

I opened my mouth to say yes. To tell him to take his men and his danger and go.

But I hesitated. My hesitation lasted only two seconds. But for Iker, it told him everything he needed to know.

He took a half-step closer, crowding me against the wall, though he didn't touch me.

"I'll handle the threat," Iker murmured, his voice dropping to a rough gravel. "But you aren't going anywhere."

Without waiting for a response, he turned back to the living room.

Over the next hour, I watched in silent disbelief as Iker’s men began tearing into my walls.

"What are they doing?" I asked.

"Upgrading your security," Iker replied without looking up from his phone.

They weren't just upgrading locks. They were installing hidden cameras in the hallways. Silent alarms on the windows. Biometric scanners on the heavy metal plate they were welding over my front door.

He hadn't asked for my permission. He had simply decided my apartment was now a fortress, and he was the architect. It was incredibly alarming, yet a treacherous part of my brain found it endearingly protective.

While I watched the door being reinforced, a technician with a handheld scanner walked past my canvases stacked in the corner.

The device beeped faintly.

The technician paused, lowering the scanner. He crouched down in front of the abstract harbor painting I had done of my childhood memories. He stared at the jagged gray lines in the bottom left corner.

"Mr. Thiago," the technician called out, his brow furrowed.

Iker crossed the room instantly.

"Look at this brushstroke pattern," the technician whispered, pointing to a cluster of strange, geometric shapes I had painted into the water. "That symbol... I've seen it before. It's the same encryption key used by the—"

"Enough," Iker snapped.

The word cracked through the room like a whip. The technician immediately went pale, snapping his mouth shut and scrambling backward away from the canvas.

I frowned, stepping forward. "Used by who? What is he talking about?"

Iker turned to me, his face an impenetrable vault. "He misspoke. It’s nothing. Go pack a bag for the hotel tomorrow."

He was lying. I knew it with absolute certainty, but I knew better than to push the question.

By 2:00 AM, the apartment was finally quiet. Jordan had been sent home in an armored SUV, and the technicians had vanished into the night.

But I couldn't sleep. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw the bullet.

I walked out into the dark living room, pulling a heavy sweater over my pajamas. The apartment felt unnervingly still. I noticed the window leading to the fire escape was cracked open, cold night air drifting in.

I stepped toward it and peered outside.

Iker was sitting on the rusted metal steps of the fire escape, shrouded in darkness. A single cherry-red ember glowed in the shadows as he took a drag from a cigarette. He looked exhausted. The sharp lines of his face were softened by the moonlight, his jacket discarded, his tie loosened.

I slowly climbed out the window, my bare feet touching the cold metal.

Iker didn't look surprised. He didn't even turn his head. He just exhaled a plume of pale smoke into the freezing air.

"You should be sleeping," he said, his voice a low rasp.

"So should you," I replied, pulling my sweater tighter as I sat down on the step beside him.

Iker let out a humorless chuckle. "I haven't slept properly in five years, Fressia."

The sheer exhaustion in his voice made my chest ache.

"Why?" I asked softly.

Iker stared out at the glittering skyline of the city. "Because sleep requires trust. And in my family, trust gets people killed. You don't survive the Thiago syndicate by being soft. Powerful families destroy softness. They root it out and they burn it."

He looked down at the cigarette between his fingers, his jaw tight. "I learned a long time ago that everyone has a price. Everyone is waiting for you to close your eyes so they can take what’s yours."

I looked at him, my heart pounding slowly against my ribs. I was sitting inches from a man who had likely ordered people dead, yet all I wanted to do was reach out and touch his face.

"Then why trust me?" I whispered into the cold air. "You ate the food I gave you. You drank the coffee. You're sitting on my fire escape with your back to the alley."

Iker finally turned his head to look at me.

His silver eyes locked onto mine, burning with an intensity that made the air between us feel dangerously thin. He studied my face, the curve of my lips, the fear and curiosity swirling in my eyes. He leaned in, the smell of smoke and mint wrapping around my senses.

"I don't know yet," he murmured, his voice so close it sent a violent shiver down my spine.

Elsewhere...

Meanwhile, in a pitch-black room illuminated only by the blue glow of a large bank of monitors, a video feed played in real-time. It showed two figures sitting on a fire escape. The man was leaning in close to the woman.

A gloved hand reached out, tracing the outline of her face on the glass screen.

"Look at him," a voice whispered from the shadows, dripping with cold satisfaction. "He's letting his guard down. He's actually attached to her."

A second figure stepped into the glow of the monitors.

"She's becoming important to him," the second voice observed flatly.

"Yes," the first voice replied, a wicked smile forming in the dark. "And that makes her very, very useful."