Ethan's POV
The door opens because doors open when fate decides to move.
It swings inward on the exact angle I predicted,
no hesitation, no flinch—a movement I have watched a thousand times in a thousand different forms: a woman stepping toward a choice, a human body answering an old summons. I am three steps from the curb when it parts, and for a single, perfect second the world contracts to a single rectangle of light framed by polished wood and a woman standing on the other side.
She freezes. The black rose is on the table behind her like an accusation. Her hand trembles on the air, not on the knob—an instinctive withdrawal as if touching metal could pull her through to the past. Her face is thinner in the yellow lamp glow, beautiful in a way that is not kind: a bone-made keep, an intelligence sharpened against grief.
I watch the small things—the way her breath stutters, the micro-tilt of her chin, the way she presses the heel of her hand against her mouth for a second like she's stopping a noise from escaping. Those are the behaviors of someone who learned to contain storms. Those are the traces I have mapped, the coordinates I stored and returned to when I wanted to know how trauma looks before it speaks.
She shouldn't open the door. Part of me admires that discipline. Part of me is glad she did.
I do not step forward. Instead I let silence do the work I cannot. The distance between us is small, mere feet, but it feels like the span between December and now.
The McLaren is a dark presence behind me, chrome and engineered threat; the glass of whiskey on my console is warm and untouched. Mike has retreated like a shadow; he knows not to linger when the current between two people tightens.
When she finally sees me—that is the exact moment everything tilts.
There is recognition, but not the startled, "who are you?" look most people offer. She knows me. The eyes that meet mine are not those of a stranger seeing a face for the first time; those eyes are collaged with memory: the sound of gunshots in a corridor that smelled of burnt metal, the scream that never quite formed into words, the single voice that anchored chaos.
There is horror there, yes. But there is also something else, something fierce and private that glares back like a mirror: the acknowledgement that I was part of her past in a way she never named aloud.
Time dilates. I watch the tiny muscles around her mouth tighten, involuntary gestures that reveal what words cannot.
I could move now, step across thresholds, close the distance, take her because a man with my resources could take anything he wanted. But this is not about force. I have never wanted to take by breaking. My idea is hunger, not violence.
Possession, in my terms, is curation, not conquest. I plan around the edges where breakage becomes rebirth.
"Ethan." My name falls from her like a shard.
She tastes it, and the sound of it is an ache. There is accusation in the way she says it, a rawness that matches the rawness I felt watching the cameras, watching her sleep, watch the way she locks doors twice, years of data folded into one syllable.
"You opened the folder," I say quietly. I didn't need to wait for confirmation. She doesn't deny it. The truth slides across the room like sunlight.
Her eyes flicker to the study, then to the closed lid of the velvet box. She sees the necklace like everyone sees a trigger: small, ordinary, murderous in meaning. The black rose behind her is crooked in its paper; its petal edges seem almost to bleed. I planned all of that.
Mike arranged hands and timing like an instrument. The package delivered at 9:41, the knock, my waiting—these are procedural notes in a larger composition.
She swallows, audible. It is the sound of someone trying to reclaim oxygen while the lungs remember choking.
For a single, horrible heartbeat I think she will step back, lock the door, call Betty, call anyone. Instead she remains rooted, as if the floor itself has decided she must stand.
I study the person in front of me: the reputation, the degrees on the wall, the clinical calm that functions more like a wall than a cure.
She built that wall carefully. That is the arrogance I find delicious. There is a purity to someone who has erected so much defense that even the shape of their fear is elegant.
"You shouldn't be here," she whispers, more command than question. Professional voice, brittle at the edges. A ruler held between fingers scorched invisible. Her accent is the one I have listened to in audio files: tucks and tonalities from another place, a reminder that she is whole-blooded Indian and also a product of a life that tested and reshaped her.
"No," I say. "I shouldn't be anywhere you don't expect me. But I am."
The words are true and trivial at once.
Heavier things hang in every quiet syllable. There's the admission of my presence and the promise that this presence is a choice—mine to make, mine to end.
For a moment she looks like she is twenty-four again: smaller in her jaw, younger in the set of her shoulders, that old terror flickering like a faulty bulb. I remember seeing those exact motions in angled footage, the way her hand clenched when she thought she would explode. There is also the woman she became, forty-three is not the number we use in this life, twenty-six, leaning into authority as if it could hold the pieces. That split is visible now, a seam of before and after.
"I came because you left something open," I say. "Because you buried a file and thought the earth would forget. Because you believed that if you never looked back, the past would starve."
Her breath catches like a sob she swallows. "Why are you here?" she asks, noting the whiskey glass, my McLaren keys on the console like a promise of motion. "What do you want, Ethan?"
The question is redundant. She knows in the marrow of her bones why I am standing there; she has always known. It is the same reason I haunted her peripheries for years: she is something precise and rare, someone I had cataloged, observed, and kept in a private schema of things I would not live without. The past did something to her; whatever broke her needs rebuilding. I am not cruel. I am exact.
I take one small step forward, not reaching, not closing the space entirely. Proximity can coerce; distance can seduce. I want her to choose the closeness rather than find it forced upon her. "I want you to live," I tell her.
The sentence hangs like a vow and a verdict. "I didn't come to make you suffer. I came to make sure you don't get annihilated by the next thing that comes for you."
Her nostrils flare. The scent of sandalwood and rose and the cheap, sentimental memory of chocolate drift between us—mixed histories that mean everything and nothing. "Live how?" she answers, incredulous, as if the very idea of surrendering to someone else's plan is treason.
I allow myself a smile that is not soft. "On my terms," I say. "Not because you're mine, Raina, but because you were never given the chance to live after they took the first one away. I offer structure, protection. A system. A life that doesn't end in December."
Her eyes widen, a flash that tells me her inner alarms are running coded protocols: distrust, suspicion, the calculation of danger versus potential refuge. She is evaluating every strand of me: the McLaren, the silk suits, the southern vowels that cut like velvet. To her, I am likely the most terrifying option. To me, she is the only option that matters.
"Who gave you the right?" she asks, voice raw now, not doctorly.
I step again—closer, the electricity of the room thickening like static. In this space I can smell the faint tang of the rose on her skin, the trace of cinnamon from morning coffee, the metallic memory that clangs behind her teeth.
"No one," I answer. "I took one."
She flinches at the word and then looks at me like she saw through to something she did not want to admit: that someone could claim a right where none existed. Ownership is ugly and compelling in equal measure.
I am only inches from her now. The hairs on the back of my neck buzz. I can see her pulse along the side of her throat, see the tiny tremor where the skin flexes over bone. The world shrinks to the space between us: wood, air, breath, a black rose folded into darkness
When you wait as long as I have, inertia becomes an ally. Waiting teaches you how to make a crowd disappear in a single glance. But what I feel now is not patience, it's inevitability. Her name in my mouth tastes like destiny, the syllables softened by a confession I have muttered for years in empty rooms and whiteboard equations.
"Rai," I say, utter the name as one might release a tether to test whether it will hold.
The sound is not a threat. It is the line I throw into the dark, to find out what will snag.
She freezes, then contracts, and the presence of December presses at the doorway like a hand. Her eyes shine like a storm-swept lake. Time, for both of us, slows its machinery.
The world snaps, no, it doesn't snap. It does something stranger. It pauses in a held breath. For the first time since I began watching her, she looks at me and the two of us exist in a moment that feels designed: my whole past colliding with her entire future, the city's hum somewhere far away, the McLaren idling like a dark animal, the whiskey glass catching a pale light.
She is exactly what I came for.
And at the same time, she is the one thing I cannot simply own.
She will not go willingly without giving every tiny, honest piece of herself first.
I step forward one final fraction and the space between us vanishes.
We stare into each other's eyes.
Time stops not because the clock has decided to but because we have decided to hold it there, to peer into the fracture and see whether it will mend or crack.
She breathes my name back like a prayer or an accusation.
"Rai," I whisper again—this time like a promise and like a plan.
And then—before anything else can settle, before she can answer, the world sharpens into the next sound: not a knock this time, but something louder, a presence shifting in the hallway behind her, footsteps, or perhaps the soft click of a camera, the echo of a life outside our paused frame.
I don't move.
She doesn't move.
The moment balances on a single, fragile edge—
—and then the door swings fully open.