They’d spent months like this, casual heated encounters, rumpled sheets, messy hair, wrinkled clothes.

It was good, no strings attached, simple as it could get.

But he knew it wouldn’t last forever. Landon King was not easy. He was cold, manipulative, ruthless, condescending—some even called him a little psychotic. And maybe they weren’t entirely wrong. He was a man of strategies and calculations, of pulling strings just to watch people dance. A man who thrived on being untouchable, unmoved, unbothered.

Yet she kept showing up anyway.

And worse, he kept letting her.

It wasn’t supposed to matter. She wasn’t supposed to matter. She was just another distraction he’d burn through when he got bored. Another warm body, another willing participant in whatever game he felt like playing.

But something about her… irritated him. Not in the usual way. Not in the way that made him want to twist people around his fingers until they broke.

No—she irritated him because she wouldn’t break.

Every time he pushed, she pushed back. Every time he tried to make her fold, she stood a little taller. Every time he attempted to remind her exactly who he was—what he was—she met his cruelty with this maddening calm, as if she could see right through the performance and straight into whatever he refused to acknowledge existed underneath.

It should have made him walk away.

Instead, Landon found himself memorizing the way she breathed after they were done, the faint tremor in her fingers when she touched him, the shape her mouth made when she tried not to smile at his arrogance.

Disgusting. Weak. Reckless.

He didn’t do attachment. He didn’t even like affection. He barely tolerated it from the people he actually cared about—Brandon, primarily. And even then, affection felt like something he had to hold at arm’s length or it would burn straight through him.

But this—she—was slipping past his control in ways he couldn’t quite explain.

Worse, he caught himself wondering how long until she realized it.

How long until she figured out that Landon King didn’t fall.

He didn’t bend.

He didn’t soften.

And if, by some catastrophic miscalculation, he ever did… he’d make sure no one saw it.

Especially not her.

Because if she knew—if she even suspected—this fragile, treacherous thread tugging at him wouldn’t just be a problem.

It would be a weakness.

And Landon King didn’t have weaknesses. He destroyed them.

Even when they looked a lot like someone lying in his bed, wearing his shirt, breathing quietly beside him as if she belonged there.

As if he’d ever let her