Behind the Badge: Obsession in the Shadows

Monster

His words sank into me like ice water, slow and numbing.

You belong to me.

Not a declaration of love. Not even obsession in the romantic sense. It was ownership. Pure, unapologetic, and final.

I stared at the hollow of his throat because I couldn't bear to meet his eyes anymore. My pulse was thudding in my ears again, but this time it wasn't fear alone.

He had watched me.

For months.

He had decided I was his before I ever knew he existed.

I swallowed hard, tasting salt where tears had dried on my lips. "You... you took me," I said, the words scraping out raw. "You staged everything. Meeting me. The locks. My grandparents thinking I am dead. You let me believe I had no one left in the world... so I'd have no one but you."

A muscle ticked in his jaw. He didn't deny it.
"I did what I had to," he said quietly. "Your grandparents were already compromised, way too close to your parents. Your parents had enemies inside every circle they ever moved in. The moment the corporation realized the binder might still exist, they started looking for leverage. You were the only leverage that mattered to your parents that even I could guess. Your grandparents would have handed you over the second someone threatened them. So obviously I removed you from the board entirely."
He said it like he was explaining a chess move. Clinical. Necessary.

My hands curled into fists against his shirt. "You could have told me. You could have warned me—"
"And you would have run straight to your parents, for conformation." he cut in, voice sharpening for the first time since we sat down. "You would have tried to find them. And they would have led every hunter on the planet right to your doorstep. You are too soft, Madison. Too trusting. You still call that man Dad because he let you sit on his knee when you were five. You have no idea what he's capable of when his back is against the wall."

He cupped my face in both hands now, forcing me to look at him finally. His thumbs brushed over my cheekbones, gentle and terrifying all at once.

"I burned every bridge you had so that the only path left led to me. Yes. I did that. And I'd do it a thousand times again if it kept you breathing."

My breath hitched. "You're a monster."

His smile was small and devastating. "I'm your monster."

He let go of my face, but only to slide his hand down to the nape of my neck, fingers curling possessively into my hair.

"Your parents are alive," he continued, voice steady again. "They're in a black-site relocation program run by a government that doesn't officially exist. New names. New faces. They check in once a year through a dead-drop I control. They know you're safe. They know you're with me. And they accepted it, Madison. Because the alternative was watching you die on a table while someone in such vile would hurt you to get the location of that binder out of you."

I jerked back or tried to shall I say. His grip tightened just enough to stop me.

"They accepted it?" I repeated, the words cracking. "They just... gave me away? To a man I've never met?"

"They traded their daughter for their lives," he said flatly. "And I took the better part of the deal."

Silence stretched between us, thick and suffocating.
I felt something inside me fracture, quiet and irreversible.

All those years of grief. The empty chair at Christmas. The birthday cards I wrote to no address and burned in the backyard fire pit because I couldn't stand mailing them to ghosts.