Chapter 13

Drake’s POV

The silence was a thick, poisonous blanket, far heavier than my own exhaustion.

I lay on the cold stone floor, naked and exposed, beside the girl who had just shattered a decade of my carefully constructed solitude. My chest heaved, no longer from physical exertion, but from the raw, involuntary expulsion of a lifetime of secrecy.

I live in a golden cage. You are the desperate, vital air I need to breathe.

The words echoed in the cavern of my mind, each syllable a self-inflicted wound. I had given her the blueprint to my destruction. I hadn't just confessed a truth; I had handed a brilliant, defiant opponent the coordinates to my heart.

I should have felt relieved. Instead, I felt the sickening chill of exposure. The exhaustion that weighed down my limbs was less about the furious sex and more about the psychological battle I had just lost. I had stopped trying to be the CEO, the husband, the father. I had simply been Drake, the