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“I was an interrogator. Not a torturer.” He held up a hand before she could respond. “I’m not telling you this to make it sound better. It doesn’t sound better. But if you’re going to hate me, I need you to hate the right version.”

“Explain the difference to me, then.”

He kept his voice level. “A torturer inflicts pain as the point. Punishment, cruelty, making someone suffer because the suffering is the goal. An interrogator extracts information. The pain wasn’t ever the purpose for me.” As a matter of fact, he’d tried to avoid it as much as possible, although explaining that would just sound like an excuse. “The pain was the leverage.”

“Leverage.” The word came out of her mouth like something spoiled.

“I needed answers. I used whatever method got them. Sometimes that was a conversation. Sometimes it was spending hours building rapport until someone trusted me enough to talk. Sometimes it was violence. The goal was always the information, never suffering for the sake of suffering.”

“And that distinction matters to you.”

“It matters because it’s accurate. Calling me a torturer lets you build a version of me that’s simpler than the truth. A brute. A man who enjoyed hurting people.” He held her gaze. “What I actually did was worse than that.”

Her expression shifted. Understandable. What would seem worse than torturer?

“What I did required intelligence. Patience. The ability to read a person completely and understand exactly what would break them down. I could make someone trust me inside an hour and use that trust to take them apart. I could shift between comfort and cruelty based on what was working, and both were convincing while they were happening.”

He paused. “I had empathy I could turn on and off. That was the skill. That was what made me valuable.”

That was what had made him a monster.

He watched it register. A torturer was a simple thing. What he was describing was calculated, deliberate, and required a kind of coldness that went deeper than cruelty.

He wasn’t trying to win the argument. He was making sure that when she walked away from him, she’d be walking away from the truth. She deserved that much. She deserved better than a story she could dismiss.

“I’m telling you this so you hate the right version of me. Not the easy one.”

The silence stretched.

When she spoke again, her voice was different. Quieter. Careful, like she was handling something that could cut her.

“Us.”

He waited.

“Not the cover. Not what we did in front of them.” Her eyes went to the bed and came back. “I’m talking about what happened in this room. Your mouth on me. Your hands. The way you knew exactly what I needed before I said it.”

Fuck.

“Was that real? Or did you read me the way they were talking about out there?” She held his gaze. “Did you figure out what I needed and gave it to me so I’d give you what you wanted?”

This was the question that wrecked him. She wasn’t being cruel. Her logic was flawless, and he couldn’t put a dent in it.

His greatest professional skill had been making manufactured closeness feel genuine. Reading a person. Mapping their needs. Becoming exactly what someone wanted until they opened up and gave him whatever he was after. That had been the job. And he’d been exceptional at it.

So how did he prove that what happened between them wasn’t that?

He could tell her about the four years since he’d gotten out of the interrogator game. About the fear that had kept him from touching anyone because he didn’t know if the coldness would come back, didn’t know if intimacy would flip into calculation the way it always had before.

He could tell her that with her, it hadn’t. That the thing he’d been terrified of for four years simply didn’t happen when she was the one in his arms.

He could say all of that, and every syllable would be true.

The problem was, his old self could have assembled those same words just as fluently. The right vulnerability at the right moment. The precise amount of honesty to build trust. He knew how effective that was because he’d done it to people who were chained to chairs.

The fact that he meant it this time was a distinction only he could verify, and his verification was worthless.

The words it was real carried no weight coming from a man whose entire career had been making it was real indistinguishable from the truth.