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“It means people hired me to extract information from other people.”

“How?”

He breathed. “Whatever worked. When psychological methods were enough, I used those. Building rapport. Manufacturing trust. Making someone believe I understood them, that I cared about them, until they felt safe enough to give me what I needed.”

“And when that wasn’t enough?”

“Physical methods.”

She was quiet. He watched her shoulders tighten another fraction of an inch, the only movement she’d made since he started talking. She was building the full picture, piece by piece, and she wasn’t going to stop asking until she had all of it.

“How long did you do this?”

“Years.”

She let that word sit. He could almost see her doing the arithmetic behind it. Years of assignments. Years of people in rooms. Years of being the man those people saw last before everything changed for them.

“How many people?”

“I stopped counting.” He heard the admission buried inside the answer. She heard it too. Her chin dipped, just slightly, and came back up. Not a nod. Something closer to confirmation of what she’d already suspected.

“Did you choose your targets?”

“No. I took assignments. Sometimes the people I worked on were criminals who had information that mattered. Sometimes they weren’t.” He paused. “I didn’t ask for their backgrounds. I didn’t want to know who they were or what they’d done or whether any of them deserved it. That wasn’t part of the job.”

Her head turned slightly to the side. Like she needed to process that particular sentence from a different angle before she could absorb it. The idea that he hadn’t cared enough to ask.

He waited for the next question. She had more. He could see them lining up in her head.

“So you just hurt whoever they put in front of you.”

“Yes.” There was no way to sugarcoat it.

She turned around.

Her jaw was set, and there was nothing in her face that offered him anywhere to hide.

“Did you ever think about telling me?” Her breathing had gone shallow. “Did it ever once cross your mind that I deserved to know who I was getting into bed with?”

He didn’t look away. “Yes.”

He could tell immediately that made it worse. He’d thought admitting he’d considered telling her would be worth something. Instead, it told her the silence had been deliberate.

He’d weighed her right to know against whatever he wanted to protect, and she’d lost.

“So you’re a torturer.”

He flinched even though there was no heat behind the words. A label applied to the correct category. The absence of emotion in her voice made it louder than if she’d screamed it.

She wasn’t angry anymore. She was done being angry. She was classifying. So much worse.

“You tortured people. People who were restrained. Captive. Helpless.” Her chin came up. “People who couldn’t fight back and had no way to stop what you were doing to them. That’s a bully. The worst kind. Someone who uses power over people who can’t defend themselves.”

He absorbed every word. All deserved.

“Interrogator.”

She stared at him.