My lips part.
But still—I say nothing.
He moves again, slow. Controlled. I can hear the restraint in the way he breathes. Like every inch of him is at war with itself.
“I don’t just want your skin,” he growls. “I want inside your fucking soul.”
The words hit like a blade.
Soft in the way they’re said.
Sharp in the way they sink.
“You shouldn’t let a man like me this close,” he whispers, rough now. Like the leash he’s holding is fraying at the edges. “I don’t stop. I don’t know how. I’ll take and take until there’s nothing left to give—and then I’ll still want more.”
I breathe in. Slow.
The scent of him settles in my lungs—cologne and sin and something warm I can’t name.
“I could bend you over that chaise right now,” he says, his voice dipping lower, “and you wouldn’t say no.”
I whimper. Quiet. Barely audible.
But he hears it.
Of course he fucking hears it.
“But I won’t,” he growls. “Not yet.”
A pause.
And then—closer now.
“Because if I touch you like that tonight, I won’t stop.”
I swallow, hard.
“You think you’re ready to be ruined,” he breathes, “but you’re still a little bit whole, aren’t you, butterfly?”
His hand brushes my wrist, featherlight.
“You still have hope in you.”
He sounds like it kills him.
Like he hates that part of me even as he reveres it.
“I touch you now,” he rasps, “and you’ll be mine. And I don’t do temporary. I don’t do careful. I will take you apart piece by piece until there’s nothing left but the part that chose me.”
The silence crackles.
Thick.
Devastating.
And then—so quietly it’s almost a secret:
“I don’t want to be the thing that breaks you.”
