The photo knocks the air from my lungs.
My apartment door is kicked in, hanging crooked from its hinges. Inside, everything is destroyed. The couch is slashed open, its stuffing everywhere. My drawings are torn from the walls. The TV is smashed. Books scatter across the floor like corpses.
"Still think you can go back to your old life?" His voice dropsto a whisper against my temple. His lips almost—almost—brush my skin. "Or are you ready to admit you're safer here... with me?"
His other hand finds my hip, thumb pressing into the hollow there.
"In my penthouse. In my bed."
I can't speak. Can't process what I'm seeing. Those monsters destroyed everything I owned, every small piece of security I'd managed to scrape together.
"Fuck you," I whisper finally.
"Eventually." He pockets his phone. "But I told you—I like to savor. Draw out the anticipation until you're desperate."
"That'll never happen."
He smiles. "We'll see. Step three tomorrow, little dove."
My stomach flips. "Which is?"
"I'm going to stroke myself while you watch."
The words settle over us, heavy and intimate, and I also can’t process them. I look at him, wide-eyed and silent.
"Sweet dreams," he says before disappearing into his office, leaving me reeling with my destroyed life on his phone screen and his promise echoing in my head.
I don't sleep.
How could I? I lie in the guest bed, silk sheets twisted around my legs, and replay everything.
The apartment. My destroyed belongings. Tangible evidence that this isn't a game or a fantasy. This isn't a situation I can walk away from when I get bored.
And Ivan’s words... Christ, they echo through my mind.
Step three.
Is he really going to dothattomorrow?
I grab the sketchbook again to distract myself.
First, I draw his hands. Hands that have killed, that have hurt, that somehow make me feel safe and terrified simultaneously.The long fingers, the calluses I noticed when he fed me strawberries.
Then his profile. Sharp jaw, straight nose. The scar through his eyebrow. Beautiful yet harsh, like a knife blade catching light.
Next are his eyes. Those impossible blue depths that see too much. That looked at my drawings and my books and my margins to see who I am underneath the diner uniform and the pretend normalcy.
The sketches get progressively more detailed. More intimate.
By three, I'm drawing his mouth.
At four, his throat.
I've moved lower by six and have to stop because my hand is shaking.
That, and I'm so turned on I can't see straight.
What's happening to me?
