Iheard the sheets shift before I really woke. Sometimes I surfaced from sleep the way a diver breaches, desperate for breath and light, but this was more like a slow, doomed float upward through syrup. All the hairs on my arms stood up, and my heart was already jackhammering before my brain spat out a single word. Danger.
I tried to move, but my body would not obey at first. Not from fear—just the kind of sleep paralysis that comes when you live your whole life bracing for disaster, and disaster finally knocks. I was propped on my side, knees drawn up, one hand in a fist against my chin like a boxer who went twelve rounds and forgot to stand down. The room was black except for the thin line from the slit in the window curtain, which cut a pale halo over the far wall and left everything else in negative.
Not a dream. Not some pre-dawn hallucination. There was a hand on my leg and another at the small of my back. I kicked my foot free. He could have continued to hold it, I was sure. On my back now, I saw the silhouette, the impossible breadth of his shoulder as he crouched next to the bed. It was the masked stranger. Only there was no mask now, but the darkness clung to his features, leaving only the glint of his eyes and the carved stone of his jaw.
It took exactly one pulse of my heart for my brain to slot the pieces together. Wrecker. The same man I’d seen through the window. The same one whose laughter rattled in the phone wires at Iron Valor MC, whose hands I’d imagined clamped around my throat, whose entire existence had loomed just outside my field of view since I was old enough to know what a monster was.
Except monsters don’t stand in your bedroom and watch you sleep. Or maybe that’s exactly what they do.
He didn’t speak at first. He stood over me so close I could smell the wild animal in him: oak, iron, the ghost of a fire somewhere, a trace of oranges. I opened my mouth, but before I could make a sound, he put his finger over his lips.
I made a noise, low and questioning. He grinned, just a flash of teeth, then leaned in so close I could count the little flecks of steel in his eyes.
“Don’t scream,” he said, voice so low it vibrated in the back of my skull.
I didn’t scream. I was never going to scream.
He watched me a long time, as if waiting for some internal clock to run down. Then, without another word, he took his finger from his mouth and grabbed a handful of my hair to pull my head from the pillow. The sting should have made me angry, but it mademe feel alive. Maybe I was just thrilled to feel something—anything.
He leaned in; his breath was on my face. “You know who I am?” His gravel voice was deep and low.
I nodded.
“Say it.” It was a command I didn’t dare disobey.
“Wrecker.” I barely squeaked the word.
Then he smiled, and I swear if gods walked the earth, one was holding my face in his hands. “Good girl.”
My stomach clenched at the endearment. I hated that I was that starved for praise, but I wanted to bathe in it. I also knew it could be just a tease before he ended me.
“Are you here to kill me?”
“Not today, little bird.” Again with that smile. And nottoday. But I could fuck this up and sign my death warrant.
Then he tightened his grip on either side of my head and kissed me.
The last time I’d been kissed like that—well, I’d never been kissed like that. It was not gentle. It was not tender. It was a fucking full-body invasion. His lips and tongue and teeth, each a separate implement of violence and worship. I was so shocked I forgot to do anything, and then my body, in its infinite wisdom, simply yielded. I didn’t fight, didn’t lean away. I opened my mouth and let him inside, and the world telescoped to just that: the dark, the heat, the slow deliberate ruin of my resistance.
He kissed as if he meant to leave a bruise.
I didn’t know how long it lasted. A minute, a year. When he pulled back, I was shaking—not from fear, but from something so old and so deep that I wanted to crawl under the bed and hide from it.
He looked at me, waiting. I waited too. I could hear my own breathing, wild and wet. My heart, deranged in my chest.
He told me I was perfect and that I would do everything that he told me to do. When he asked me if I understood, I just stared at him blankly.
“Do you understand?” he asked, voice a rasp.
I didn’t. I stared him down, blinking, and let my jaw clench tight around the only words I had. No. Not yet.
He ran one finger down my jaw, trailing over my throat. I thought he might choke me. Part of me wished for it. Instead, he just watched the way my pulse beat under his touch, and let his hand rest there, a slow squeeze, as if he could set my heartbeat to any rhythm he wanted.
“I’m not here to hurt you, Wren,” he said. “Tonight I’m here to meet your needs.” He was trailing small kisses up my neck. “To fulfill the fantasies that consume your waking dreams. You’regoing to surrender your control to me, or I am just going to take it. Either way. Then tomorrow, we are going to discuss why you have put yourself in the middle of a deadly game of cat and mouse between Iron Valor and Greenbriar, and you are going to tell me everything you’re guilty of.”
I froze.
“That’s right. I know all about it. Everything but the details, which you will provide. But the first command I’m giving you is to clear your mind, little bird. Don’t worry about your little dog. He is happily gnawing on another juicy bone. Next, you need to realize the position you are in. You have no power here. Not in your life, not in this room, not under me. I am going to use your body in every way you can imagine. Going to make you come over and over again until you beg me to stop. And then, I’m going to make you come again. I would ask you if we are clear on this, but you wouldn’t answer, because you don’t want to answer. You want to feel what true surrender feels like. And I’m going to show you, Wren.”
