I scoop a page from the mess, press it against her chest where her heart hammers wild, then drag my finger through the blood at her palm and smear it across the line where a signature should be.
“There,” I whisper, satisfaction curling dark in my gut. “Signed. Sealed. Forever.”
Her breath catches on a sob she tries to swallow, her body trembling against mine. I don’t let her hide. My hand wraps around her throat, not squeezing—just reminding. Just marking. Just proving.
“Lesson learned, little star?”
She opens her eyes, and for a heartbeat I almost stagger. Because what stares back isn’t broken. It isn’t begging.
It’s war.
And I smile because nothing tastes sweeter than a war she can’t win.
Her eyes blaze, and I feel it like a blade across my chest. She’s daring me. Begging without begging. Telling me no with her mouth and yes with the tremor in her body, the way her pulse thrashes under my thumb.
“Lesson learned?” I ask again, but this time it’s not a question. It’s a threat.
She doesn’t answer. Her lips tremble, a flicker of a smile, a flicker of hate. Defiance.
Perfect.
My hand tightens on her throat—not enough to cut her air, not yet. Just enough to remind her what silence feels like when it’s mine. She claws at my wrist, nails scraping, breaking skin, but I don’t flinch. Blood beads and runs down her fingers, down mine, mixing until I can’t tell which is hers and which is mine.
I press her back into the bed, glass crunching under the mattress, fragments embedding into fabric and skin alike. She winces, but I hold her there, pinning her with one hand on her throat and the other dragging the ruined contract across her body. Pages smear with sweat and blood as I spread them over her chest, her stomach, her thighs—covering her in proof.
“Look at you,” I murmur, voice low, guttural. “Paper doll. Bleeding doll. Mine in ink, mine in blood, mine in ruin.”
She shakes her head, tears spilling silent and furious. I lick one from her cheek, slow, deliberate, tasting the salt like it’s communion.
“You’ll sign again,” I whisper against her skin. “Not with a pen. With screams. With scars. With the way your body bends when I tell it to.”
She snarls—a sound torn raw from her chest—and spits in my face.
For a second, the world stills. My hand tightens. Her breath stutters. My blood roars in my ears.
And then I laugh. Dark. Wild. Too loud for the small room.
“Good girl.”
I slam her wrists above her head, pinning them against the headboard. Pages scatter around us like confetti at a funeral. My knee drives between her thighs, forcing them open, not gentle, never gentle. She gasps, body arching, rage and want indistinguishable now.
“This is the lesson,” I growl, teeth grazing her ear. “Every rebellion, every splinter, every drop of blood you spill—it all writes my name deeper into you. You can scream it, deny it, carve it into the walls, but it won’t change the ending. You were mine before ink. Before blood. Before glass. And you’ll still be mine when all that’s left of you is dust.”
Her hips jerk against me—anger, desperation, hunger. I don’t care which. They’re all mine.
I drag my hand down her throat, over her chest, across her stomach, until my palm presses flat against the waistband of her nightgown. I don’t move further, not yet. Just hold her there, hovering on the edge of violation, on the edge of choice.
Her eyes snap to mine. Red-rimmed. Burning. Not begging. Not anymore.
“Do it,” she whispers, voice cracked but steady.
My smile is sharp as glass.
“Oh, I will.”
Her wrists strain against my grip, skin raw under the press of my fingers. The papers crumple around her like a nest of ash, proof and ruin scattered across the bed. She looks like she’s drowning in it, chest heaving, hair plastered to her face, eyes burning like she’d set the whole world on fire if it meant taking me with it.
“Do it,” she whispers again, voice cracked, defiant.
