And that’s better, more promising.
I let her sit in the silence for hours that stretch and compress. I want her to drown in it, to let it fill her lungs until there’s no room left for the person she used to be.
No music to distract her. No camera feeds making obvious noise. No guards stationed outside her door with their inevitable movements.
Just the stillness—and the scent of me still clinging to her skin like a brand she can’t wash off.
I watch the monitor like it’s a goddamn cathedral window, and she’s the sermon being preached to an audience of one.
She’s lying on her back now, body stretched across the silk sheets, staring up at the ceiling like it’s got the answers to questions she hasn’t formed yet.
It doesn’t hold any revelations.
I do, and I always have.
Her fingers twitch against the fabric like she wants to scratch her way out of her skin, like she’s fighting something deep inside that’s trying to claw its way to the surface. Good. Let her fight it. I hope it hurts. I hope she loses the battle eventually.
Because if she doesn’t lose to herself…
I will, and that’s unacceptable.
I tilt my head, dragging the silver ring across the edge of my lip, tasting the iron bite of restraint that’s becoming harder to maintain because I haven’t touched her again since I left her bound and denied.
Not yet, not since those moments in the car and it’s killing me by slow degrees but I’m a patient man when the payoff is divine, when the reward justifies the torture of waiting.
I make my way to her door through corridors that echo with emptiness. No fanfare. No theatrics. Just the measured sound of my footsteps against the black marble that reflects nothing, absorbs everything.
She doesn’t sit up when I enter the room.
She doesn’t flinch or scramble away.
But her breath stutters—just a fraction, just enough.
There it is, the tell I’ve been waiting for.
A little tremor running through her. The kind that would go unnoticed by anyone who hadn’t studied her the way I have, who hasn’t memorised every micro-expression and involuntary response.
She’s not ready to admit it consciously, but her body already knows the truth.
Knows I’m not a man in any conventional sense.
Knows I’m not a saviour coming to rescue her.
Knows that monsters don’t live under beds waiting to be discovered?—
They build the beds themselves.
And hers has her name carved into the headboard in letters she hasn’t seen yet.
Her legs shift beneath the sheets—barely a movement, more like a silent defiance expressed through the smallest gesture. Like she’s reminding me this cage hasn’t won yet, hasn’t claimed her completely.
But she’s wrong about that.
The second I stepped into her life, the second she let her rage be seen by me, the second her thighs trembled under the weight of my voice?—
That was the beginning of her end, the opening of a chapter she’ll never close.
And she’s perfect in ruin, beautiful in her resistance.
