God help me, I do.
The knock isn’t a knock in any conventional sense.
It’s one heavy thud—just enough to warn me before the lock clicks with mechanical finality and the door swings open on well-oiled hinges.
I don’t move from my perch.
I don’t flinch or scramble back.
I sit there on the edge of the ruined bed, spine straight despite everything, mouth sealed shut, heart crawling somewhere behind my ribs like it’s trying to hide. Because if Ishow him fear, he’ll taste it in the air. And if he tastes it, he’ll feed on it, will use it against me.
I don’t know if I can survive another bite, another piece of me consumed.
His shadow hits the floor first—long and bent like a monster crawling in behind him, distorted by the angle of light from the corridor.
Then his boots against the hardwood, expensive leather making no sound. Then the dark slant of his suit that probably costs more than I used to make in a year. And then… his eyes. Those eyes that don’t just look at me like other men do. They dig beneath the surface, excavating things I’ve buried.
“You’ve been quiet, Tink,” he says, and the nickname makes my skin crawl. Like he’s concerned about my wellbeing. Like he isn’t the reason my silence tastes like blood and glass and swallowed screams.
I meet his stare deliberately, refusing to look away first. I make it hurt, put all my remaining defiance into my gaze.
“If I scream, will you come faster next time?”
There’s the flicker I was looking for. That sharp glint in his eye, like violence dressed in a tuxedo, like brutality wearing civility as a mask. The corner of his mouth twitches—not a smile exactly. Something crueller, more predatory. Like he’s glad I still bite, like my resistance pleases him.
He steps inside the room, movements slow and controlled. The kind of movement that tells me he could lunge—but doesn’t need to, doesn’t have to rush. Not yet. He’s already won the room just by breathing in it, just by existing here.
“I prefer when you whisper,” he says, voice like silk dragged across a blade’s edge. “You say prettier things when you think I’m not listening.”
My stomach coils tight with dread. My fists clench in the folds of the blanket until my knuckles ache. He’s bluffing, has to be. I haven’t said anything out loud. Not where he could hear.
But his eyes say otherwise, glittering with knowledge I didn’t give him.
He walks to the mirror with deliberate casualness. Straightens it with one hand, adjusting the angle like he’s fixing something sacred, something that matters. The mirror shows me both of us now—him behind me, tall and still and utterly in control, and me in the foreground looking smaller than I want to admit, looking like prey.
“You broke my bed,” he says conversationally, as if we’re discussing the weather.
“You kidnapped me,” I shoot back without hesitation.
He hums low in his throat. A sound so deep it almost vibrates the floor beneath my feet. “I bought you, Tahlia. Fair and square. Don’t flatter yourself into thinking this was anything dramatic.”
My breath stalls in my lungs, catches there.
Because it doesn’t sound like a threat designed to frighten me.
It sounds like the truth, stated plainly.
I don’t blink, refuse to give him the satisfaction because blinking would mean I believe him, would mean accepting his words as reality.
If I believe him, I might never breathe the same again, might never be free.
The silence between us thickens—molasses and venom and the kind of dread that sinks in slow, that seeps into your bones gradually. I try to swallow it down, but my throat is dry, scraped raw by questions I don’t know how to form, by accusations that would sound insane if spoken aloud.
“What the fuck did you just say?”
The words come out cracked, stitched together by disbelief and growing horror. By fury that’s starting to burn through the shock. By the echo of something I thought I buried years ago—the girl who still believed she had a say in her own life, who thought she had autonomy.
He leans against the dresser like we’re just having a casual conversation, like I’m not chained to this moment by the weight of what he just said.
