“I bought you,” he repeats, slowly, deliberately, making sure every word lands. “Legally. Quietly. Expensively.”
I rise to my feet, legs unsteady but determined. Not out of strength—out of survival instinct kicking in. Rage is the only armour I have left, the only protection against the implications of his words.
“You’re lying,” I accuse, desperate for it to be true.
He shrugs one shoulder, the gesture elegant and dismissive. “I don’t lie, Tink. I manipulate. I distort. I devastate. But I don’t lie—lying is beneath me.”
I walk towards him, every step trembling but firm, bare feet hitting the hardwood with sharp, angry slaps that echo in the stillness. My bare feet hit the floor like accusations. He doesn’t move, doesn’t retreat or brace himself. Just watches with that infuriating patience. As if he’s curious how far I’ll go before I break myself against him again, before I shatter.
“What does that even mean?” I hiss, voice shaking. “What the hell are you talking about? Bought me? From who?”
A smirk unfurls on his lips—lazy and lethal, satisfied.
“I think you already know,” he says quietly. “You’ve spent your whole life being sold in pieces, haven’t you? I’m just the first one who wanted the whole thing, who saw value in all of you.”
My stomach twists so violently I think I might be sick, might actually vomit because he’s not wrong about that assessment.
I’ve seen the way people look at girls like me, have felt those calculating stares. Like I’m a transaction. A service. A body, wrapped in the thin illusion of choice and agency.
And now… I’m his property.
Not because he dragged me here against my will.
But because someone else handed me over like goods, like merchandise.
“Why?” I whisper, the word barely audible.
He steps forward towards me, just once.
And then again, closing the distance.
I back up instinctively, but he keeps coming, slow and controlled, until the backs of my legs hit the edge of the broken bed frame and I have nowhere left to go. His hand lifts—not to touch me, but to curl a single strand of my hair between his fingers, examining it like it’s precious.
“Because I collect rare things,” he says softly, voice almost gentle. “And you, Tahlia Fernwynd… you’re the last of your kind.”
I don’t move, frozen in place.
I don’t breathe, lungs refusing to work.
His words crawl across my skin like insects with knives for legs—sharp, deliberate, leaving no part of me untouched or unscarred.
He doesn’t blink when he says it, doesn’t waver. Doesn’t smile now, either. Just stands there with that look in his eyes that makes my blood run cold. That look that says he knows everything about me. Not just about where I come from or who sold me, but what I am when no one’s watching, what happens in the dark. What I would’ve become even if he hadn’t taken me, what trajectory my life was on.
As if I was always meant for a cage, predestined for captivity, and he just happened to be the one holding the fucking key.
I try to laugh at the absurdity.
It comes out broken, hollow, a sound scraped from somewhere under my ribs where everything hurts.
“You think you own me?” I whisper, trying to make it sound defiant.
His eyes don’t waver, don’t show doubt. “No. I do own you.”
There’s no heat in it, no passion. No rage. Just fact. Cold, brutal, matter-of-fact domination that slips under my skin like poison disguised as logic, like truth wrapped in horror.
I shake my head in denial, backing up until there’s nowhere left to go. My body brushes against the broken headboard—the one I shattered in a storm of fury and desperation—and the irony makes my stomach turn, makes me want to scream.
“You don’t get to decide who I am,” I bite out, clinging to that last scrap of identity.
