The moment stretches, heavy and breathless.
His weight settles over me, solid and shaking. His mouth finds my throat again, kissing me like he worships me. I can still feel him inside me. Still feel the echo of every thrust. Every word.
Now, something darker has replaced the fear I felt. Something that feels an awful lot like victory.
He didn’t just take something from me tonight.
Igaveit to him.
And in doing so… I think I took a piece of him, too.
Chapter 16
Booked
Jacob
She’s still asleep when I wake.
Curled up on my chest like she was made to fit there—bare skin pressed against mine, breath slow and shallow, lashes flickering with the tail-end of a dream. The sunlight leaking through the curtains turns her auburn hair to gold. Innocent. Almost holy. Like last night didn’t happen.
But it did. It fucking did. And I’m never letting her forget it.
She’s mine now. In every way that counts. That tight little body broke open for me. Took everything I gave and begged for more. The way she stared into my eyes as the orgasm crashed through her, eyes glazing and rolling back, a shuddering surrender that felt like it belonged only to me. And now, with her legs tangled in mine and her scent on my skin, I feel like I’ve just won a war no one else knew I was fighting.
Mission fucking accomplished.
I drag my palm down her spine, slow and owning. Possessive. She’s mine now— marked in ways she can’t yet see.
She doesn’t stir.
Good. Because I’m not done thinking. Not by a long fucking shot.
Her body’s already mine, but her soul, that fragile, shiveringheart she keeps trying to hide from me? That’s still bleeding on the table, waiting to be claimed. But I’ll make sure the only life she can imagine is the one beside me, so no one else will ever get close enough to matter. Someday, she’ll wear my ring, and my name will wrap around her like barbed wire, enough to keep every other bastard in this town at bay. And with Benny circling like a mutt sniffing after scraps, I don’t have the luxury of patience.
Last night I gave her soft—my version of it, anyway. Careful hands. Tender, if you squint past the obsession that drips off me.
I never planned to grow into a monster. Watching my father break my mother taught me the mechanics of containment, and maybe that explains why I hunted her like a man possessed. My days begin and end with her name— God, they have for years. She needs to wake up, see the bars I’ve built around her, and accept one inevitable truth: in every map I draw, Summer Miller is marked with my name.
But she doesn’t know. Not really.
She thinks I’m just some twisted bastard who wanted her and jumped at the opportunity. That part is true, at least. But she doesn’t know the extent of what I saved her from. She doesn’t know who her father fucked with. What they were going to do to her the second he took Jackson down. She doesn’t know about Donnie and Vince. About the club. About the catalog of girls who never came back. About the ones we did eventually manage to find.
If she did… if she knew what they would do to her… what she was supposed to be for them… She might just beg me to keep her locked in this house forever.
I grind my teeth and shift, careful not to wake her. She makes a soft sound, a little whimper, and my cock twitches at the memory of how she moaned last night. How she whined when I split her open for the first time and whispered mine into the hollow of her throat.
Jesus. I could drag her back under and fuck her until sunset. But I won’t. This isn’t just about sex. It never was. She’s a goddess, yes. A fantasy come to life. But she’s also a woman with no idea how much danger she was in—could still be in. A woman who still clingsto hope like a lifeline, who still believes someone out there might love her, soft and clean, without the darkness.
And she’s wrong. Because there is no clean. Only survival. Only truth. Only me.
I pull on my jeans and head downstairs, pouring myself a coffee and staring out the kitchen window at the gravel road beyond the trees. My mind’s already racing. I could tell her everything. Lay it all out, brutal and raw. Make her see who I’m saving her from and why I took her before they could. But she’d question it. Maybe not out loud, but in her head. She’d wonder if I made it up to keep her here. To own her.
No.
I hear movement upstairs—soft creaking, the whisper of bare feet on floorboards—and I smile into my coffee.
Good morning, little doll. Enjoy the calm while it lasts. Because today? Today, you learn everything.
