Two months later, I’m still in his house.
And somewhere between that first week and now, Jacob announced that I was his.
He says it in front of the whole town—at the diner, at the gas station. He parades me through Main Street on Saturday mornings, hand on my back, guiding me like I’m a new shiny toy that only he gets to play with. People smile at us; say we make a nice couple. They tell me I’m lucky.
I want to tell them all that this is a charade. That none of this is true, but the threat of Jackson’s men still hangs over my shoulders. Visions of the photograph of me asleep still live in my mind, and although Jacob is dangerous, at least he does keep me safe.
He knows I don’t want him. I see it in the way his eyes narrow when I pull away too fast, the way his jaw tightens when I answer him with one word instead of two. But Jacob’s patient in that dangerous way—like a hunter who knows his prey has nowhere else to go.
He tells me I’ll get used to it. That one day, I’ll stopfighting him. That the walls I’ve built between us will crumble, and when they do, I’ll realize there’s nowhere safer than right here.
And maybe that’s the worst part. Not his certainty. Not even his control.
It’s the quiet voice in my head that wonders if he’s right.
I missed celebrating my twenty-first birthday in the house I grew up in.
Mama and Papa came to us instead, carrying cake and gifts, trying too hard to make it feel normal. Adelaide and Constance came, too. They hugged me longer than usual. Constance’s eyes followed Jacob every time he moved, like she was keeping count of how close he stood.
Constance and Adelaide know that Jacob has always been infatuated with me. It used to be an inside joke between the three of us. But the joke fizzled out, and they quickly realized this was more than a crush. We had spoken about trying to put a stop to it. But who would listen to three small-town girls over the sheriff?
Jacob is a lot older than me. Thirty-seven.
Sheriff. Badge. Power.
Day by day, he messes with my head—giving and taking like it’s a lesson plan.
He confuses me on purpose, makes me question everything until I can’t tell what’s real and what’s bait. Sometimes I catch myself wondering if he’s as bad as I think. Then the manipulation turns bitter, and I run.
He’s caught me three times in the two months I’ve been here. The time before last, it wasn’t even him who found me—one of his deputies did. When I was brought home, he locked me in my room for a whole day and night after telling me he wouldn’t let me go. He said I’d spend every day of the rest of my life in that room if I kept running. I begged. I wailed. I screamed until my voice broke.
Then, like a switch, he came back in and behaved like nothing hadhappened. Like we were sitting at breakfast, not that he’d spent a day deciding my punishment. The normalcy was part of it—the apology never came, only the neat silence that pretended it was all my fault.
When Mama and Papa came, I told them. At first, they were furious. They demanded answers from him, and he gave them a story: I kept running, he did what he had to do to teach me a lesson and to keep me safe from Jackson’s men.
He said it like it was charity.
They believed him. They said it was best to keep me hidden. After all, they’d done the same.
I was dumbfounded that he had managed to wriggle his way out of it, that they didn’t immediately take me home, but it’s clear. Jacob will always win. He will always get away with taking and doing whatever he wants.
One saving grace is that Jacob hasn’t tried to own my body.
Still, when his hand finds my throat and his need to “protect” me hardens into control, a treacherous thought flickers: what if I stopped fighting and gave in to him? I hate that my body answers him at all. The longer I’m here, the more his rules crawl under my skin, and the more that wrong hunger wakes.
I’ve only had sex once—back when I was nineteen. It barely counted: clumsy, rushed, over in minutes.
Jacob was already one step ahead. He’d ordered a drug raid on Tyler Jenkins’s place that same night—sirens, lights, deputies shouting down the hallway. They found nothing, of course.
That’s when I understood: Jacob didn’t have to be in the room to stop me from living my life; he just had to be everywhere else. I don’t know if he realizes I lost my virginity that night. But I won’t tell him—ever.
I’m wrenched from my thoughts when Mama and Papa arrive.
I move downstairs to greet them, though the weight in my chest makes every step heavier. When I open the door, they’re polished and smiling, the dying sunset behind them casting everything in gold—a cruel kind of beauty that only deepens the poison in my thoughts.
My stomach twists. The betrayal settles in my bones, resentment flaring hot and wild, like a furnace I can’t contain.
How can they not see? How can they stand there, blind to what’s happening right in front of them? They handed me over to a man whose obsession swallowed my life whole.
