His presence continued to look at me in the room like smoke—silent, suffocating, thick with something unspoken. The air changed, pressed against my skin like heat from a fire I couldn’t see.
And my body?
My traitorous, trembling body?
It responded.
My skin tingled, every nerve flaring like I’d been struck. My pulse pounded in my throat as he moved closer, his energy curling around me with a weight I couldn’t shake.
“Sit,” he said.
Not harsh. Not barked.
Just a word wrapped in velvet and steel.
I wanted to say no.
Wanted to stay standing.
To meet his gaze with my spine held high and my fists clenched in defiance.
But something shifted in the air.
The room seemed to lean in around me—pulling, pressing, promising.
I sank.
Lowered myself onto the edge of the bed with a breath I didn’t mean to release, heart hammering so hard it echoed in my ears.
He didn’t look pleased. Or smug.
He looked certain.
Like gravity itself answered to him.
A silk robe landed across my shoulders.
He draped it like a crown—no, like a leash.
Not to comfort me.
To mark me.
The fabric was cool, sliding against my skin like a stranger’s touch—soft and wrong and dizzyingly intimate.
I wanted to scream at him.
Tell him to stop playing this game.
To get out. Leave me alone.
But beneath all of it—rage, fear, humiliation—there was something else.
Want.
Heavy and hot and humming low in my belly.
He knelt in front of me like a man offering worship with his hands.
