I hate him. I hate him with every fiber of my being, but I hate myself more for the way my body sings under his touch, for the way my hips rise to meet his, for the desperate plea that is caught in my throat.
He senses my impending surrender, the moment the fight in me finally breaks. My hands fly to his back, my nails digging into the hard muscle of his shoulders. I am clinging to him, a drowning woman clinging to her tormentor.
“I told you not to move those,” he tsks, but doesn’t tell me to put them back.
His hands grip my hips bruisingly. He pulls me tighter against him, changing the angle again, hitting a spot deep inside me that makes me see stars. A choked, broken sob escapes my lips. The pleasure is so intense it's almost painful.
“Mine,” he growls, the word a final, brutal brand against my ear. “You're mine, Kinsley.” And maybe I am.
He slides his hand between us and circles my clit with his fingers. Over and over until I’m a panting mess, and with that, he finally gives the command.
“Come for me.”
The permission is the key that turns the lock, and the coiled spring inside me snaps. The world dissolves into a blinding, shattering wave of pure, unadulterated pleasure. My body arches off the bed, a taut bowstring of sensation. A scream tears from my throat, raw and primal, a sound of total surrender. My inner walls clench around him with a frantic, rhythmic pulsing. A final, desperate attempt to hold on as I am shattered into a million pieces.
The release is so violent, so all-consuming that for a moment I am nothing but sensation, a creature of pure pleasure, completely and utterly at his mercy. The war inside me is finally over. I have lost. And in losing, I have found a terrifying, twisted peace.
He follows me over the edge with a guttural groan, his hips driving into me one last, powerful time. I feel the hot flood of his release, a final, intimate claiming that marks me as his territory. He collapses on top of me, his weight a heavy, possessive blanket pinning me to the bed, to this moment, to him.
He buries his face in the crook of my neck, his body shuddering with a final, possessive tremor. The world outside glitters, oblivious.
He doesn't move for a long time, he just lies there. His weight is a heavy, comforting, suffocating presence. He pulls me against his side, my back pressed against his chest, his arm a steel band around my waist as he holds me like a trophy, a prize won after a long, hard-fought battle.
He thinks he has won. He believes he has broken me, and maybe he has. But as I lie here, a prisoner in his bed a single, defiant thought, small and sharp as a shard of glass, forms in the wreckage of my mind.
He may have my body, he may have my surrender. But he will never, ever have my silence.
The storm is not over. It has just found its eye.
Twenty Nine
Kinsley
Iwake to the unfamiliar sensation of soft, expensive sheets against my bare skin and a dull, aching soreness between my thighs—a brutal reminder of the night before. My body feels heavy, used, a vessel that has been emptied and claimed. For a blissful, fleeting second, I don’t know where I am. Then it all comes crashing back: Asher’s cold eyes, the emerald green dress, the slow descent of the zipper and the shattering, involuntary pleasure he wrung from my body.
My eyes flutter open.
He’s already awake, propped up on one elbow, watching me. The morning light streams in through the vast windows, painting him in shades of grey and gold. It’s Saturday. There are no classes, no clinicals, no structured reason to escape. The unstructured expanse of the day, of the entire weekend, stretches before me.
A hot flush of shame crawls up my neck. He saw me break, he watched me come undone. He was the first, and as he so brutally reminded me, theonly.
“Good morning,” he says, his voice a low, gravelly rumble in the quiet room. It’s a simple phrase, yet when it comes from his lips, it sounds like a declaration of victory.
This time, I don’t just pull the sheet tighter. I glare at him. A simmering rage has replaced the exhaustion of last night. “What do you want?” I snap, my voice rough from sleep but laced with defiance. “I need to go home.”
He doesn’t flinch. A slow, appreciative smile spreads across his face, a predator enjoying the renewed struggle of his prey. “There’s that fire. I was wondering if it had burned out.” He reaches out, his fingers gently prying the sheet from my white-knuckled grip. “You’re not going anywhere, Kinsley. Not yet.”
I scramble back, pulling the sheet with me, pressing myself against the headboard. “You can’t keep me here!”
He laughs, a low, dark sound that sends a shiver down my spine. “Can’t I? You’re in my penthouse, Kinsley. My building, my rules. And you walked in here willingly last night.”
“I was exhausted!”
“And you still came,” he counters, his eyes dark with triumph. “You still surrendered. Don’t pretend you didn’t feel it. Don’t pretend you didn’t want it.”
My cheeks burn. He’s right, and that’s the most infuriating part. “I have things to do! I have a pathophysiology exam on Monday. I need my notes, my laptop.”
“They’re already here,” he says, gesturing vaguely towards a door across the room. “My assistant retrieved them from your apartment an hour ago. Along with some clothes.”
