I probably look the same.
"You drive me insane," he says roughly, his voice raw. His thumb brushes across my lower lip, already tender and swollen. "Every time I think I have control, you shatter it."
I'm trembling, my body still humming with want, and I hate myself for it. Hate that he can make me feel this way even as he's destroying my life. Hate that some part of me craves his touch like oxygen.
"Let me go," I whisper, but it sounds more like a plea than a demand.
"Never." He leans in, pressing one more kiss to the corner of my mouth—softer this time, almost tender. "You're mine, Eve. The sooner you accept that, the easier this will be."
Then he releases me and steps back, and the sudden absence of his body is almost painful. Cold air rushes in where his warmth had been, and I feel the loss of it like a physical ache.
"Good," he says calmly, as if nothing happened. "I have calls to make. We're having dinner at eight."
He walks back to his desk, dismissing me as casually as if we'd discussed the weather. I stand against the wall, my wrist still tingling from his grip, my heart pounding against my ribs.
A monster. My monster.
The thought should disgust me. Instead, it sends a dark thrill through my veins that I can't name and don't want to examine.
***
I ask Nathan's driver to take me out, needing space from the penthouse, from Nathan, from the weight of realizations I'm not ready to face. He doesn't ask where, just pulls smoothly into evening traffic while I stare out the tinted window.
The city slides by in a blur of lights and movement. People heading home from work. Couples walking hand in hand. Normal lives, normal problems, normal relationships that don't involve obsession and violence and this sick, twisted thing growing in my chest.
I'm starting to have feelings for him.
The thought crashes through me like breaking glass, sharp and undeniable. Not the gentle, gradual falling of romance novels. This is something darker, more complex—a tangled mess of fear and fascination, terror and terrible understanding.
He destroyed my life. Systematically dismantled everything I'd built, isolated me from everyone I knew, and forced me into a gilded cage of his design.
And some sick part of me is grateful.
I press my hand to my mouth, feeling like I might be sick. What's wrong with me? What kind of person feels grateful for this?
But I can't deny it. He saw me. The real me—the lonely, grieving girl still searching for her brother in every empty room. The woman who built an empire not from passion but from a desperate need for control. The person who was so tired of being strong that she secretly craved someone strong enough to make her stop.
Nathan didn't just see that girl. He wanted her. Obsessively, violently, completely.
It's not just physical, though God knows my body responds to him in ways that shame and thrill me. It's deeper. He knows things about me I've never told anyone. He understands the grief that shaped me, because he carries the same grief. He's the only person in a long time who's made me feel truly seen.
The cost of that visibility is my freedom. My autonomy. My safety from the darkness he carries like a second skin.
And I'm starting to think I'd pay that price willingly.
The realization makes me want to cry. Or scream. Or both.
The car continues its aimless route through Manhattan while I sit with this horrifying revelation. The city lights smear into meaningless color. My world has shrunk to the size of him—his hands, his voice, the way he looks at me like I'm something precious and breakable and utterly his.
He put Bryce in a wheelchair. He orchestrated my company's collapse. He manipulated every aspect of my life.
And I want him. Not just physically, though my body burns for his touch. I want the safety of his obsession, the certainty of his claim, the dark promise that nothing will ever hurt me again because he won't allow it.
I'm not just his prisoner. I'm falling for my jailer.
The thought should make me sick. Does make me sick. But it's also true.
This is who I am now. Who I may have always been, beneath the armor of independence and success. A woman who craves the kind of devotion that borders on madness. Who finds safety not in freedom but in being claimed so completely that she'll never be alone again.
