“You can both eat my entire dick.”
“Bet you’re watching her right now, huh?” Lucien drawls. “Eyes on her bed, like the little psycho you are.”
“First, I’m taller than you, and second, don’t project. You’re the one who mailed a girl a knife for Valentine’s Day.”
“It was engraved with my name,” he says, like that makes it romantic.
“Just ping me with what you found.”
“You’re getting three PDFs, a zip folder, and two recorded phone calls that were definitely not legally obtained. Do with them what you want. Just don’t be a fucking idiot about it.”
“I’m not gonna kill him.”
“Good, because he’s not back-alley trash. He’s empire-level. If you so much as break his jaw, six lawyers will crawl out of his ass with lawsuits,” he says, his tone dropping just a fraction softer. “Keep your girl close, okay?”
I nod to myself, already pulling up the first file on the burner. “Appreciate you, Lucien.”
“You better, motherfucker,” he says, and then the line goes dead.
The files open, and just like that, the night gets darker.
Chapter 5
Shannen
I didn't hearhim leave—not that that means anything, considering he's been slipping in and out of here for years without me knowing. But my alarm's been screaming at me for eight minutes straight, and I'm still lying here like a coward, my face buried in the pillow, pretending I don't exist and that last night didn't happen.
I tried to convince myself that what I needed was separate fromwhoI needed, but I can’t pretend those are two different things because they’re not. They’re all tangled up in one fucked little knot I tied myself, and I just keep yanking it tighter.
I don’t do denial, and I’m not some naïve girl who thinks love makes monsters less monstrous. He’s exactly what he looks like: dangerous, obsessive, and so far past the line, he can’t even see it anymore.But deep down, he’s still the boy I knew, and that’s the part that screws with me because all of this—the control, the fury, the brutal way he loves—didn’t come out of nowhere.
It was alwaysthere.
But I’m not the girl he knew, and that’s the problem.
He unknowingly helped build this version of me, so now I want to fight him harder. And I want to mean it. Really mean it because everything I said in that hotel room is still true. Every word I screamed at him, every feeling that tore through me… it’s still sitting in my chest, exactly the same way.
The anger and pain.
The betrayal and the fallout that live under my skin.
My PTSD from my childhood to the relentless, soul-stripping hell that was school—it’s all still there.
Trust doesn’t just bounce back once it’s gone. And mine isn’t just broken. It’s obliterated. Ground to dust under the weight of what he did, what he didn’t do, and all the ways he failed me when I needed him to be different from every other person who’d hurt me.
God, I’m an idiot.
I knew better, and I still poked the bear.
I should’ve remembered all the reasons why letting him touch me is playing with fire. But then there were his fingers on my skin, his cock grinding against me, and the heat of him everywhere at once, like he’d swallowed the sun and decided to burn every inch of me with it.
The way he came on me and made me taste it—Jesus, I’ve never been that turned on in my entire life.
Lianna told you to stop feeding the flames, and there you were, desperate to feed him your pussy.
The little dark bitch inside me is smirking.
Yesterday, everything still felt raw, but today, I have clarity. I need to cut him off completely. No more games and no more letting him mind-fuck me like some perverted Yoda.
