“You think this is power?” I snap, my voice trembling with the effort not to cry. “Pressing me against a fucking wall in the dark?”
His grin returns, sharper than a razor. “No, Wendy. This is power—knowing you’ll still be thinking about the way I made you cum tomorrow when your best friend asks why you look like you’ve been thoroughly fucked.”
My stomach drops, a sickening cocktail of fury and heat tangling until I can’t tell which is which. The thought of his sister, of the lies I’ll have to tell, makes me want to vomit and scream all at once.
“Fuck you,” I spit.
His hand slides lower, fingers trailing down the column of my throat, not choking—just a terrifying, lingering threat of what he could do if he wanted to. “You already thought about it. You’re thinking about it right now.”
And then he steps back. Just like that.
No warning. No slow withdrawal. Just a sudden, cold vacuum as he removes his presence. He leaves me pinned against the wall by my own frantic heartbeat, while he smirks like he’s already collected his trophy.
“See you soon, Darling,” he murmurs, his voice low enough to bruise my skin.
And then he’s gone, slipping into the night like the devil never needed to stay to win the soul.
I stand frozen, lungs dragging in the smog and the city air, my hands shaking too hard to hide. My thighs are still trembling, my lips still tingling with the ghost of words he didn’t even kiss into me.
I hate him. I crave him. And God help me, I know I’m coming back for more.
I think he’sgone—slipped back into the shadows where monsters and nightmares belong. But then his hand snaps around my wrist again, iron and heat, yanking me half a step forward before I can even draw a breath.
“Wait—” The word rips out of me, raw and useless.
He tilts his head, the smirk curved like a sickle. “You don’t get to tell me when it’s over. I decide when I’m done with you.”
The pressure on my wrist is sharp enough to throb in time with the frantic rhythm of my heart. He doesn’t squeeze harder, but the threat is there, coiled in his fingers. I’m already trapped, suspended in that dangerous, electric place between the urge to fight and the desperate need to submit.
“Let me go,” I whisper, the words a dying ember.
“Let you go?” His thumb drags slow and heavy across the vein in my arm, a touch that feels more like a brand of ownership than anything else. “Darling, you don’t get it. You’ve never been free a day in your fucking life. Least of all from me. I’ve owned a piece of you since the first time you looked at me and blushed.”
My throat closes around the cold air.
He steps closer again, crowding me back against the unyielding brick, his chest almost brushing my breasts, his breath fanning across my lips until I’m lightheaded. “You keep coming to that club like you’re waiting for something to happen to you. And now it has. You found me.” His smile twists, wolfish and dark. “So don’t pretend you don’t like the cage when you’re the one who keeps crawling inside and locking the door.”
“God, you’re so fucking arrogant,” I hiss, though my voice isa traitor, trembling like it’s begging for a hit instead of defying a dealer.
“And you’re wet. Again.” His voice drops, a dark, merciless vibration that goes straight to my core. “Don’t bother denying it, Wendy. I can smell it on you.”
Heat scalds my cheeks, a deep, agonising flush of shame. The coil in my stomach tightens until I think I’ll break in half.
He leans down, his lips brushing the shell of my ear—not a kiss, but a branding. “Next time,” he murmurs, his voice filthy velvet that promises nothing but ruin, “I won’t stop at words. I’m going to put my mouth on you until you’re screaming for me to stop, and then I’m going to keep going until you can’t even remember your own name.”
My knees nearly buckle. My lungs seize.
And then—just like that—he releases me.
The loss of his grip is a physical blow, almost worse than the hold itself. My wrist burns where his hand had been, a phantom heat searing through my veins like permanent ink.
Peter steps back, slow and deliberate, his eyes still locked on mine like a promise and a threat. “Go home, Wendy. Dream about me. Hate yourself in the morning when you wake up with my name on your lips.”
He turns away, slipping into the crowd outside the alley with that lethal, predatory ease that makes people part for him without even realising they’re afraid.
I sag against the wall, every nerve ending still buzzing with electricity, every thought fractured into a million jagged pieces. I should hate him. I do. Every fibre of my being screams that he’s a monster but mythighs press together anyway, seeking the friction he just took away.
And I know he’s right—when I close my eyes tonight in the silence of my room, it won’t be freedom I’m thinking about. It’ll be the way his voice sounded when he promised to break me.
