Peter
Ishouldn’t have let her walk away. Not tonight. Not after the way her voice cracked—that delicious, jagged sound of a girl breaking—when she told me to let her go.
Not after the way her thighs pressed together in that desperate, silent plea when I leaned in and whispered the truth she pretends she doesn’t want to hear.
But I did. Because sometimes the leash cuts deeper when you loosen it first. You have to let them think they’ve escaped just so they can feel the snap of the collar when you reel them back in.
I sit in the backseat of the car, city lights smearing across the tinted windows like neon blood. My hand flexes once, twice—my skin still prickling with the memory of the heat radiating off her wrist.
I can still feel the frantic, pathetic leap of her pulse against my thumb. A rhythm I could crush between two fingers if I wanted. A rhythm I will eventually own.
She thinks I stumbled across her tonight. She thinksit’s accident or fate or some fucked-up coincidence that I found her in the same booth, drinking the same pink poison, wearing that shade of lipstick that makes me want to smear it across her throat.
She has no idea I’ve been keeping her in my sights for months. Years, if I count the nights before she was legal enough to haunt bars, back when I used to watch her from the shadows of her driveway, counting her breaths through a cracked window.
She doesn’t understand the rot that grows in me when I see her laugh with some pathetic, soft-handed man who doesn’t know the first thing about how to handle her. The violence that itches into my very bones when she touches anyone who isn’t me.
She doesn’t understand that I already own her. Every cell. Every breath. Every shiver.
Not because she’s my sister’s best friend. Not because she looked at me once three years ago and flinched, a look of pure, unadulterated terror that I’ve tasted every night since. But because she’s the only one stupid enough to think she can survive me.
And I’m going to spend the rest of my life proving her fucking wrong.
I light a cigarette, the flame illuminating the scars on my knuckles, and drag in smoke until it burns my lungs. I let it out slow, watching it coil in the dark. The driver doesn’t speak; he knows the price of my silence is high.
The quiet leaves room for the memory of her face when she slapped me in that alley—the stinging heat of her palm, the way her eyes lit up with a fury that made my cock ache.
I crave that fury. I’ll starve her of everything else untilanger is the only thing she has left. Then I’ll take that too. I’ll strip her down until there’s nothing left but the need for my hand on her neck.
My phone buzzes. A message from a number that exists on a ghost-server I built myself.
She’s not safe.
The words curl through me like gasoline catching a spark. I know. Of course I fucking know. That’s why I watch her. That’s why I’ve got cameras stitched into the corners of her building, why I have men on her street even when she thinks she’s finally alone in her bed.
But whoever sent this—they’re not warning me. They’re mocking me. They’re standing in my territory and pissing on the fence.
Because someone else is circling her. Someone who thinks they can poach what’s mine.
And that? That I will not allow. I will gut them in the street before they even get a taste.
My jaw locks. My fingers twitch against my thigh, the muscles coiled like a spring. She doesn’t know it yet, but Wendy Darling is standing at the edge of something much bloodier than obsession. She’s standing on a cliff, and I’m the only one who gets to push her off.
I’ll kill whoever tries to touch her. I’ll peel the skin from the fingers of anyone who leaves her notes, anyone who thinks they can breathe her name like a prayer.
Because she’s mine. Always mine. And when I finally drag her under? She’ll thank me for the salt in her lungs.
The cigarette burns low, the cherry glowing like a dying star. Ash flakes across my lap like dirty snow.Outside the window, the city blurs, the red lights of the traffic cutting the night into jagged, bleeding pieces.
All I can see is her face when she looked at me tonight—the way her pupils blew wide, the way she tasted the air like she was already drowning in me.
She doesn’t know how close she was to being dragged out of that booth and thrown into this car. She doesn’t know that the only thing stopping me was the vibration of that text.
I flick the ash out the window and read it again.She’s not safe.
It’s not a threat. It’s a challenge.
Somebody else is moving on her—someone with the same hunger, maybe worse. Someone who thinks they’re faster, quieter, meaner.
