“Take it,” he roars, his hand flying up to catch my throat again, squeezing just enough to make the world go hazy at the exact moment the explosion hits.
The orgasm doesn’t just happen; it detonates.
It’s a violent, bone-shattering convulsion that rips a sound out of my throat I didn’t know I could make—a high, keening wail of pure surrender. My pussy clamps down on his fingers in desperate, rhythmic pulses, milking him as I sob his name over and over again. My vision goes white, my body arching so hard my back leaves the mattress, the zip-ties the only thing keeping me from flying apart.
I’m crying—real, ugly, hot tears of relief and ruin—as the waves wash over me, leaving me limp and breathless against the sheets.
Peter doesn’t move. He stays there, his face buried between my legs, breathing in the scent of my climax. He lingers for a long, quiet minute, tasting the last of me, before he slowly pulls away.
He stands up, looking down at my shaking, bound body. He’s breathing hard, his chest heaving, his own cock still straining against his zipper. He looks at the marks he’s left—the bruises, the blood, the zip-ties—and he smiles. It’s not a kind smile. It’s the smile of a man who just checked a box.
“There,” he says, his voice back to that chilling, witty calm. “Now you’re clean. And now you know.”
He reaches into his pocket, pulls out a small knife, and slices through the zip-ties in four quick snaps. My arms and legs fall limp, the blood rushing back into my extremities with a painful sting.
I can’t move. I don’t even want to. I just lie there in the wreckage of his bed, staring at the ceiling, feeling his brand on every inch of my soul.
“Go to sleep, Wendy,” he murmurs, turning toward the door. “I have things to take care of. And don’t bother trying the door. It’s locked from the outside.”
He pauses at the threshold, looking back over his shoulder.
“You’re not going back to the girl you were. She died in the alley. Remember that when you wake up.”
The door clicks shut, and the lock turns with a final, heavy thud.
I’m alone in the dark, smelling like him, aching for him, and knowing with a terrifying certainty that I’ll never be whole again.
Peter
The basement of the warehouse smells like copper, stale cigarettes, and the kind of fear that makes a man’s sweat turn acrid. It’s a familiar perfume. It’s the scent of my life’s work.
I’m sitting in a high-backed leather chair that has no business being in a place this damp, watching Silas. The second scout—a kid with a shaved head and a chin that won’t stop quivering—is zip-tied to a steel chair bolted to the centre of the concrete floor. He’s already leaking. Silas has a way with a heavy ring that tends to split skin like ripe fruit.
My phone vibrates in my pocket. I don’t have to look to know the rhythm of the buzz.
Peter, where the fuck is she? She didn’t come home. If you touched her, I swear to God I will burn your fucked up empire down.
I slide the phone back into my pocket without asecond thought. Clara thinks she knows what fire is. She doesn’t realise she’s been living in a house I built out of tinder and gasoline, and I’m the only one holding the matches.
I lean back, the leather creaking under my weight, and let my mind drift back to the bedroom. Back to the way Wendy looked when I left her—limp, ruined, her skin marked by the purple blooms of my ownership.
People think obsession is a sudden thing. A lightning strike. They’re wrong. For me, Wendy was a slow-growing cancer. I’ve spent seven years watching her from the periphery of her life, curating her world like a goddamn museum exhibit. I remember her at seventeen, standing in the rain after a breakup with some boy whose name I’ve since erased from the earth. She looked so fragile, so breakable. I knew then that if I didn’t take her, someone else would—and they wouldn’t be as careful with her pieces as I intended to be.
I didn’t want to just fuck her. I wanted to be the only thing she saw when she closed her eyes. I wanted to be the reason she couldn’t breathe.
“He’s not talking, Boss,” Silas rumbles, shaking his hand out. His knuckles are split. “Thinks he’s a soldier.”
I stand up. The movement is slow, intentional, the heels of my boots clicking against the concrete like a countdown. I walk over to the small wooden table beside the chair. On it sits a glass bowl filled with coarse, industrial sea salt.
I pick up a handful. It’s heavy. Gritty.
“You know what this does to a wound, son?” I ask, my voice a low, melodic purr. I walk behind the kid, my hand hovering over his shoulder. “It’s not justthe sting. It’s the way it draws the moisture out. It preserves the meat while it burns the nerves.”
The scout tries to pull away, his breath coming in short, wet gasps. Silas has already done the prep work—three long, jagged slices across the kid’s bicep, the blood sluggish and dark.
I lean down, my mouth inches from the kid’s ear. “I’m thinking about my girl right now,” I whisper. “I’m thinking about how she’s sleeping in my sheets, smelling like me. And then I think about you, watching her through a lens. Following her. Touching the air she breathes.”
I don’t wait for him to beg. I press my palm—overflowing with the salt—directly into the open gashes on his arm.
