“Not yet. But we're getting there.” He leaned closer, breath hot against my throat. “You want to come, Rourke? Want me to make you spill in this alley where anyone could walk past?”
“Mercer—”
“Say it. Ask for it. Admit you want this.”
I couldn't. Wouldn't. My body didn't care about strategy or pride or control — it just wanted release, wanted his hand, wanted permission to stop fighting.
His hand moved faster. Merciless. His other hand slid from my hip to my arse, squeezing through fabric, fingertips pressing with pressure that promised more.
“You're close,” he said. “I can feel it. The way your cock's pulsing. The way your breathing's changed.”
“I'm not?—”
“You are.” His thumb circled the head, applying pressure that made stars burst behind my eyelids. “Come. Give me proof that I can break your control.”
I came. Release tore through me hard enough to buckle my knees, filling his hand, ruining my boxers with evidence of how completely he'd taken me apart.
He kept stroking through it, milking every pulse, expression focused and clinical. When the aftershocks faded, he released me, withdrew his hand, wiped it clean on a handkerchief from his pocket.
“There,” he said. “Control proven. Any questions?”
I stared at him, rage and shame warring in my chest.
“That was manipulative,” I managed.
He pocketed the handkerchief, adjusted his clothes. “You wanted to intimidate me. I turned it around. Showed you that bigger and stronger doesn't mean immune to leverage.”
“This isn't over.”
“No. It's not.” He met my gaze. “But now you understand: I don't scare easily. I don't fold under pressure. And threatening me just makes me more creative about how I respond.”
He adjusted his jacket, smoothed out the wrinkles, then looked back at me with that infuriating smile. “I think we're past formalities, don't you? After all that.” A vague gesture toward mystill-undone trousers. “Can I call you Dom? You can call me Cal. Seems only fair.”
The audacity of it. The sheer bloody cheek. He'd just made me come in an alley and now he was asking permission to use my first name like we were mates at a pub.
Before I could answer, he was already moving past me toward the alley's entrance. “See you around, Dom.”
I stood there for five minutes. Breathing. Processing. Trying to reassemble the control he'd shattered and failing because the pieces didn't go back where they'd been.
The man I absolutely could not afford to be attracted to.
The man whose touch I could still feel like brand marks.
I walked out of the alley, headed back to Ravenswood, and tried to pretend I hadn't just crossed a line I couldn't uncross with someone who was either going to help me understand the corruption eating London or destroy everything I'd built to protect the people I loved.
Either way, Cal Mercer had just rewired something fundamental.
And I had no idea how to fix it.
