The silence stretched, vibrating with the sound of… nothing really. That was the bizarre thing. It was so quiet it felt likesound.
He didn't look at the door behind me. He looked at my throat. He looked at the way my pulse was jumping under the skin.
And he moved, closing the distance until the heat from his chest hit my face. He was so close I could see the fine grain of his skin, the absolute lack of hesitation in his eyes.
He reached out. I flinched — just a hair — but he didn't strike. He tucked a stray lock of hair behind my ear, his fingers grazing my temple. His touch was light, almost holy, but his eyes were cold as a ledger.
“Come back to bed, Mercy,” he said.
It wasn't a request.
Upstairs, the room felt smaller. The damask walls seemed to be leaning in, watching, like all good peeping-toms.
Judah didn't say a word. He didn't ask what I saw. He didn't threaten me. He simply lay down and opened his arm, waiting.
I got in. I didn't have a choice. Being near him felt like standing at the edge of a cliff, but being away from him felt like falling. I slid into his heat, my skin prickling where it touched his.
He didn't move his arm. He just… let the weight of it settle across my waist — a loose, certain tether. His hand found my hair, his fingers rhythmic and steady, stroking from my crown to my neck.
One. Two. Three.
A strange thought came to me.It was the way you’d soothe a horse before the slaughter.Gentle. Patient.
I lay there with my eyes wide open in the dark, listening to the house groan. I knew he wasn't sleeping. I could feel the alertness radiating off him — listening to my every breath, measuring them against his own.
Eventually, the exhaustion won. My eyes got heavy. The last thing I felt was his thumb tracing the line of my jaw, slow and possessive, marking the territory he already owned.
The first thing I registered was the ceiling.
Twelve feet of plaster medallions, crown molding thick as my forearm, a fresco in the center panel that had faded to something soft and indeterminate — cherubs, maybe, or clouds, or the memory of both. Not my ceiling. My ceiling was eight feet of water-damaged drywall above a food bank.
I didn't have to look beside me to know he was awake. Judah didn't sleep; he just waited for the sun to catch up to him. I kept my eyes closed, my heart hammering a frantic rhythm against my ribs that I knew he could hear. I was a guest in this bed the way a bird is a guest in a cage.
I felt him shift.
His palm landed heavy on my mid-thigh, his fingers sinking into my skin with a blunt, bruising certainty. He wasn't checking to see if I was awake; he was reminding me who owned the legs he was touching.
“Good morning, Mercy,” he said, voice rough with the night’s remnants. No confusion about who I was or why I was here.
His hand continued its journey upward, and I fought the urge to arch into his touch. “I should go,” I whispered, even as my body betrayed me, shifting closer.
“Should you?” The question hung between us as his palm found the curve of my hip, fingers splaying possessively across my skin. “I don’t recall giving you permission to leave my bed.”
At first I thought he was joking. But when I realized he wasn’t, I felt a shameful thrill run down my spine, pooling low in my belly. This was Judah Beaumont — the man who controlled everything in St. Francisville, including… apparently, me.
“Permission?” I managed, trying to sound defiant despite the way my skin burned beneath his touch.
“I’m a possessive man.” His fingers traced higher, skimming over my ribs under the shirt, thumb brushing the underside of my breast. “A shortcoming I cannot seem to shake.” His eyes fell to the curve of my breast as he pushed himself up on his elbow.“I am my beloved's and my beloved is mine,”he quoted the scripture. Solomon 6:3.
My breath caught in my throat. The words hung in the air between us, a confession and a warning all at once.
His hand cupped my breast fully now, thumb circling lazily over my nipple until it hardened beneath his touch.
“Song of Solomon,” I whispered. “You’re quoting love poetry from the Bible while you...” My voice trailed off as his lips found my neck, pressing against the tender spot he’d discovered last night.
“While I what, Mercy?” His breath was warm against my skin. “While I touch what belongs to me? While I worship what I’ve claimed?” His teeth grazed my earlobe, and I gasped.
There was blasphemy in his words, but they resonated through me like church bells. I should have been appalled — should have pushed him away — but instead, I turned toward him, my hand finding the hard plane of his chest.
