He gathered me against his chest, and I pressed my ear to his heartbeat. Steady. Certain. Alive. The rhythmof it was an anchor, pulling me back from the edge of whatever abyss the nightmare had opened.
"I'm here," he murmured against my hair. "I'm not going anywhere. You're safe."
Safe. The word should have comforted me. Instead, it made me think of cages. Gabriel had called me safe, too, when he'd locked me in the pink room and told me the outside world was too dangerous for what I was becoming.
But Nathan wasn't Gabriel. Nathan had never locked me anywhere. Nathan had given me keys and choices and the freedom to make my own decisions. The fact that my brain kept drawing parallels between them was just—what had Matt said?—trauma responses. Flashbacks. The long, slow process of healing.
"Make me forget," I said against his chest. "Please. Make me forget him."
He pulled back enough to look at me, and I saw the question in his eyes. "You're sure?"
"I'm sure."
What followed wasn't sex—not the way we usually had it, all heat and hunger and the desperate claiming of two people who'd found each other in the dark. This was something else. Something slower. Something that felt almost like worship.
He laid me back against the pillows with hands that barely seemed to touch me, and when he kissed me, it was soft as a benediction. His lips traced from my mouth tomy jaw to my throat, lingering over the place where the phantom collar still ached, and I felt the pressure of his kiss overwriting the pressure of Gabriel's ghost.
"You're here," he breathed against my skin. "You're mine. Not his. Never his."
"Yours." The word came out as a sob. "I'm yours."
His hands moved down my body with deliberate slowness, mapping territory he'd claimed a hundred times but never stopped appreciating. Each touch felt like an exorcism—Gabriel's memory driven out by Nathan's presence, old scars overwritten by new sensation.
When he reached my hips, he paused. "Tell me if you need to stop."
"Don't stop. Please don't stop."
He entered me with a gentleness that made my eyes sting, and I wrapped my legs around him and pulled him deeper. The rhythm he set was slow, almost torturous, each thrust a deliberate act of reclamation. He wasn't fucking me—he was reminding me. Reminding my body who it belonged to. Reminding my mind that pleasure didn't have to come with pain.
"I love you," he said, and the words hit like a promise. "I love every broken piece of you. Every sharp edge. Every scar."
"Nathan—"
"You survived him. You survived everything he did, and you're still here. Still fighting. Still choosing to be mine."
The orgasm built slowly, unlike the frantic climaxes we usually chased. This one was a wave that rose from somewhere deeper than physical sensation—it came from the way he looked at me, the way he spoke to me, the way he made me believe, at least for this moment, that I was more than the sum of my damage.
When I came, it was with his name on my lips and tears streaming down my face. He followed moments later, his own release a shuddering groan against my shoulder.
Afterward, we lay tangled together, breathing hard. The phantom collar had faded to a faint ache, barely noticeable. The lullaby had stopped.
"Better?" he asked.
"Better."
But when he drifted back to sleep, I stayed awake. My hand crept to my throat again, pressing against the skin where the collar used to sit. The ache was still there, buried beneath Nathan's kisses like a splinter I couldn't quite dig out.
The morning light made everything seem less threatening. Nightmares, I told myself, were just nightmares. The pill in the medicine cabinet was just a manufacturing error. The ache in my throat was just muscle memory, an old wound that would fade with time.
Nathan left for a meeting with one of his consulting clients—he'd been cagey about the details, which wasn't unusual. He kept his work compartmentalized, the way I kept my past compartmentalized, and I'd learned not to push. Some things were easier to carry in separate boxes.
I spent the morning cleaning the apartment. It was a ritual I'd developed in the early days after Gabriel, when I'd needed structure to keep myself from falling apart. Scrubbing surfaces, organizing cabinets, making everything exactly right—it gave my hands something to do while my mind wandered.
The kitchen was already spotless, but I found myself wiping down the counters anyway. The coffee maker. The knife block. The floor in front of the sink, where I knelt to check for spots I might have missed.
I was halfway through scrubbing a mark that wasn't there when I realized what I was doing.
I was kneeling.
