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Iwoke that morning in the best mood of my adult life, and that wasn’t an exaggeration.

The irony also wasn’t lost on me, as I was lying on a prison cot in a six by nine concrete box with some poor bastard two floors down screaming at a wall. Because despite where I was, it didn’t take away from the feeling sitting in my chest. A feeling I couldn’t name, for the simple reason that I had never felt it before.

It wasn’t satisfaction. Satisfaction I knew. Satisfaction was what you get when a thing is over. When it was finished but this… this was far from over… in fact, it had only just gotten started.

Because in eight days, my infatuation with her had grown into a deeply rooted obsession that I felt carved into my skin. And yesterday had been a turning point, for both her and me. Because now I wanted more. I had a taste of her and fed the beast of my addiction, even if the violent noise in my head had gone quiet the second she stepped foot in that tiled room.

Days ago, I had left her with a great deal to think about after pinning her to the wall in that treatment room and taking my souvenir. But three days without sight of her hadn’t been easy. Three days of lying on a cot working out what a frightened woman does after a moment like that and hoping that she didn’t run. Of course, I’d had my men watching her, just as they did now. However, I would prefer to be the one to take her and that… well that did take more planning.

I also knew that I had purposely led her into a false sense of security by giving her those three days. She no doubt thought I was patient, and I let her think it, because it suited me. Patience was not something I’d ever had to work at. It was the whole of my trade, and the only time I have ever been caught was the one time I lost it to my rage. But whatever I had with her was not patience, it was three days of holding still while my head screamed at me the entire fucking time.

Every hour of those three days I could have walked out of that cell and lifted her out of that infirmary in front of six officers, and not one of them would have put a hand on me.

But I had frightened her badly enough already.

I had spent three days buying that shower room and the time in it, but I had not once decided exactly what I was going to do inside it. Which wasn’t like me at all, because I prided myself on planning everything down to the very minute. Yet I walked in there with nothing. I didn’t know what version of me she would get when that door shut, and some part of me had already accepted that she was going to find out at the same time I did.

So, I gave her a few days to settle. Doing nothing more than have my shirt put in her locker with a note for her to find. Because it turns out I can go three days without seeing her, but I can’t go three without reminding her of who she belongs to.

Which made our time in the shower all the sweeter because by then I was very close to losing my damn mind with wanting her. Which meant that by the time she walked through that door I was three days past the end of my own patience.

Fuck but my hands were actually shaking in anticipation when the time came, and I purposely wanted her to find me naked. To find me bare of all else and make my intentions known.

I had her wrists bound above her head in her own gauze, tied to the arm of that shower, and I loved the sight of her at my mercy. But what surprised me was what I did with that knowledge. Usually, it would have ignited a sinister need within me, for I wasn’t exactly known as a gentle lover. I often fucked like it was a fight to be won. Not that I ever beat on the women in my bed, but they most definitely walked away the next morning with bruises they had begged for. Teeth marks. The print of my palm across an ass. Red rings at the wrists where the rope had been, and bruises on the hips in the exact shape of my fingers.

Their bodies were a thing to be marked, a job I did well, and they thanked me for. I had never once given a woman anything softer than that, because there has never been anything softer in me to give.

Then that afternoon, with a shaking woman half undressed and tied to a pipe in a room nobody was coming to save her from, I wanted to be careful with her… which wasn’t like me at all.

I turned it over a long time afterward, and it still didn’t sit right. Not that I didn’t want to mark her, because I had wanted my hands all over that woman since the first morning I smelled her. What I didn’t want was to break her, but I had no idea just how true that was until she was actually in front of me with nowhere left to go.

Because a small part of me wanted to hate her for making me feel this way about her. For igniting this obsession for something other than revenge. Therefore, I didn’t know if resentment would rear its ugly head and make me snap the second I had her within my grasp.

And yet no violent urges surfaced, and what I learned about myself that day was that they never would. Because it turned out, I was capable of being… gentle. I had never been gentle with a single living thing in thirty years and until that afternoon, I wasn’t sure the ability was even in me. Because you can’t use a tool that was never fitted properly… or so I thought.

Then she started to fight the gauze.

She started to hurt herself and something in me snapped at the sight. The way she twisted her wrists to free herself from the gauze was the way a frightened animal will do anything to escape. It was only when I told her I knew her last name was a fake that this response kicked in.

Of course, she had tried to fight me, but then, that was all part of the game. Part of the sick thrill for both of us and I felt it in every part of her, no matter how much she might deny it. She was getting off on it, something proven when I felt how wet she was for me. Which was not the natural response at all, because most would have simply begged me not to hurt them.

But subconsciously, she knew I wouldn’t harm her, which was why she felt safe enough to fight me. She fought so as not to appear weak and submissive, and honestly, I admired her for it. I admired her spirit and was addicted to her fire. And once I had her exactly where I wanted her, she never once fought me like that when I touched her sexually. So, I knew it was the name that truly terrified her. And the second I saw her pain; I couldn’t get her still fast enough.

She was frightened of me, and she had every reason on God’s green earth to be. But the way she had looked up at me with those enormous hazel eyes of hers… Fuck, but something in me shattered. Shattered only to be made whole again when I tasted her sweet pussy off my fingers. I knew right then and there that I would never let her go. That there was no sating my thirst for her. There was no cure for this level of addiction, no pill to take. And even if there was, I would have crushed it with my boot long before it could ever make its way to my lips.

But no matter how much I wanted to claim every inch of her, there was one thing I refused to do and that was take her by force. I despised rapists for a reason and had therefore killed a great deal of them in my time.

Now, with that being said, I had taken a great many things by force before, and from men who had it coming. Money. Territory. Hours out of a man’s life while he told me what I needed to know. Fingers, on occasion. A name, when a name was the only thing left on him worth having. I once took a business three generations deep off a man in a single evening, and as he wept about it, I ate my dinner with his blood still staining my fingers.

Because taking was easy. Taking was the least interesting thing these hands have ever done. And in thirty years, exactly one person has ever taken something from me.

Someone who will soon die by my hands.

But then there was her and she became the second.

She took my self-control to a new level and tested it. It was the heat coming off her, the way her hips moved before she had decided to move them. It was the sound she bit down on and then couldn’t hold in any longer. It was the exact moment her body gave up arguing with her mind and came over to me entirely.

That was what did it.