Chapter 13 Julian
JULIAN
The worst part of healing isn’t the pain.
It’s the boredom. The stillness. The way the world goes quiet while my body knits itself back together and my brain—my fucked, feral, traitor brain—goes hunting for anything loud enough to drown itself out.
Kai pumped me full of some pain cocktail earlier, something warm and humming that makes the edges of everything blur and soften, like a dream that doesn’t want to end.
My thigh aches, wrapped tight in layers of gauze that throb every time my heartbeat remembers how to exist, but even that’s fading under the drug-slick haze.
I’m sprawled on my bed, half under the blanket, the container dim except for the thin blade of late-afternoon light squeezing between the metal slats.
Too quiet. Too empty. Too fucking big for one person.
The kind of quiet that lets ghosts crawl out of the walls.
So, of course, my brain goes straight to Rafe.
The memory hits like heat under the skin—his hands, big and rough and angry; the weight of him pinning me down when I tried to move; the low gravel of his voice in my ear while I thrashed on the ice; the way he pressed the water bottle to my mouth like he’d force me to swallow it if I didn’t cooperate.
Then the kiss. Jesus. That kiss through the black tape.
Hard and bruising, teeth scraping against vinyl and lips, breath hot against my skin, his fingers digging into my jaw just to shut me up.
And that smirk afterward—quick, cruel, like he knew exactly what he was doing to me. Like he wanted to see me beg for more.
I shift on the mattress, exhaling slow as the heat pools low in my stomach, right under the dull ache of my stitched thigh.
My body betrays me instantly, craving contact, craving pressure, craving him.
I drag my palm up my torso, letting my fingers trace the line of my ribs, the curve of my hip, imagining his hand instead—heavier, firmer, impatient.
I imagine him pushing me onto my stomach, knee between my legs, voice in my ear telling me to stop fighting, telling me to open up like I’m something he owns.
My breath stutters.
Because I want it. I want all of it. Rafe’s weight on my back, heat pressed into the cold of my spine, his thigh forcing mine apart.
I want his hands pinning mine to the mattress, wrists bound in black tape, my face shoved into the pillow while he fucks me the way he plays—silent, focused, brutal.
I want the tape across my mouth again, his fingers on my jaw making me take whatever he gives.
I want the sound he makes when he’s right at the edge of snapping.
I want the moment he stops pretending he doesn’t want me.
I want to be ruined, stripped, claimed, whatever the fuck he calls it when he looks at me like that.
My hips roll up into my hand without permission, a quiet gasp leaving me as the fantasy locks me down hard.
I see him above me—shoulders tight, jaw clenched, eyes dark and furious.
I hear the way he growls my name, low and dangerous, right before he does something unforgivable.
My fingers slip lower, sliding under the waistband of my sweats, and I tip my head back with a broken sound because the image is so fucking vivid it hurts.
Rafe’s hands on my throat. Rafe’s breath on my neck. Rafe’s body covering mine like a shield made of violence.
I can almost feel the tape burning around my wrists, the sting when he yanks me into position, the heat of his hips slamming into me from behind while he tells me to shut up, to stay open, to take it like a good fucking boy—
And then, right when the fantasy gets too sharp, too real, too close to the edge—his face changes.
The heat dies and Nathan’s face snaps into place instead, like a glitch in the universe, sudden and wrong.
My stomach drops, my breath collapses. Everything inside me claws backward so fast I choke on it. My hand jerks away from myself as if I touched fire. “No,” I whisper, shaking my head like I can physically shake him out. “No, no, no. Not you. Not now.”
But the damage is done. His voice, his smile, the way he held me in that fucking video—they slam into me with the force of a sledgehammer.
I curse under my breath, already reaching blindly for the small burner phone Misha gave me.
My fingers tremble as I unlock it, screen lighting up my face in the dim room.
I shouldn’t do this. I know I shouldn’t.
I know exactly where it leads. But I open the drive anyway, scroll past the photos, past the harmless clips, straight to the file with no name.
My thumb hesitates. Just for a second. Then I hit play and the hotel room fills my container like poison.
The video opens with that soft hotel-room glow—the one I used to think made everything feel safe, like the world couldn’t reach us if the curtains were drawn and the door was locked—and before I can even brace for it, I’m smiling.
Actually fucking smiling like an idiot, lying in this steel coffin of a container with my leg wrapped in bandages and my sanity peeling at the seams.
Nathan’s face fills the screen in that stupid, gentle way he used to look at me—warm eyes, a half-smirk tugging at the corner of his mouth, hair damp from the shower, leaning over me like I was the only thing in the universe that mattered.
God, I’d forgotten how soft he used to be with me.
Before everything. Before the lies. Before he sold me out with the same mouth he kissed me with.
He laughs at something I say in the video—something quiet, something only he could pull out of me—and the sound goes straight through my ribs like someone’s tapping on bone from the inside.
My throat tightens. My chest aches. And still I watch.
I watch him kiss down my throat like it’s a ritual, watch his hand slip under my back to pull me closer, watch myself melt into him like I didn’t know any better, like I wasn’t a fool begging to be ruined by the wrong man.
My smile stays, even though it feels like it’s cutting my face open. I can’t look away.
Somewhere around the midpoint—when Nathan presses his forehead to mine and whispers “look at me”—I feel it again.
That electric pull low in my stomach. That shame-soaked heat curling under the blanket.
My hand drifts down without permission, sliding into my sweats as if it’s obeying someone else entirely.
And sure enough—I’m hard. Hard for him. Hard for the past. Hard for a ghost. Disgust claws up my throat immediately.
I grab myself anyway—not to stroke, not to feel good, but to punish.
I squeeze tight, too tight, until the pressure burns, until the pleasure chokes itself on the pain. My jaw clenches.
I hate that my body remembers him. I hate that he can still do this to me, from a fucking screen, from a video that should’ve been deleted the second he let them use it against me.
I squeeze harder, fingers digging into the fabric, into myself, grinding down on the sensation like it’s a sin I’m trying to carve out of my skin.
“Fuck you,” I whisper into the empty container, eyes glued to the screen where Nathan kisses my cheek like he owned me.
“Fuck you for this.” But the worst part—the part that rots me alive—is that even as I say it, even as I squeeze myself like I’m trying to choke the heat out of my own body, I’m still getting harder. Still watching. Still wanting. And hating every second of it.
The tears roll before I even realize they’re falling—hot and silent, sliding down my cheeks while I keep my eyes locked on the screen, on him, on everything I lost. I don’t wipe them.
I don’t stop watching. I just let the pain do what it wants, let the heat in my stomach twist tighter, let my hand stay where it is, curled around myself like I’m trying to hold on to the only version of me that ever felt wanted.
Then, the door opens. No knock. No warning. Just the sound of the handle turning and the metal groaning open like it belongs to him. Because it does. Because locks don’t work on Rafe. They never have. They never will.
I jerk, startled, instinct slamming into me like a fist—but I don’t pull my hand out of my pants. Don’t wipe the tears. Don’t even pause the video. There’s no point. He already saw.
Rafe steps inside slow, nothing in his body showing surprise or disgust or anything I can use to shield myself. He doesn’t say a word. Just walks over to my bed, boots quiet on the metal floor, sits next to me like this is the most normal shit in the world.
And then he looks.
He looks at my face—at the red-rimmed eyes, the trembling mouth, the cheeks wet with shame.
Then he looks at the phone in my hand, the video still playing—Nathan’s voice still murmuring those soft fucking lies into the silence.
Then he looks at my hand in my sweats, still clenched, still twitching. And finally, he looks back at me.
Doesn’t say a thing. He just takes the phone out of my hand.
I let out a protest, soft and breathless, more habit than intention. “Rafe—”
But the look he throws me shuts me up cold and I close my eyes. I don’t want to see his face when he realizes. When it hits him what he’s looking at. He probably thinks it’s porn. Normal shit. Some anonymous scene I got hooked on. Not what it is. Not me. Not Nathan. Not that night.
Not the reason my entire fucking career, my life, everything went up in flames.
But then—He doesn’t stop it. I can still hear it playing. Nathan’s voice, low and intimate. My own voice, wrecked and raw. Skin slapping against skin. That disgusting little moan I used to make when I thought it meant something.
I open my eyes and Rafe’s staring at the screen. Frowning. His brow drawn so tight the scar through his right eyebrow pulls. “What the fuck is this?” he growls.
And just like that—my stomach fucking drops.