Chapter 15 JULIAN #2
My entire spine tries to jump out of my body. Luca’s snort is sharp, delighted, musical in the worst way—like he’s been waiting for this exact explosion. He steps back just enough to make it look like he’s innocent, but he leaves one hand on my hip out of pure spite.
I’m too high to do anything but stare straight ahead as Rafe stomps down the hallway, looking absolutely unhinged—jaw clenched, hair a mess from practice, gear half-off like he didn’t even bother unstrapping everything before storming after us.
He looks at Luca’s hand on me and his eye twitches in a way that makes every molecule in the room consider evacuating.
Kai appears in the doorway behind Rafe like a ghost summoned by swear words. He doesn’t even look surprised. “He came to me,” Kai says blandly, which is somehow worse. “I didn’t send him out to be harassed.”
“Harassed?” Luca scoffs, flipping his hair off his forehead. “I was welcoming him back to the land of the living. Someone’s got to, since you two are too busy measuring whose leash is longer.”
Rafe’s head snaps toward him. Slowly. Silently. Terrifyingly.
Luca just beams like a gremlin. I, meanwhile, am trying to focus on which one of the three Rafes I’m seeing is the real one.
Rafe steps between us, shoving Luca back with one arm without even looking at him. Then he grabs my chin—hard—and lifts my face up so our eyes meet. “Julian,” he growls, scanning me, pupils, breathing, the way I’m swaying on my feet. “How high are you?”
“Uhhh…” I try to count fingers. Fail. “Moderately?”
“That is not moderately,” he snaps. “You can’t even stand—”
“Actually,” Luca interrupts cheerfully, leaning against the opposite wall, “he walked into me perfectly fine. Stumbled a bit, but honestly? I’ve seen worse from Misha sober.”
Rafe ignores him entirely. His fingers tighten on my jaw. “You went to Kai instead of me?”
Kai lifts a brow. “He needed a dose. You don’t handle the medical—”
“I handle everything with him,” Rafe shoots back, low and lethal, still holding my face like I might vanish if he loosens his grip. “If he needs something, he comes to me. If he wants something, he comes to me. If he’s bleeding, high, shaking, screaming—he. Comes. To. Me.”
Luca whistles. “Someone’s possessive.”
Kai folds his arms. “Someone’s projecting.”
I blink. A lot. Because the hallway is definitely spinning.
Rafe finally tears his eyes off me long enough to glare at both of them. “And you—both of you—stay the fuck away from him when he’s doped to the moon. If I find either of you sniffing around him again, I’ll—”
“Kill us?” Luca supplies brightly.
“Break something?” Kai guesses.
Rafe bares his teeth. “Start with your legs, end with your throats.”
“Hot,” Luca says, grinning.
Kai sighs. “Exhausting.”
And I sag forward, forehead hitting Rafe’s chest because gravity hates me and so do all my life choices.
He catches me instantly, one arm locking around my waist like he knew I was going down before I did. “Mine,” he mutters under his breath, furious and soft. “Fucking mine.”
I blink up at him. “You’re… really loud for a goalie,” I mumble.
Luca cackles.
Rafe growls.
Kai shuts the door like he’s done with us, then opens the door again like nothing ever happened—calm, expressionless, the way surgeons look before cutting into a live chest—and reaches out with one long arm, fingers closing around Luca’s collar like he’s picking up a badly behaved cat.
Luca yelps. Actually yelps. “Hey—!”
And then he’s yanked backward into the container so fast he barely manages to dig his heels in, and the door slams behind them with a metallic thundercrack that makes me flinch so hard I nearly collapse again.
My chest jumps. My ears ring. My skin prickles with the echo.
“What the fuck,” I whisper to no one, dazed, leaning into Rafe because I don’t know what else to do with my limbs.
Rafe doesn’t say a word. He just picks me up. Just lifts me straight off my feet like I weigh nothing, one arm under my knees, the other bracing my back as if I’ve done something irreparably stupid and now I’m his problem to carry.
“Rafe—” I start, but my voice is thin and ruined and the high is still dragging claws across the inside of my skull.
“Shut up,” he growls.
I shut up.
The compound shifts around us, blurry and too bright.
I barely register the metal stairs, the heavy doors, the rust stains like old blood smeared across the walls.
All I see is him—his throat flexing as he walks, jaw tight, hands warm and unyielding.
He doesn’t speak again. Just moves with that monster grace of his—too silent for his size, like the rules of sound don’t apply to him.
When we get to his container, he kicks the door open with his boot and steps inside.
I stop breathing. Because I’ve never seen this room before. Never been allowed in. Never been this close to his world. And the second we cross the threshold, I realize something dangerous.
This is not like the others.
It’s darker, bigger. A converted two-container space—richer in every sense.
There’s a massive steel-framed bed bolted to the floor.
Black sheets. Restraint hooks welded into the headboard and footboard.
A punching bag swings slightly in the corner like it was recently abused.
The walls are covered in knives, sticks, tactical gear.
And one shelf—just one—holds five battered notebooks and a single photograph face-down.
I don’t know what I expected. Something barren. Angry. Brutal, maybe. But this?
This feels like a nest. A predator’s den. A war zone dressed in velvet.
Rafe sets me down on the bed—carefully, like I might break now that we’re alone—and stands over me like a storm deciding whether or not to hit land.
“This is…” I try, licking my lips, trying to find words through the drug haze. “Homey.”
He stares.
“Rafe,” I whisper.
He doesn’t answer. He just reaches into his pocket, pulls out a roll of black tape, and tosses it onto the bed beside me. “Next time,” he says, voice low and sharp and steady, “you want to forget? You come to me.”
I stare down at the tape. It’s just sitting there. Matte black, curling at the edge like it’s waiting for my mouth.
My chest pulls tight, muscles locking in a slow, sick cramp that has nothing to do with the drug and everything to do with him—the man who threw me over his shoulder like I was a misbehaving pet and dragged me into a room I shouldn’t be in.
My knees ache from the hard edge of the mattress.
My thighs still tremble from Kai’s poison.
But my eyes? They’re locked on the goddamn tape.
Then something flickers across the far wall, and I look up. There’s a monitor in the corner—no, a screen, huge, built into the wall like it belongs to someone who needs to see everything.
The image is flickering through grainy black-and-white surveillance feeds.
Containers. Hallways. The rink. A brief glimpse of Misha dragging Corso by the collar.
Another of Kai shoving Luca down into that chair in his container.
For a second I think I see myself—hours ago, stumbling down the walkway, high and hollow.
“Jesus Christ,” I whisper, watching the loop.
Rafe’s standing in front of it, one hand braced against the wall, the other reaching for a switch.
And then—the screen blinks. The hallway disappears. The cameras go dark and Nathan’s face explodes across the screen like a fucking ghost.
I flinch so hard I almost fall off the bed.
Every part of me curls in, instinctive and raw, because I’ve seen that still. That fucking frame. The way his mouth is parted, lips wet, his fingers curled in my hair, the exact second before he whispered “You’re my best mistake.” It’s from the tape.
And Rafe knows it. He’s not even looking at me—just watching Nathan’s face like he wants to rip through the screen and tear out his eyes. “This what you trying to forget again, Jules?” he asks, voice low and guttural, thick with disgust and something far more dangerous underneath.
“Ye—No—fuck,” I croak, throat closing around the word. “Yes. No. I don’t—I don’t know.”
Rafe turns, slowly. He walks toward me like the embodiment of judgment, leaving Nathan’s face burning behind him like a goddamn funeral pyre.
“You keep crawling to everyone else when you spiral,” he says, stalking closer, “but then I find you on the floor, shaking, crying, soaked in someone else’s drugs with his fucking voice echoing in your mouth.”
I can’t speak. I can’t. My throat is tight and my head is spinning again and I hate that he saw me like that. I wish I had the guts to tell him to shut up, but instead I say something worse. “I don’t know how to forget him,” I whisper.
Rafe’s mouth twitches. “Then stop trying,” he says, low and brutal. “Start replacing.” And his eyes flick down—to the tape. To me. To the space between. “Unless you want me to remind you what mine feels like again.”
Rafe doesn’t touch me. Doesn’t move toward the tape. Doesn’t bark an order. Doesn’t rip the high from my bloodstream with his hands like I’m used to.
He just steps around me, calm as fucking death, and drags the heavy chair across the room like it’s nothing.
Metal groaning on metal. His throne. That’s what it looks like.
He sits. Legs spread. Hands braced on his knees.
The monitor behind him still glowing with his face—Nathan’s stupid fucking half-smirk, frozen in time, immortalized in betrayal.
And then—like he planned this—Rafe reaches behind himself. Grabs a remote. Clicks it once and the video starts playing.
My sex tape.
There I am. On-screen. Younger. Softer. High off adrenaline and worship. Twisting in silk sheets and smiling like I’m being seen. Really seen. Nathan’s voice low in the background, telling me I’m perfect, I’m his, he’ll never leave me.
He fucking left me.
I try to turn my head but Rafe’s voice cuts through the air like a blade. “Don’t look away.”
I freeze.