Chapter 15 JULIAN #3
“I said,” he growls, “don’t fucking look away.”
My eyes snap back to the screen. My gut flips. I watch my own mouth stretch open around a moan. I know what’s coming. I know this part. Nathan always knew how to build tension. How to film it like love, fuck it like theater, lie like he meant it.
“You still touch yourself to this?” Rafe asks.
I want to lie. I want to. But my throat stays silent.
“You watch it when you want to feel wanted,” he says. “When you want to remember what it felt like to be kept.”
I nod. Barely. My face burns. My stomach’s doing flips and my chest feels too tight and I don’t know what this is—punishment? Exposure? A fucking lesson?
“But it wasn’t real,” Rafe snarls. “You know that now.”
My jaw clenches. “Doesn’t matter.”
“It does.”
The screen flickers. Nathan moans something sweet. I flinch. My nails dig into the bedframe. “Stop it—”
“No.” Rafe’s voice cuts me off like a whip.
“Watch it, Jules. Watch what he made you believe. Watch what he used to fuck you and sell you. Watch it, and feel how fucking fake it is.”
My mouth opens. No words come out. I’m sitting there, trembling, soaked in my own sweat and Kai’s high and shame that tastes like vomit. Watching myself beg a man who threw me away like trash to fuck me harder. Watching myself cry from it—thinking it meant love.
And Rafe is across from me, silent and staring, seething in a way that fills the entire room, but he doesn’t touch me and he doesn’t stop it. “You want me to destroy this?” he asks quietly. “Say the word.”
I can’t say it. Not yet, because some stupid, broken part of me still wants to remember what it felt like to be loved, even if it was all a fucking lie, even if Rafe’s right about everything, even if this—him, the tape, this chair, this room, this suffocating silence—is the only real thing I’ve got left.
When the tears finally come, they don’t start slow.
They crash. One blink, and they’re just there—hot and humbling, streaking down my face before I can bite them back.
Before I can steel my spine or make a joke or snarl something filthy to hold my dignity together with spit and string.
No. I fall apart. Messy. Ugly. Cracked down the middle like the glass behind Nathan’s smile.
“Make it stop,” I whisper. Then louder, hoarse and breaking, “Please, Rafe, make it stop—make him go away—make me forget—please—”
And Rafe moves. He crosses the room in three long strides, the remote hitting the floor with a clatter I barely hear because my pulse is screaming.
My hands are fists. My breath’s a riot. I’m bracing for the slap of tape across my mouth again, bracing for the silence and the rough hands and the punishment, because that’s what he does when I spiral, right?
But he doesn’t tape my mouth. He tapes my fucking throat. A single strip of black, ripped clean and fast, pressed tight just under my jaw like a collar. One perfect line, sealing me in.
My breath catches. My fingers go to it immediately—not to tear it off. Not to resist. I just touch it. Slowly. Wonderingly. Thumb brushing along the adhesive line like I don’t understand what just happened. Like I’m trying to memorize the pressure. The claim.
“Rafe…”
“Look at me.”
The command is low. I obey.
He grabs the remote again and presses another button, and the screen behind him flickers—no longer Nathan, no longer betrayal, but me.
A live feed from a camera I didn’t even notice. There I am on the screen right now, kneeling on Rafe’s bed, tear-streaked and flushed, the tape tight around my throat, my eyes wide and my lips parted like I’ve forgotten how to breathe.
Collared.
I look… glorious.
Like something ruined on purpose, a cathedral broken just enough to let God bleed through the cracks.
“Do you know what the tape means, little halo?” Rafe asks.
I freeze.
The words echo in my chest like a secret I wasn’t supposed to hear. My lashes flutter and I almost choke on a sob, because I think I imagined it—I have to have imagined it. He doesn’t give out nicknames. He gives orders, scars, tethers.
But when I look at him, he’s staring at the screen. At me. Like I’m his.
And the tape around my throat isn’t gagging me.
It’s marking me.
Rafe climbs onto the bed behind me like a fucking inevitability—slow, controlled, the mattress dipping under his weight in a way that makes my whole body jolt forward. His thighs bracket mine, huge and unyielding, his chest flush against my spine before I even remember how to breathe.
His hands don’t touch me yet. Not my hips, not my shoulders, not the tape at my throat. He just sits there, behind me, around me, a cage shaped like a man.
The screen glows in front of us, showing me—collared in black tape, eyes wet, face flushed, breathing like I’ve been dragged out of my own skin.
Rafe’s breath hits the back of my neck, hot and steady and punishing. “It means you’re mine now,” he growls, his voice so close I feel it run straight down my spine. “Not his.”
My fingers twitch against my thighs as I stare at the screen, unable to look away and unable to breathe without tasting his voice in the back of my throat.
“He doesn’t deserve your tears,” he murmurs, his mouth skimming the shell of my ear without touching it. “Or your blood.” His hand finally moves—just one—coming up slow, deliberate, and wrapping around my waist like he’s claiming a weapon. “Or the space in your little drugged-out pretty brain.”
I shudder. My eyes go glassy again on the screen, and the version of me up there reacts like he felt it too—tiny, involuntary tremble at the base of the throat.
Rafe sees it and growls—deep and satisfied. His fingers splay over my lower belly, dragging my shirt up inch by inch, exposing warm skin to cold air. “Look at you,” he whispers. “Look at what you become in my hands.”
The image on the screen is obscene. I look wrecked. Beautiful. Owned.
Rafe’s other hand slides up—slow as sin—over my chest, up my throat, stopping just below the tape. His fingers hover there, the barest pressure under the strip, making the tape bite gently into my skin.
“You’re not his ghost,” he growls, lips brushing my cheek as he speaks. “You’re my fucking problem. My responsibility. My addiction to manage.” His fingers press firmer against the tape, making my breath hitch. “My little halo.”
My knees nearly give out, even though I’m sitting.
On the screen, I watch myself melt back into him—head tipping, mouth parting, eyes heavy like I’m drowning in his voice.
Rafe’s palm drags lower again, sliding down my stomach, slow and inevitable, heat seeping through every nerve he touches. “Say it,” he murmurs, teeth grazing my jaw. “Say you’re mine.”
My body wants to say it. Every inch of me—skin, breath, bone, the twitch in my fucking thighs—wants to collapse into the moment, lean back into him, let the words fall out like a confession I’ve been holding since the second he taped my mouth shut for the first time. I want to say I’m his.
But my brain—my traitor fucking brain—It flashes back.
Nathan’s voice. “You’re mine, Julian.” Nathan’s hand curling around my throat. Nathan’s lies.Soft and pretty and fatal.
And suddenly it’s not Rafe’s hands on me. It’s his.
My vision goes white at the edges. My lungs lock up. The tape on my throat feels too tight, and the warmth behind me becomes a vice, and I’m shaking, I’m shaking so fucking hard I might vomit.
Rafe doesn’t move.
But I do.
I jerk forward—hard—out of his grip, off his lap, landing on my knees like I’ve just been shoved underwater. My hands go to my throat, not to tear the tape off but to make sure it’s not choking me. My heart is sprinting. My ears are ringing. “No,” I rasp. “Don’t—don’t call me that—don’t say I’m—”
Rafe is still behind me.
I don’t turn around. Can’t.
Because last time I was someone’s, they fucked me until I thought it meant something.
They told me I was theirs. They promised forever, and then they fucking left me.
Left me ruined and raw and exposed to the whole goddamn world.
My face smeared across headlines. My name dragged through courtrooms and fan forums and smear campaigns.
My entire soul sold for five million dollars and a better contract.
I claw at my chest like I can rip the memory out. “I can’t—” I whisper. “I can’t be someone’s again. I can’t survive it if it happens again. I won’t—I’ll die if you leave me too.”
And there it is. The real panic. The truth buried in every overdose, every needle, every desperate night I watched that video just to pretend I mattered to someone.
I can’t be his. Because if Rafe leaves—if he betrays me—it won’t just hurt. It’ll kill me.
Rafe doesn’t give me the chance to run. He moves like a fucking strike—no hesitation, no space, no mercy—and yanks me back into him, hard, until my spine is flush against his chest and his arms are iron around me.
One across my waist. One across my chest, palm flat over my racing heart like he’s daring it to stop.
His mouth drops to my ear, breath hot, voice molten. “Listen to me, Julian,” he growls, words dragging across every open nerve.“I am not him.”
My body jerks. But he holds me tighter. Not to trap—just to anchor.
“I will never leave you unless I’m in a fucking body bag, do you hear me?”
I whimper. I sob. My head drops back to his shoulder as my chest caves, throat raw and tight and aching. It’s too much. It’s too real. It’s too much.
But Rafe isn’t done. His voice turns darker, hotter, almost feral.
“You are not my dirty little secret,” he hisses.
“You are not some shameful mistake I bury in hotel sheets. I will fuck you in front of every goddamn syndicate, on the fucking ice, with a gun in my hand if I have to—and I will destroy anyone who even thinks about touching you.”
I cry harder. Fists clenched, vision blurred. My throat burns under the tape, not from pain—but from how tight it all feels. The heat. The truth. The fucking fury in his voice.
“Do not,” he bites out, “fucking compare me to that useless scum.”
My whole body shakes with it. And I reach back—blind, desperate—and grab his arm.
The one holding me. The one across my chest. I grab it like it’s the only thing left tethering me to the ground, sobbing so hard my ribs ache, but holding him like if he lets go, I’ll fly apart in pieces too small to put back together.
“Okay,” I gasp. “Okay. Okay—okay—I hear you—I fucking hear you—”
He tightens his grip. One brutal arm wrapped around me. The other sliding up, curling around my throat—fingers brushing the edge of the tape like he’s reclaiming it, like he’s reclaiming me.
I twist in his grip—awkward, shaky, wet-faced and still trembling—but I turn until I’m facing him, pressed chest to chest, heart to heart, too close to be safe.
My fingers clutch his shirt like I’m afraid he’ll disappear if I blink.
His jaw is so tight I can see the muscle ticking. His eyes? Fire. Steel. Mine.
And then I say it. “Then prove it. Fuck me like you mean it.”
The room goes still. His expression shifts slightly. That storm behind his eyes breaks into something darker. Deeper. But he doesn’t pounce. Doesn’t growl. Doesn’t rip the tape from my throat or slam me down like I half-expect.
He smirks, slow and knowing. Then he reaches up with one calloused hand and wipes my tears away, thumb dragging rough across my cheekbone, down to my jaw, like he’s cleaning me up for something sacred.
And he says—quiet and lethal “I’m not fucking you until you’re sober.”
I freeze as my lips part and my breath catches in a small, uneven hiccup.
He leans in, voice like smoke wrapping around my pulse. “I want you to feel and remember every second of it.” His thumb presses gently into the side of my throat—right over the black tape. “You got that, little halo?”
I nod because I do. I do get it. This isn’t sex. This isn’t punishment. This is claiming. And he wants all of me for it. Clear. Aware. Present.
Even if that’s the scariest fucking thing in the world.