Chapter 5
Scarletta
I'm staring at my ceiling. Again.
The words won't stop this time. They're flying through my head like they used to—back when writing felt like breathing instead of drowning. Ivy and Logan. The sex club. The bench. The crowd.
I dreamt about them last night.
Actual dreams. Not the blank nothing I've been swimming through for six months. Not the dissociative fog where I wake up and can't remember if I slept or just stopped existing for eight hours.
Real, vivid, filthy dreams.
I close my eyes. Slip my fingers between my legs.
I'm already wet.
Jesus Christ.
I haven't been wet like this since—
No. Not thinking about that. Not thinking about him.
Just Ivy and Logan. Just the story.
Inside Logan's sex club, Ivy is bent over a bench facing a crowd of people. Most of them are naked—like completely naked. Hard cocks everywhere. Tits everywhere. Glistening pussies. Bodies pressed together, watching, waiting.
They're eagerly awaiting Ivy's scene debut.
She knows there are mirrors positioned behind her. Angled perfectly so the people in front can see what Logan is going to do. Can watch his fingers spread her open. Can see how wet she is. How her pussy clenches around nothing, desperate and needy and—
Logan steps behind her. His hand slides up her inner thigh.
Except it's not Logan anymore.
It's Caleb.
I don't even try to stop it. Don't pretend I'm still writing fiction.
I'm in Ivy's position now. Bent over that bench. Spread wide. Mirrors behind me reflecting everything for the crowd to see.
And Caleb's fingers—those expert, ruthless fingers that know exactly how to make me fall apart—slide through my wetness.
"Look at you," his voice echoes in my head. Low. Commanding. "Dripping for all these strangers to see."
My actual fingers circle my clit. Clumsy compared to his. Desperate compared to his control.
But God, I'm so wet.
"Such a good little slut," Caleb whispers in my fantasy. His finger pushes inside me. Just one. Slow. "Putting on a show. Letting everyone watch what a filthy whore you are."
I arch on my bed. Push two fingers inside myself.
The crowd in my head is watching. Stroking themselves. Getting off on watching Caleb finger-fuck me in front of them.
"Please—" I hear myself beg in the fantasy. "Please, Master—"
The orgasm hits me like a physical blow.
I'm writhing. Making sounds I don't recognize—high, desperate, obscene noises that bounce off these expensive high ceilings and fill my sterile apartment with proof of exactly what I am.
A broken girl who can only come when she imagines the man who stalked her.
The man who killed someone in front of her.
The man who—
Another wave crashes through me and I'm gasping, my fingers working frantically, chasing every last pulse of pleasure until I'm shaking and my thighs are trembling and I can't breathe.
I collapse back against my expensive sheets.
Stare at my expensive ceiling.
Seven times.
I've masturbated seven times since I left him in that alley last night.
Seven incredible orgasms.
After six months of nothing. Six months of my body refusing to respond to anything—not fantasies, not porn, not the battery-powered vibrator I spent two hundred dollars on in a moment of desperate hope.
Nothing worked.
Until yesterday. Until he pressed his thigh between my legs in a dirty alley and called me a filthy slut and my entire body woke up screaming yes.
I should be horrified.
I am horrified.
But I'm also—
God.
I press my wet fingers against my mouth. Taste myself.
The way he made me do. That first time. When he fingered me and then made me suck his fingers clean while he called me a good girl.
My pussy clenches.
I could go again. Right now. I could slip my hand back between my legs and come an eighth time just thinking about—
No.
I force myself to sit up. Swing my legs over the side of the bed.
My thighs are sticky. The sheets are damp beneath me.
Evidence.
I stumble to the bathroom. Turn the shower on scalding hot.
While the water heats, I catch my reflection in the mirror.
Flushed. Hair a mess. Pupils blown wide.
I look like I've been thoroughly fucked.
Except I haven't been. I've just been lying in bed alone, getting myself off to memories of a man who gets turned on by torture.
After my shower, I find myself lingering in the apartment, wandering aimlessly from the bathroom to the kitchen and back again.
Usually, I can't wait to get the fuck out of here as soon as I'm dressed—I've developed this restless, caged feeling the moment I wake up. Like the walls are closing in.
I used to be afraid of the outside world. Used to love my solitary lifestyle, actually. The quiet. The isolation. The way I could disappear into my own head for days at a time without anyone noticing or caring.
I used to tell myself I enjoyed the loneliness—that it was a choice, not a circumstance.
Well, that's not really true, is it?
Maybe I didn't exactly enjoy being lonely, but I was comfortable in it. Familiar with it. It was like an old, worn-out sweater that didn't fit quite right but you kept wearing anyway because at least you knew what to expect.
And besides, I had my writing. My stories. My online community of faceless readers who didn't know my real name or see my real face.
That made it bearable.
More than bearable—it gave me purpose.
That all changed after I came home from the island.
Everything changed.
I couldn't stand to be alone anymore. Couldn't stand to be in that apartment with its four walls closing in and the silence pressing down like a physical weight. Couldn't write a single fucking word, no matter how many times I opened my laptop and stared at the blinking cursor.
The stories that used to flow out of me—dark, twisted, cathartic—they just... stopped.
So... the first thing I did was start looking for a new apartment.
I needed to get out of that studio. Needed walls that didn't hold memories of before—before the island, before him, before everything got so goddamn complicated.
I couldn't write there anymore. Couldn't breathe there.
Every corner reminded me of the person I used to be, the one who thought she had her life figured out even when it was falling apart.
The application process for rentals these days is insane.
Background checks, credit checks, employment verification, references.
I didn't qualify for anything—not with my credit score in the toilet and my employment history looking like a fucking patchwork quilt of part-time gigs and freelance work that barely covered rent.
But for this place—this beautiful, enormous third-floor loft with its exposed brick and twelve-foot ceilings and windows that let in actual goddamn sunlight—I offered to pay a year in advance.
Thirty thousand dollars.
Cash. Well, wire transfer. Same difference.
I didn't even blink when I made the offer.
The landlord didn't either. Just nodded like people threw that kind of money around every day and handed me the keys three days later.
Nine months ago, I'd never had thirty thousand dollars in my life. Hell, I doubt I even made that in a year with the pathetic employment history I had—cobbling together coffee shop shifts, and freelance copywriting gigs that paid pennies, and restaurant work that left me smelling like fryer grease.
Now, I literally have millions.
I don't know the exact number. I stopped trying to calculate it after the first few weeks.
Every month I get bank statements in my email. Each account has exactly two hundred fifty thousand dollars in it. No more, no less. The maximum the FDIC covers in case of bank failure.
I had to look that up. I didn't understand why he kept making new accounts instead of just dumping everything into one. Why the specific number. Why it mattered.
Finally ChatGPT explained it to me in tiny little baby words: federal insurance limits, asset protection, risk mitigation. The kind of financial planning that people with actual wealth do automatically, without even thinking about it.
I don't know how many accounts there are. A dozen, at least. Maybe more.
I don't even open those emails anymore.
I have enough money to really escape. To actually, genuinely disappear if I wanted to badly enough. The resources are there, sitting in those accounts I don't open anymore, waiting to be deployed.
I could hire someone to help me cover my tracks—a fixer, maybe, whatever those people are called.
Probably hire an entire security team if I needed to.
Find a hacker who specializes in making people vanish digitally.
Get myself somewhere safe, somewhere remote.
Purchase a whole new identity with papers good enough to pass scrutiny.
Figure out a way to systematically close all those accounts he set up, liquidate everything, and funnel it into new ones under a different name in a different country.
I've thought about it. Late at night when I can't sleep, when the walls of this beautiful apartment feel like a new prison, just prettier. I've mapped it out in my head, step by step, like plotting one of my stories.
The logistics of disappearing.
There are exactly two reasons I don't do this.
One. Deep down, in the part of me that's learned to think like him whether I wanted to or not, I don't think it would actually work.
Whatever money I have access to—these millions that still don't feel real, that I can't quite wrap my head around—he's got a billion times more than that.
Literally.
His resources outweigh mine so completely it's almost laughable to compare them. The power differential is staggering.
If he genuinely wants to find me, if I become a problem he needs to solve, he will find me. He'll deploy whatever tools, whatever people, whatever technology it takes.
And unlike me fumbling around trying to figure out how disappearing even works, he'd know exactly how to do it efficiently.