CHAPTER TWELVE #3
Heat burst beneath my skin, a painful storm of humiliation and rage.
My mouth opened, but nothing emerged for a long, breathless second.
I could barely swallow. I could barely breathe.
Every polite instinct drilled into me by years of being the good, accommodating daughter was at war with the feral part of me that wanted to claw the smirk straight off his face.
“Put that down,” I said, my voice a shredded whisper, a gasp dragged from the rubble of my dignity.
He didn’t.
He didn’t even pretend to consider it.
Instead, he kept holding them, letting the moment stretch until it felt like he was peeling layers off me with his eyes alone. He let me stand there in my mortification, frozen in place while he held the most intimate piece of my life between his fingers.
Only after the silence burned through me did he lower his gaze again, then very deliberately fold the lace once. Neat. Intentional.
Then, with a lazy confidence that made my stomach drop, he slipped the panties into the front pocket of his jeans.
A theft.
A claim.
A message.
I felt the shock like a slap, breath punched from my lungs, the world tilting again. This wasn’t teasing. This wasn’t playful humiliation. This was a line crossed, then erased entirely. He had taken something private, something meant for no one, and pocketed it like a trophy.
Like a promise.
“There,” he said finally, rising with liquid ease, brushing non-existent dust from his palms as if he hadn’t just disassembled my sanity in a sunlit driveway. “Now I have a little something of yours… a reminder of everything we’ve shared so far. A souvenir.”
My heart hammered painfully against my ribs.
A souvenir.
He was smiling faintly, his expression relaxed, casual, almost charming to anyone who didn’t know him. To anyone watching, this could be mistaken for joking banter between step-siblings.
But I knew better.
The look in his eyes told me exactly what he meant:
I take what I want.
I take what is yours.
And for the next two weeks, you are entirely within my reach.
My breath returned in a jagged rush. My body moved before my mind caught up, dropping to my knees on the warm stone tiles, hands shaking as I began shoving stray pieces of my life back into the gaping carcass of my suitcase.
Silk, cotton, lace, even a lone sock. I stuffed them in blindly, instinctually, as if gathering pieces of myself that had burst out on impact.
My fingers fumbled, clumsy with adrenaline. Every movement was frantic, graceless. I hated that he saw it.
Riley sank down beside me again with a slow, predatory ease, as though he had all the time in the world.
His movements contrasted mine in a way designed to humiliate: unhurried, precise, almost elegant.
His long fingers brushed mine again and again, each accidental touch somehow intentional, each one sparking fresh humiliation under my skin.
The air smelled like hibiscus and motor oil and my own humiliation burning through me.
“Careful, princess,” he murmured, his voice a lazy ribbon of heat sliding along my spine. He leaned just close enough that his breath grazed my cheek. “Don’t rush it. You don’t want to rip something else.”
I froze for half a second, then shoved a folded sundress into the mangled suitcase with enough force to strain the stitching again. My jaw tightened until it ached. I wanted to spit venom. I wanted to snarl. But my throat was tight, raw, a battlefield swallowing its own screams.
I dragged the zipper across the seam, forcing it shut. It groaned in protest, the metal teeth straining, snagging, fighting me. When it finally sealed, the bag felt volatile, a ticking bomb barely holding its shape.
Just like me.
Riley rose first, his shadow falling over me. Then his hand closed around the handle of my suitcase. A simple gesture. A small thing. But this time, I didn’t fight him.
I hated myself for the stillness that followed.
For the surrender built not from softness but from exhaustion.
He had won this round, decisively, with surgical precision and a smile.
He loaded the bags into the trunk as if nothing destructive or intimate had just occurred. Then he opened the back door of the sleek sedan, his head tilted slightly, his expression unreadable but dripping with authority.
“After you.”
I stepped inside, the blast of cool air from the vents hitting my overheated skin like a slap.
The interior was spacious, upholstered in soft black leather, but the moment I sat down, the illusion of space evaporated.
Riley slid in right after me, settling so close our shoulders nearly brushed.
His presence filled the car like a rising tide, swallowing oxygen, swallowing logic.
The driver closed his door. The world outside dimmed. A soft click of the privacy glass rising.
And then we were moving.
The resort’s manicured gardens fell away behind us, the palm trees and bright flowers blurring into streaks of color. A place of safety and witnesses shrinking in the rearview mirror.
A place where someone might have helped me if I screamed.
The farther we drove, the more the truth clawed up through the panic.
I was alone with him.
Not just for the drive.
Not just for the flight.
Two weeks.
Two weeks in a house he commanded.
Two weeks without my mother.
Two weeks where the only boundaries between us would be the ones strong enough for me to hold.
I pressed my forehead lightly against the cool window and watched the ocean slip out of sight, replaced by highway and volcanic cliffs. Every mile put more distance between me and safety. Between me and anyone who knew how to read the tremor in my voice.
Riley didn’t speak at first. He didn’t need to. His silence was a presence. A pressure. A hand at the base of my throat guiding me gently toward the truth I refused to admit.
He had a piece of me in his pocket. A souvenir. A claim.
And I knew, deep in the cold, shaking center of my chest, that the flight ahead of us was not travel.
It was a battlefield.
A confined one.
A flying cage.
Thirty thousand feet where no one could intervene, no one could overhear, no one could save me from what he intended to do with the power he now held.
He shifted slightly beside me, the leather creaking.
In the reflection of the window, I saw his smile.
Slow.
Satisfied.
An omen of the two weeks ahead.