Chapter 11
ELEVEN
Tessa
I waited until I heard the heavy thud of Daniel sitting down against the other side of the door.
He was guarding it. Not to keep me in, but to keep the others, and maybe even himself, out.
Unless you beg.
The words echoed in the empty room, bouncing off the glass walls, mocking me. The audacity of it. The sheer, arrogant Alpha presumption.
I paced the length of the rug, my bare feet sinking into the wool. My skin felt too tight. The aftershocks of the heat, chemically induced and brutally interrupted, were still fizzing in my blood like cheap champagne. My hands were shaking, but not from fear anymore.
It was rage, and beneath the rage, something hotter. Something darker.
I looked at the mess of the room. The shattered water carafe. The tangled sheets. The impression of three bodies on my rug and chair.
They had invaded everything. They had seen everything. Seen me.
I kicked at the pile of debris near the window where Simon had been sleeping. My toe hit something solid. A leather strap caught on my foot and I looked down.
It was his bag. The battered leather messenger bag he had been clutching like a shield. He must have left it behind in his scramble to escape my lamp-swinging wrath.
I knew I shouldn't touch it. I knew it was an invasion of privacy, a petty retaliation, but I found myself kneeling down next to it anyway.
The leather smelled like him, burnt sugar, graphite, and stale coffee. It was a scent that made my stomach clench with a phantom memory of long, calloused fingers.
I flipped the flap open.
Inside, nestled between loose pencils and erasers, was a heavy, black, hardbound sketchbook. The spine was cracked and worn, clearly well-loved.
I pulled it out. It fell open naturally to the middle; the binding giving way to the page he had spent the most time on.
I stopped breathing.
It was a drawing. Charcoal and ink.
It was me.
But it wasn't the "Graduation Girl." It wasn't the meme of the girl in the wet dress crying on stage.
It was a woman on her knees, head thrown back in ecstasy, her hair a wild halo around her face. Her hands were gripping the arms of a chair, her back arched in a perfect curve of surrender. The shading was exquisite, loving, worshipping the lines of her throat, the curve of her hip.
She looked powerful. She looked consumed. She looked beautiful.
I turned the page.
Another one. Me, sitting in a window seat, looking out at a storm, a pen in my mouth.
Another. Me, sleeping, wrapped in blankets that looked soft enough to touch.
And then, the last few pages. Sketches that were clearly from last night. Frantic, jagged lines capturing the chaos of the kitchen floor. But even there, in the depictions of my breakdown, the perspective wasn't mocking.
He hadn't drawn a victim. He had drawn a storm.
I traced the line of my own face on the paper; the charcoal smudging slightly under my fingertip.
"He saw me, really saw me," I whispered to the empty room.
And for the first time in ten years, the idea of being watched didn't make me want to hide. It made the heat in my belly flair, hot and sharp and demanding.
I looked at the locked door. I could hear Daniel’s slow, deep breathing on the other side.
Unless you beg.
I gripped the sketchbook tight, my nails digging into the leather cover.
"I won't beg," I hissed.
But as I looked at the drawing of myself unraveling in ecstasy, I knew it was a lie.
The deadbolt felt cold under my palm, a solid, unyielding knot of brass that separated me from the rest of the house. From them.
I pressed my forehead against the painted wood of the door, listening.
On the other side, the silence was heavy, vibrating with the presence of three large men.
I could hear the faint, rough scrape of fabric against the wall; Daniel was shifting his weight where he sat guarding the hallway.
He wasn't leaving. He had promised to stay on the other side of the threshold, but his presence leaked through the cracks like smoke.
Unless you beg.
The words were a rusted hook in my chest, pulling at something deep and wet and terrified.
I pushed away from the door, my legs trembling.
The adrenaline that had fueled my brass-lamp stand-off was evaporating, leaving behind a jagged, hollowed-out exhaustion.
My body felt like a house that had survived a hurricane, structurally compromised, stripped of its siding, creating a draft where there shouldn't be one.
My hands were shaking as I clutched the heavy black sketchbook to my chest. Simon’s bag lay abandoned on the floor, spilled open like a gut wound, but this… this was the heart.
I walked to the bed. The sheets were still tangled, smelling of sweat, stale fever, and the faint, lingering spice of Daniel’s skin. I ignored the impulse to strip the bedding, to scrub the scent of them out of my fortress. I didn't have the strength.
I sat down on the edge of the mattress; the springs groaning softly. Outside, the storm had reduced to a sulky, grey drizzle, casting the room in a flat, clinical light.
I opened the book again.
I needed to see it. I needed to know the extent of the violation.
The first drawing I had glimpsed earlier was still there, the woman on her knees, head thrown back in ecstasy. It was confusing, disorienting. But as I turned the pages back toward the beginning, toward the older, yellowing paper, the narrative shifted from confusion to something sharper.
Here was the gymnasium.
I traced the date scribbled in the corner in a hasty, jagged pencil. June 14th.
I remembered that day in high-definition horror, the way my cheap polyester gown scratched my neck.
I remembered the smell of floor wax and the crushing weight of thousands of pairs of eyes.
In my nightmares, I was a monster. A snot-nosed, sobbing, leaking mess, dragged off stage like a bag of wet laundry.
But that wasn't what Simon had drawn.
The charcoal sketch was dark, heavy with shadows, but the figure at the podium wasn't pathetic. She was terrified, yes, he had captured the white-knuckle grip of my hands on the microphone stand with devastating accuracy, but he hadn't drawn a victim.
He had drawn a singularity.
The composition centered entirely on me.
The crowd in the background was just a wash of grey noise, faceless and insignificant.
The focus was the girl. He had exaggerated the arch of my spine as the heat hit, turning the convulsion into a line of tragic, balletic beauty.
My hair, escaping its pins, wasn't messy; it was wild, windswept by an invisible storm.
He made the moment of my destruction look like the moment of my apotheosis.
Meaningless. It was just art. Just a filter he put over the ugliness to make it palatable.
I turned the page, my fingers leaving faint sweat marks on the borders.
Another sketch from that day. This one was from the side. I was on the floor of the stage, half-obscured by the podium.
In reality, this was when I had started to dry-heave.
In the drawing, I was curled in on myself, protective and sharp. But it was the way he drew the gaze that stopped me. In the foreground, he had sketched the back of a boy’s head. Neat, golden hair. Broad shoulders in a suit jacket.
Anders.
Simon had drawn Anders watching me. And he had drawn himself watching Anders watching me. There was a tension in the lines of Anders’ shoulders that I had never noticed, a rigidity that wasn't just indifference. It looked like restraint. Like he was vibrating apart.
"You saw," I whispered to the paper. "You saw everything, realized what was happening, and you just… kept drawing."
I should be furious. I was furious. It was voyeurism of the highest order. He had stolen my trauma and turned it into portfolio content.
But I couldn't stop looking.
I flipped forward, skipping years of blank pages or random architectural studies, until the paper turned white and crisp again.
Yesterday.
My breath hitched.
The sketches became frantic. The lines were darker, pressed harder into the paper, as if the artist was trying to carve the image rather than draw it.
First, the doorway of this house. The storm raging outside.
Then, the kitchen.
My stomach rolled over. There was a nest of shredded paper. And there, huddled in the center, was a creature of pure lines and shadows.
Me.
But again, not pathetic. He had drawn the curve of my bare leg emerging from the paper with a loving, obsessive detail. He had shaded the hollow of my throat where my pulse must have been hammering.
And then, the images from last night.
The heat flared in my belly, sudden and violent, a physical echo of the charcoal lines.
He had drawn me on the floor. He had drawn the moment they pinned me.
In my memory, it was a medical assault. Cold pads. Rough hands. Screaming.
In the book, it was… worship.
There was a sketch of Daniel straddling my legs.
He looked like a titan, a mountain of protective mass.
And me, my head thrown back, mouth open in a silent scream, my hands clawing at his forearms. It looked like a Renaissance painting of a martyrdom or a ravishment. It was explicitly, undeniably erotic.
But it was the next page that broke me.
It was a close-up. Just my hips. And a hand.
Simon’s hand.
I somehow recognized the long, slender fingers, the square nails, the stains on the skin. He had drawn his own hand disappearing inside me.
The detail was obscene. He had captured the wetness, the slick sheen of my fluids coating his wrist. He had drawn the way my thighs clenched around his forearm.
But he hadn't drawn it like a medical procedure. He hadn't drawn it like triage.
He had drawn it like a prayer.
There were notes scribbled in the margin, frantic and barely legible.
Texture: Velvet/Fire.
Response: Immediate. Desperate.
She tastes like salt.
I dropped the book on the duvet as if it had bitten me.
"Oh god."