Chapter Fifty-Six
Rheda
I drink until the edges blur.
The first glass is for my hands because they won’t stop shaking. The second is for Peter. For Harris. For tomorrow sitting in the middle of my chest like a countdown I can’t shut off. By the fourth, I stop pretending any of it is about calm.
I know exactly what I’m doing.
I am making it easier to slip away for him one last time.
The thought should disgust me more than it does.
I pour again. The burn slides down my throat, sharp and punishing, and I welcome it because at least it is honest. At least it hurts where I expect it to.
My body loosens in uneven places. I sit on the edge of the bed, the bottle hanging loose in my hand. My knees are apart, spine bent forward. It is not graceful. It is not controlled. It is the posture of someone waiting.
I need him.
My eyes fall half-closed.
The room finally gives him back to me.
“You made yourself easier tonight.” His dark voice ripples around the room.
Heat climbs my throat so fast it feels like being slapped.
“No,” the lie barely survives the room.
The mattress dips hard beneath his weight as he leans over me, one arm braced beside my head, the other dragging slowly across my waist like he already owns the space there. The movement is smooth enough to feel predatory, all controlled strength and quiet intention.
My breath catches.
God. Up close, he’s unbearable.
I catalogue small things, sharp things about his beauty, forcing them into my memory like I can trap this moment forever.
His dark brows cut low over his eyes that look black in this light, nose that has the faintest crookedness to it, like it was broken years ago and healed badly.
The angle of his jaw is rough with the beginning of stubble, dark enough to catch silver where the moonlight touches it.
He looks like violence taught itself how to be beautiful.
And tomorrow, he’ll be dead.
“I don’t want them to kill you.” It comes out too fast, too raw, stripped clean of pride.
I try to swallow the lump in my throat down.
My bottom lip wobbles. “You shouldn’t die because you fought to live.”
He still doesn’t speak.
My hands move before I decide. One against his wrist, the other against his thigh, like touching him might help me survive saying it.
“I need you,” I whisper.
“I need you because when you leave, everything gets louder.” My voice shakes. “Because I can’t think when you’re gone. Because I keep trying to hate you and I can’t. Because I should be terrified of you and instead—”
I stop. My chest seizes.
His thumb brushes once over my mouth. “And instead?”
I close my eyes. “Instead, I want more.”
The silence after it is unbearable. When I open my eyes again, there is something in his expression that makes my stomach drop. Satisfaction, like he has been waiting for me to ruin myself properly.
He pulls back. I slide from the bed to the floor. I need to be closer to him, because some broken part of me thinks lowering myself might make this feel less like falling. My knees hit the carpet.
“Why can’t I get you out of my head?” I whisper.
My hands grip his legs just to have something to hold. He touches my hair once, almost gentle, and that nearly destroys me more than cruelty would have.
“You stopped resisting me a long time ago,” he murmurs, eyes flicking to my lips before returning to my eyes.
The words hit somewhere so deep it feels like injury.
He leans down, close enough that his mouth brushes my temple.
His fingers find the back of my neck and close there, warm and firm, his thumb brushing once over the sensitive skin just below my ear.
The touch is almost sweet, slow enough to make my body betray me.
His fingers move lower, stroking the line of my throat, tracing the pulse beating there like he put it there himself.
“I haven’t told you the whole truth, Doctor.” He murmurs.
My heart slams against my ribcage. “I’ve seen this reaction before.”
“What?”
His eyes search mine. “You think this started in the interrogation room?”
Blood drains from my face. “What do you mean?”
“Your mind always makes this difficult.”
His hand slides higher again, into my hair this time, fingers threading through it with a patience that feels intimate enough to be dangerous. For one humiliating second, I lean into it. My eyes half-close. I let myself have the lie of gentleness.
Then his fist closes. Hard. The sharp snap of my hairband breaking cracks through the room.
I gasp.
My hair falls loose around my shoulders as he drags my head back just enough to force my face upward, the sting immediate, my scalp burning where he holds me.
“There,” he says softly, like he’s fixing something. “That’s better.”
My breath comes thinner now. His other hand moves, calm and unhurried, to the button of his trousers, and something cold drops through me when I realise what he’s doing. His grip in my hair tightens.
“Look at you,” he murmurs. “You kneel so easily for someone you call a monster.”
The sound of his trousers hitting the floor cuts through the room like something final. He steps out of them without hurry.
My eyes betray me first, dragging downward before I can stop them, catching on the hard shape of him, the heavy outline pressing against dark fabric.
My mouth waters.
He watches every betrayal.
He frees himself slowly, and the sight of him knocks something loose inside me. Thick. Heavy. Arrogant in the way it stands there, like it already knows exactly what it does to me.
I flinch but I can’t move far because his hand in my hair holds me fixed.
“Don’t hide now,” he says softly. “You know what to do.”
I can’t breathe around the shame of it. His thumb strokes once against my scalp, almost soothing.
“You spend all day pretending you’re still in control, Doctor,” he murmurs, looking down at me like he’s examining damage he caused himself.
My fingers curl uselessly against his thigh.
His mouth shifts, not quite a smile. “And then you end up here. Again.”
My lips part on instinct. I make a small sound, something trapped and useless. My hands fly to him, fingers digging in, not to push him away, not really. Just to hold on.
He forces himself inside of my lips. There’s no patience.
In one hard motion, he thrusts past my tongue and slams the back of my throat.
I choke immediately. Gargled noises escape me, pitched and desperate.
I stare up at him, tears burning viciously.
One slips down my face, and he tracks it all the way down.
“You want to know why this fantasy works on you?” His voice roughens low in his throat.
My body betrays me, hips shifting instinctively against the floor before shame burns through me hard enough to hurt. His mouth drags close to my ear. “Your mind likes cages.”
“Touch yourself.” He growls.
I move before I can think about it, too fast, too desperate to pretend there was ever a choice.
My hand slips between my thighs and finds the wet heat waiting there immediately, proof of my own betrayal.
The shame of it barely has time to land before pleasure crashes through me, sharp enough to make my whole body jolt.
I press harder, helpless against the ache that has been building for too long. Everything turns hot and tight and unbearable, pleasure and humiliation twisted together so completely I can’t separate one from the other anymore.
His stare is unrelenting, stripped of anything soft. He watches me like he’s witnessing something ugly.
My hand trembles between my thighs, the pressure turning unbearable, every touch sending something sharp and electric through me until I can’t stay still. I writhe under it.
It’s too much.
Too hot.
Too exposing.
“Good,” he murmurs, and the praise feels like degradation. “Now you look honest.”
A broken sound leaves me. I hate how much that does to me.
“Deogal—” I try to say his name, but it falls apart halfway, weak and wrecked.
Something in his expression shifts at that.
And then, suddenly, he pulls away. The absence hits like injury.
My whole body reacts before pride can stop it, a desperate movement forward.
I lurch toward him like something starving.
The second I realise what I’ve done, humiliation crashes over me so hard it almost makes me dizzy.
His touch isn’t gentle.
One second I’m on my knees, still trying to breathe through the humiliation of it, and the next his hands are on me—firm, impatient. He shoves me forward onto the bed hard enough to steal the air from my lungs.
I catch myself badly, palms sliding against the sheets, my body folding where he puts it.
Bent over.
Open.
Exposed in the ugliest way.
The position hits me like a blow. A violent flash of recognition tears through me so fast it makes my vision blur. My stomach drops. My skin goes cold.
My body reacts like it knows this. The panic arrives rehearsed.
This.
The helplessness of it. The familiarity.
“Your mind keeps making you violent toward me.” He pauses, a deep chuckle falling. Something flashes across my mind.
My arm striking. The dull ache of muscles tensing, and a wet noise when something tears through flesh.
His face burns across my vision suddenly, eyes curled into anguish, lips parting with a gasp.
For one sharp second, panic takes over. I jerk forward, twisting, trying to get away on pure animal instinct, just a sudden desperate need to run.
His hand slams against my lower back and he holds me there.
Something sharp tears out of me—a broken, strangled sound I barely recognise as mine.
My whole body locks under him. Breathing too fast. Heart beating so hard it hurts.
And above me, around me, everywhere—him.
The weight of him. The heat of him. The awful calm in the way he handles me, like none of this surprises him, like my panic is expected, accounted for, already owned.
My fingers fist the sheets.
“Please—” I don’t even know what I’m asking for.
Mercy.
Slower.
More.
Anything.
His hand moves once, slow along my spine. “Soon, Little Red.”
The nickname burns like something branded into my skull, but I can’t place it’s origin. Tears sting my eyes from pure frustration, from shame, from the unbearable feeling that my mind is remembering something my body refuses to.
He drags himself between my folds once, slow enough to make my whole body shake, the head catching on every slick, sensitive place. It’s cruel. Deliberate. My hips grind back against him.
A dark sound leaves him.
“So good,” he murmurs, one hand spreading hard over my lower back, holding me down like I’m something being prepared. “Crying and still trying to take more.”
“Deogal—”
His grip tightens.
Humiliation burns so hot it makes me dizzy. My body throbs between my legs, wet and aching and traitorous.
He presses forward just enough to threaten it.
“Tell me what you are.”
The word comes out broken. “Yours.”
The silence after is worse than shouting. He exhales against the back of my neck, slow and satisfied, like he’s been waiting for that longer than I understand.
He pushes in. There’s no warning, no gentleness. One brutal, sharp thrust and he forces himself inside me all at once.
The scream tears out of me before I can stop it. It hurts—blinding, splitting, too much pressure, too much stretch, my body trying to decide whether to fight or melt around him. My fingers claw uselessly at the sheets.
“Oh God—”
He doesn’t stop. He gives me no time to adjust, no pause to breathe through it. He drives deeper, harder, like he’s punishing me for making him wait, and every movement punches the air from my lungs.
Pain sparks white-hot through me, but underneath it—worse—pleasure rises with it. Sharp. Electric. Filthy.
I hate it.
I hate the sound I make when my body starts wanting it.
He pounds into me again and again, each thrust dragging something ruined out of me, until I can’t separate pain from pleasure, fear from need. My whole body is trembling beneath him.
Then his hand snakes around. His fingers find my clit. I know immediately I’m finished.
“No—” I gasp, because it’s too much, because I’m already there, because I know I have no choice.
“Yes.” He rubs once.
I break.
Pleasure detonates through me so violently I can’t even understand it at first. My back arches, a cry ripping from my throat, my whole body clenching helplessly around him as the orgasm tears through me, hard and humiliating and completely out of my control.
He holds me through it, forces me to feel every second, every shaking aftershock.
And the worst part, the truly unforgivable part, is that somewhere inside it, I swear I feel him smile.
His hand tightens around my hip hard enough to bruise, fingers biting into skin, and every movement after that loses whatever control he’d been pretending to have. It turns sharp, punishing. Each thrust feels like accusation, like he’s trying to force something out of me I haven’t said yet.
I’m shaking beneath him, clutching uselessly at the sheets, my body no longer mine.
He finishes like violence. His whole body locks, a rough sound torn from him, and he holds me there through it.
For a few seconds, neither of us moves.
My breathing is wrecked. My skin feels too tight. My thoughts are somewhere far away, useless and flickering.
Then he pulls away. There’s no warning, just absence.
The loss of him is so immediate it feels like being dropped. Cold air rushes over overheated skin. I barely have time to breathe before his hand is on me again, turning me over onto my back like I’m something to be inspected.
I flinch.
He stands there for a moment, looking down at me. Really looking. Hair ruined. Mouth swollen. Skin marked. Every humiliating trace of what he’s done laid open under the low light of the room.
His gaze drags slowly over me, clinical and cruel, like he’s admiring damage. Something shifts behind his eyes after a second, something colder, and he finally looks away.
“Tomorrow, when they inject me with poison,” he murmurs. “Remember what I did to you tonight.”
I choke.
It’s a violent reminder of what’s happening.
What I can’t stop.
My throat tightens. He steps back, collecting himself with the same cold ease that makes me hate him most, like he hasn’t just pulled me apart with his bare hands.
I stay exactly where I am. Barely breathing, unable to move.
At the door, he pauses. I don’t ask him to stay. I think that might be worse.
“Don’t cry for me, Doctor.” He murmurs. “I’m a monster. I killed them brutally.”
His mouth tilts, barely a smile. “And you only found three of them.”
He leaves me alone, aching and used. My bottle tipped sideways on the sheets. Breathing like I’ve survived something and lost something at the same time. I stay here far too long, staring at nothing, feeling the ghost of his hand still on my body.
I should have been afraid of him.
Instead, I am terrified he’ll never come back.