CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN #2
His hands grip my thighs firmly, thumbs sliding slowly along the tender skin inside, pushing them wider with unbearable patience—his patience. Every inch spreads because he wills it, because he wants to see me bare, exposed, and completely under his control.
“And now,” he whispers, breath hot just above the slick heat between my legs, “I will.”
My back arches before I even realize it. My fingers clench the sheets so hard they bite into my palms, the tension a dull ache beneath my skin.
But he doesn’t rush. Not him.
He kisses the inside of one thigh—slow, willful—then the other, as if savoring the power he holds over me. His stubble scratches softly against my skin, that roughness a sharp contrast to the heat of his mouth. I moan uncontrollably, my body betraying me in the way only his touch can.
“Say it,” he says, voice low, commanding, a growl that settles in my bones. “Say what you need.”
“You,” I gasp, breath trembling. “Please, sir, I need…to come, please.”
I don’t care how I sound—how desperate, how broken.
He exhales against me, a slow, deep sound that makes my body pulse with need.
“Good girl,” he growls, approval laced with hunger.
And then his mouth is on me.
No hesitation. No mercy.
His tongue moves with slow, precise mastery, tracing slick circles around my clit.
The soft cries slipping from my lips can’t be silenced as he sucks that swollen spot—gentle at first, then building with a fierce, insistent hunger.
His strong hands lock around my thighs, holding me spread open and vulnerable, while his tongue delves deeper, lapping up every drop of my arousal.
Every stroke is his command. Every flick is his control.
I can’t think. I can’t breathe.
When he slides two thick fingers inside me, deep and sure, I shatter.
My first orgasm crashes through me like a tidal wave—my body writhes beneath his touch, trembling uncontrollably as I sob his name. But he doesn’t stop.
Slowly, earnestly, he crawls up my body, not with the brutal force of a captor, but with the intimate claim of a man who knows me—who has once owned me and still wants every part of me.
He holds me in the storm, kisses me through every shudder and sigh, works me until I am raw, shaking, utterly and completely his.
Every whispered command, every calculated touch is a reminder.
I belong to him.
And I need it.
And suddenly I am no longer in this room. No longer on this bed wrapped in silk and shadow.
I am back in the dark. Five years ago. Pressed against a van, trembling and too young to understand what survival would eventually cost. And he—Montgomery—had kissed me just like this. Like I was something breakable he intended to protect. Like I still had pieces worth keeping whole.
But Montgomery is dead.
I felt it in my bones the day I stopped waiting for him. When I accepted that he wasn’t coming back. That no one was.
So why does this kiss taste like a memory?
Why does it feel like him?
My fingers twitch against the Warden’s chest, caught in the grip of something colder than fear and sharper than longing. A voice inside me whispers that this couldn’t be real. That trauma is stitching ghosts into the seams of my reality.
But I can’t stop the flood of sensation.
I can’t silence the ache that blooms in my chest when his hand cradles my jaw—not to control, but to hold.
And that is the most terrifying part.
Because the Warden doesn’t hold. He takes. He trains. He punishes.
What terrifies me most isn’t that he feels like a stranger…it is how much I want more.
How much my body leans in while my heart fractures backward—pulled into the memory of another kiss. Another man.
Montgomery.
Why him?
Why now?
Why, in the arms of the Warden, do I ache for the ghost of someone I’d buried long ago?
If the Warden knew where my thoughts have gone, he’d punish me.
He always does.
As if reading my mind, his voice slices through the silence like a scalpel.
“I hope that’s me you’re thinking about.”
I swallow hard, forcing the lie past my lips. “Always you, sir.”
The taste of it burns. Bitter. Wrong. It curls in my mouth like smoke.
He goes still.
And then the warmth of him vanishes.
I hear it before I see it—the quiet, metallic click of the mask locking back into place. That soft, unmistakable sound that signals the end of tenderness. The end of him.
“Sir?” I ask, my voice soft, tremulous—tinged with something dangerously close to a whine.
I hate myself for the sound.
I hate how it exposes me. How it needs him.
“You got the release you begged for,” he says, voice flat, stripped of the heat and hunger that had just devoured me. Cold. Formal. Like he’d put himself back behind glass.
A wall slams down between us as he takes my blindfold off.
“Now go to sleep.”
“Sleep?” I blink at him, still bare, still reeling from the shift. “Sir, I haven’t...I haven’t serviced you though.”
I regret the words the moment they leave my mouth—but they are honest. He never lets me finish without paying a price. And this feels like a trap. Like another kind of test.
His voice turns sharp. Unforgiving.
“Do as I say, Starling. Goodnight.”
He doesn’t wait for a reply. Doesn’t offer comfort. Just turns, his coat catching the air as he moves toward the door.
And I am left alone.
Flushed, spent and confused. My skin is still burning where he’d touched me. My heart is still beating to a rhythm he had set. And my thoughts?
My thoughts are a mess of want and memory. Of longing and loss.
Because this isn’t just the Warden anymore.
And I don’t know what he is turning me into.