Chapter 13 #2
“No. You’re the man who took me. Who built a fucking house like he’s been looking through a one-way window in my goddamn head.
Who won’t show me his face and won’t tell me why I’m here and keeps leaving me pink lollipops like a trail of breadcrumbs I’m not supposed to follow.
” I take a breath. “So forgive me if I can’t just leave it alone. ”
The silence between us is the kind that has mass. The kind that takes up space. Then he laughs, a bitter sound that crawls down my spine.
“You’re so sure of your ability to read people. Their feelings.” He inches closer, too close, eyes flashing. “But you can’t read someone who doesn’t have any.”
“Yet you have me locked up in this house, protecting me from something.” I study his eyes, his features. “Not something someone will do if they don’t feel.”
I can see his jaw clench beneath the buff, the tension in the room a living, palpable thing.
But I don’t care. Maybe I’m all survived out.
Maybe I’m tired of treading lightly, giving way to fear and uncertainty.
Maybe I’m just ready for all of this to end, ready to piece it together so we can move on…
even if it means he leaves me in this house to die.
Or kills me himself.
“That’s what you said, isn’t it? You’re protecting me?”
“Fuck this shit.” He brushes past me, anger rolling off him in waves that take my breath. But I won’t let him go. I won’t settle for half-assed answers and loaded silences. Not today.
“It’s linked, isn’t it?”
He stops. Doesn’t turn.
“Whatever it is—whoever it is you’re protecting me from and those lines on your arm?”
“Stop, Sophia.”
“Why. Because I’m getting close?”
He pivots sharply. “Because you don’t know what the fuck you’re walking toward.”
“Then turn the light on. Let me see.”
His hand finds my shoulder, and the world compresses to a single point.
I’m moving before I register it, pushed back by his grip—not violent but absolute, the kind of certainty that doesn’t need force because it’s already decided.
My spine hits the wall, and the air leaves my lungs in one sharp exhale.
His forearm crashes against the wall beside my head.
The vibration ripples through plaster, through bone, until my teeth hum with the aftershock.
“I should lock you in that goddamn room again,” he threatens.
“And I should let you cut your other hand.”
The buff stretches over his jaw, hiding a smirk underneath. “You’re good at analyzing people, yet you can’t tell that pain is never a threat to me.”
“And you are no longer a threat to me.”
He leans closer, eyes searching mine. “I’ve never been a threat to you.”
Like a switch, the air changes. Reth fills every inch of the space in front of me. He doesn’t just stand close—he occupies. His chest a wall, his forearm a cage, his body blocking out the light from the window so all I can see is him. All I can breathe is him.
My heart slams as his gaze drops to my mouth. His thumb finds my bottom lip, gently tracing the curve, and I whimper at the contact, at the tenderness of it.
“Cherry-red,” he murmurs.
My breath stutters. That’s my color. My exact signature shade, one I’m not wearing now, yet he knows it by heart.
The realization slams into me with brutal intimacy. My pulse spikes, and a dark, traitorous heat blooms low in my belly. This tiny detail should cut like a violation; instead, it has me tilting my head to capture more of his touch.
I should be afraid…but I’m not.
“Show me your face.”
He shakes his head once. A denial with the weight of stone.
“Why won’t you show me your face?”
His finger rises between us. Presses to his own lips. Shh.
The gesture is so quiet. So absolute. And somehow incredibly intimate. My chest rises and falls, my breathing becoming labored because he’s taking up all the air without even trying to.
His gaze drops, his fingers finding the neckline of my shirt at the same moment—so light I feel it like a live wire, not a touch. Fingertips at the edge of fabric and skin, tracing the collar with the patience of a man who has decided he’s allowed and is taking his time about it.
He stops, and his eyes find mine, asking something that has no words.
I don’t move. I don’t speak. And I don’t stop him as he slides a hand beneath the fabric.
Knuckles graze my breast as he eases the shirt down so unbearably slowly until the fabric drops beneath and my breast meets the cool air of the room as his eyes drink in the sight, their heat a tangible thing against my skin. The sound I make is barely anything. Just air leaving my body.
He goes completely still, his gaze tracking over me with a thoroughness that feels nothing like reverence and everything like hunger—the curve of my breast, my nipple already stiff and aching, the shirt bunched beneath like I was made to be unwrapped exactly like this.
I can see what it’s doing to him. Can see him fighting it. Can see him losing.
I’m not breathing.
Neither is he.
Then his hand moves, takes the full weight of my breast in his palm, and my knees nearly give out.
My pussy pulses so hard it borders on pain. A deep, greedy throb of desire that punches straight up through my stomach and into my chest, and I press my thighs together because I need friction, pressure, something, anything to hold against the ache.
It doesn’t help.
Nothing helps.
His grip tightens. Slow. Testing the give of me. And I feel it everywhere, in my thighs, in the slick heat flooding between them, in the way my nipple hardens against his palm like my body is trying to communicate something my mouth won’t say.
“You have no idea,” he starts, voice stripped down to almost nothing.
“Of what?”
“What you’ve cost me.” His thumb drags across my nipple. Once. Deliberate.
My head hits the wall behind me.
“Every day. Just existing. Just being you.”
The words go through me like something breaking. “You’ve been watching me.”
“I’ve been breathing you, Sophia Sinclair.”
He pushes his hips forward, letting the full length of his cock press between my legs, and every coherent thought I have dissolves on contact.
He’s thick—impossibly, devastatingly thick—the rigid heat of him flush against my core with nothing between us but thin cotton and rough denim and the last shredded remnants of my self-control.
I feel him throb against me, a promise of pleasure my body craves.
My pussy floods. Slick and immediate and completely beyond managing, the ache between my thighs sharpening into something that wants and doesn’t care about context or consequence or what kind of woman this makes me.
I ask, “What’s your name?” Breathless. Barely words.
“I told you.”
“Not just what’s left of it.”
The fabric of his mask shifts. I watch his jaw move underneath it, and my thighs clench in response because even that, even just the suggestion of his mouth, does something criminal to me.
He thrusts forward. Harder this time. The friction hits me like a fist, a raw, electric drag of his cock against my slit through the fabric, and my mouth falls open on a sound I don’t recognize as mine.
My fingers find the front of his shirt and grip, white-knuckled, holding on because my legs have made their position extremely clear and their position is done.
I grind against him. No shame. No hesitation. Just my hips rolling forward, chasing his cock through the fabric with a desperation I stopped pretending about approximately thirty seconds ago.
His exhale hits my hair. Ragged. Wrecked. The sound of a man whose control just took a hit it wasn’t built to survive.
“Sophia…”
My name in his mouth like that. Like a warning. Like a prayer. Like he’s already lost and hasn’t finished pretending he hasn’t.
“Reth,” I breathe out his name like it’s fucking sacred, and his hand tightens on my breast, squeezing, and the sensation arrows straight down to where I’m grinding against him. I whimper, the sound escaping before I can catch it.
I rock my hips again, harder, rolling into him.
“Don’t.” His voice is wrecked. Barely a word. And I’m nothing but labored breaths and arousal, a physical response to him that I shouldn’t have.
My arms snake around his shoulders, fingers reaching for his neck, nails wanting to dig into—
“Stop!”
His fist hits the wall, the sound of it cracking through the seasons, and I flinch—my whole body jerking sideways—but I don’t pull away. I don’t move from this wall, but I’m barely able to keep myself upright.
The silence after the impact is enormous, and his forehead drops forward, almost to my shoulder, not touching, his fist still against the wall. I can barely breathe, barely feel the oxygen reach my lungs.
“Reth…”
He’s shaking.
“Reth,” I whisper, almost inaudibly. “What happened to you?”
He takes a step back…then another. When he finally speaks, his voice is the quietest I’ve ever heard it, ground down to almost nothing.
“You can’t fix me.” A pause that has the weight of something he’s been carrying for a very long time. “That’s all you need to know.”