Chapter 5 #3
"I hate you." The words come out on a sob, because it's true—I hate him with every fiber of my being—but I also need him with a desperation that terrifies me.
"I know, baby." He bites my shoulder, sucks hard enough to mark me for days. "I know you do. Come anyway."
His fingers press harder against my clit. His cock hits something deep inside me that makes my whole body seize.
"Say it first." His voice is wrecked. Barely human. "Say you're mine. Say it, and I'll make you come so hard you forget your own name."
I'm so close. Teetering on the edge of release. My body trembles, clenches, screams for relief.
"No."
He stops.
His hips go still. His fingers freeze. He's buried to the hilt inside me, and he just... stops.
"Say it, Liberty." He sounds as destroyed as I feel. "Say you're mine."
"Please—" I try to push back against him, desperate for friction, but his hand on my hip pins me in place.
"Say. It."
I'm shaking. Falling apart at the seams. My pride screams at me to hold out, but my body is screaming louder.
"I'm yours." The words tear out of me like a confession. Like a death. Like the last piece of myself I had left. "I'm yours, Elias. Please. I'm yours."
He slams into me so hard the desk scrapes across the floor.
"Again."
"I'm yours." I'm sobbing now, tears streaming down my face, pleasure and shame and need all twisted together until I can't tell where one ends and another begins. "I'm yours, I'm yours, I'm—"
His fingers press down on my clit. His cock drives deep. And I shatter.
The orgasm tears through me like a bomb detonating at the base of my spine.
My vision whites out.
My body convulses around him, milking him, and I hear him groaning my name against my shoulder like it's a prayer—the only prayer he's ever meant.
His hips stutter. He buries himself to the hilt and comes with a sound that's almost a snarl.
For a long moment, neither of us moves.
His weight pins me to the desk. His breath heaves against my back. I can feel him softening inside me, feel the wetness between my thighs, feel the tears still tracking down my cheeks.
I said it.
I told him I was his.
And the worst part—the part that makes me want to carve my own heart out of my chest—is that I meant every word.
Reality crashes back in like ice water.
I shove against the desk, and he pulls out of me, steps back.
I hear him dealing with the condom as I grab my clothes, yanking them on with desperate, jerky movements.
My hands won't stop shaking.
"Liberty—"
"Don't." I can't look at him.
Can't look at the desk where I spread my legs for him.
Where I begged for him. Where I told him I belonged to him while he fucked me like I was made for exactly that purpose.
"This changes things."
"This changes nothing." I button my jeans, grab my shirt, focus on the mechanical motions because if I let myself think—if I let myself feel—I'll shatter into pieces too small to ever put back together.
"You said you were mine."
"I lied."
His laugh is soft. Dark. Knowing. "No, sweetheart. You didn't."
I force myself to meet his eyes.
He's still half-dressed, shirt torn, belt undone, looking at me like I'm something precious he's finally caught. Something he's never going to let go.
I shove steel into my spine. Into my voice. Into every part of me that wants to crumble at his feet and beg him to do it again. "This was a mistake. It won't happen again."
"Yes." He tucks himself back in, buckles his belt, his eyes never leaving mine. "It will."
I don't argue. Can't argue.
Because some part of me—the treacherous, broken, wanting part I hate most—knows he's right.
I unlock the door and walk out without looking back.
The guest house is exactly where I left it. Same pretty curtains. Same soft bed. Same gilded cage dressed up as paradise.
I lock the door behind me.
Strip off clothes that smell like him, like sex, like the worst mistake of my life.
I turn the shower to scalding and stand under the spray, scrubbing at my skin until it's raw, trying to wash away what happened.
I can't.
I can still feel him inside me.
The stretch. The fullness. The devastating pressure of his cock hitting places no one has ever reached.
I can still hear my own voice—broken, desperate, his—begging him to make me come.
I can still feel the way my whole body lit up when he said my name.
The first sob catches me by surprise.
The second doesn't.
By the third, I'm sliding down the shower wall, curling into myself, water beating down on me like punishment.
I cry until I can't breathe. Until my ribs ache. Until there's nothing left inside me but hollow, echoing shame.
I told him I was his.
I meant it.
What the fuck is wrong with me?
I stay on the shower floor until the water runs cold, until I'm shivering so hard my teeth chatter.
Then I force myself up. Turn off the water. Wrap myself in a towel. I don't look in the mirror. I can't.
I sit on the edge of the bed and breathe.
In. Out. In. Out.
Until the shaking stops.
Until I can force the broken pieces of myself into something that resembles human.
He thinks he's won.
He thinks that because I let him inside my body—because I came on his tongue and his cock and his whispered commands—I've surrendered.
He's wrong.
This isn't surrender. This is reconnaissance. This is learning the enemy, finding his weaknesses, finding every crack in his armor.
He showed me something tonight. He showed me how much he wants me. How it makes him shake. How it makes him lose control.
That's information.
That's leverage.
That's a weapon.
I lie back on the bed and stare at the ceiling.
Between my thighs, I still ache with the memory of him.
In my chest, something has cracked wide open that I don't know how to close.
I ignore it.
I have to.
Because this isn't over.
It's only the beginning.