9. Chapter Nine
Chapter Nine
C amille
Preston leads us closer to the table, and with every step, the sinking realization hits me harder.
Kane is walking toward the same table.
My stomach knots sharply, dread mixed with a perverse thrill as I reach my seat, discovering the seating card bearing his name. Someone’s idea of a cruel joke, or worse, a very deliberate message.
Seating arrangement from hell.
Kane Rivera, right next to me.
His date, seated directly across, cozied up next to Preston.
Absolutely fucking perfect.
My fingers curl tight around the champagne flute, grip shaky, skin prickling with the searing awareness of Kane beside me.
He shifts casually, thigh brushing mine beneath the table. Heat rushes up my spine, furious and electric, memories sparking to life like flame to gasoline.
I refuse to look at him.
Because if I do, if I so much as glance his way, he’ll see it. How thin my mask has stretched. How my composure is nothing but a trembling breath away from splintering all over this table.
Across from us, Ivy’s voice slides into the air like honey laced with cyanide.
“Preston. It’s been a while.” she purrs, leaning in, the glint of gold on her wrist catching the candlelight. Her fingers trail along his arm, slow and soft, like she’s painting a claim onto his skin. “You look good. Politics suit you.”
He laughs, open, warm, blissfully unaware. The kind of laugh that makes people trust him. Vote for him. Sleep beside him and believe it means something.
Ivy smiles. Effortless. Strategic. And I want to claw her eyes out.
God, I hate her.
But I hate him more.
Because this, all of this, wasn’t an accident. It’s a production. A performance. A carefully choreographed psychological striptease, and Kane Rivera is directing it like the bastard he is.
Every detail was placed like a dagger:
The way Ivy leans in.
The precise inch Preston shifts toward her.
The suffocating space between Kane and me that feels anything but safe.
And then…
He leans in.
Slow.
Deliberate.
His breath brushes the curve of my neck, warm and dark.
“Careful, Camille,” he murmurs, voice like velvet stretched over a knife. “You’re holding that glass like you want to slit someone’s throat with it.”
“I do,” I hiss, jaw locked. “And guess whose name is carved into the stem.”
He laughs, and it’s not fair that something so deadly can sound so good. The low rasp of it scrapes down my spine, slick and wicked, pooling heat where it shouldn’t.
“You’re disturbingly hot when you’re homicidal,” he says.
“Go to hell.”
“I brought hell with me,” he says, voice dark with something close to delight. “Figured you’d be bored up here in paradise.”
I whip my head toward him, heat and fury colliding in my chest. My eyes meet his and it’s like touching a live wire. Sparks and danger and hunger.
“You think you’re funny?” I hiss.
“No.” His eyes glint, cruel humor curving his lips. “Funny’s for amateurs. What I have planned is fucking art.”
I open my mouth to fire something back, something vicious, cruel, unhinged…but I freeze.
Because his hand is on my thigh.
Heavy. Hot. Possessive. Hidden under the white tablecloth like a beautiful, depraved secret.
I don’t breathe.
His fingers trail slowly upward, the motion maddeningly casual, as if he has all the time in the world to ruin me. And maybe he does.
“Back off,” I say, voice low, deadly.
“But this seat’s so warm,” he murmurs, dragging his knuckles up the inside of my thigh like a dare. “And you, Munequita, you’re practically begging for a deeper conversation.”
His mouth tips into a smirk, dark and unholy. “Nine inches deeper, give or take.”
I inhale sharply, my entire body stiffening. “You’re disgusting.”
“You say that,” he murmurs, “but your legs haven’t moved. Haven’t stopped shaking either.”
My heart’s a war drum. I want to slap him. I want to straddle him. I want to run.
Instead, I sit perfectly still.
Poised. Silent.
Drenched in the kind of panic that tastes like desire.
His fingertips drift upward, slow enough to feel like punishment, bold enough to brand my skin. My pulse pounds violently beneath the silk fabric of my dress, and I’m suddenly terrified everyone at this table can hear the rush of blood through my veins.
“Kane,” I hiss through clenched teeth. “Don’t.”
“Say please,” he whispers, the smirk on his lips devastatingly arrogant. “Maybe I’ll listen.”
I’m burning alive beneath his touch, fighting desperately to hold onto the fraying edges of control. “You’re sick.”
“As fuck,” he murmurs, tracing maddening circles into the soft, trembling skin of my inner thigh. “But we both know you’re not going to stop me.”
His touch moves higher, pressing just enough that my legs tremble, traitorously parting beneath the table. Panic spikes through me, tangled helplessly with raw, consuming desire.
Preston’s laugh rings clear from across the table, and I flinch, jerking my gaze toward him. He’s smiling at something Ivy says, oblivious to my unraveling, to Kane’s careful, calculated assault beneath the tablecloth.
I choke on a sharp inhale as his fingertips press firmly against the edge of my panties, teasing, testing, destroying every barrier between sanity and surrender.
My voice trembles, a raw, breathless thing soaked in desperation. “Stop…someone could see us.”
Kane leans in closer, so near I can feel the ghost of his breath against my ear. His voice is a velvet snarl. “Let them.”
I shudder.
“Let them watch you come undone,” he murmurs, low and dark, each word a caress and a threat. “It’d be the first honest thing you’ve ever given them.”
Rage coils in my gut like barbed wire, at Preston’s blind stupidity, at Ivy’s effortless charm, at Kane’s merciless needling, and worst of all, at my own treacherous body betraying me in real time. My glare could cut steel. My cheeks are fire. “You’re the devil.”
His eyes catch the light like polished obsidian, too sharp, too deep. That smirk, the one he only wears when he knows he’s already won tugs at his mouth. “Then pray, Munequita,” he purrs, voice honey-laced poison, “because heaven’s not coming to save you.”
His fingers slip beneath the delicate lace of my panties, slow, practiced, devastating.
The intrusion is electric, deliberate, obscene in its subtlety.
A gasp shudders out of me, all control slipping through my fingers like sand.
I clutch the table’s edge like it’s the only thing keeping me upright, my knuckles bone-white, eyes flickering around the room in frantic bursts.
No one looks.
No one sees.
No one knows.
Except him.
“You hate me,” Kane breathes, his fingers stroking with a languid cruelty that leaves my thighs trembling, my core traitorous. “But your body? Your cunt?” He keeps his voice low, “All truth.”
I bite my lip hard enough to taste blood, desperate to strangle the moan building in my throat. My voice, when it finally claws its way out, is all wreckage. “Please, Kane…”
His eyes blaze at the sound of that word, the fragile fracture in my armor. He stills, his thumb dragging a slow, pulsing circle that rips the breath from my lungs.
“Please what?” he asks, the words molten. “Stop?” A pause, dangerous. “Or don’t stop?”
I freeze, only for a heartbeat.
But that’s all he needs.
His smile blooms like sin. “That’s what I thought.”
Across the table, Ivy giggles, whispering something light and meaningless. Preston laughs, head tilted back, completely unaware. So casual, so removed, so oblivious.
And Kane? Kane sees everything.
He’s watching me unravel, stitch by stitch, savoring every crack he’s carved into my composure. His voice lowers, a blade wrapped in silk. “Look at them, Camille. So shiny. So perfect. All mask and polish. “Now feel this,” His finger pushes deeper, and I nearly cry out. “this is real, raw, mine.”
My breath fractures on a gasp, sharp and soundless. My whole body coils tight, hips shifting forward in a pathetic, involuntary plea. Needy. Shamefully eager. Every nerve screaming for more, for him.
His gaze is liquid darkness, voice edged with a possessive command. “Say it.”
I’m close. So fucking close. Teetering on the edge, right there at the tip of release, dragged forward by the unbearable rhythm of his fingers, every touch calibrated to unravel me. I can feel it building, cresting inside me, pressure threatening to snap my spine in two. I’ll break. I will.
Right here.
Right now.
At this pristine table with Preston chuckling like an idiot and Ivy whispering lies into his ear.
And I’ll fucking fall apart with Kane watching me, owning it.
Owning me.
My head shakes, weak and desperate. My teeth sink into my bottom lip like they might stop the words, stop the truth. But they don’t. My voice breaks apart anyway, breathy and cracked.
“N-No…”
It’s not a protest. It’s not even a refusal.
It’s a confession. A moan wrapped in denial.
His touch slows.
Stops.
Torturous. Intentional. Fucking ruthless.
I feel the absence instantly, my body screaming for him, chasing what’s already gone.
No. No. No. No.
His lips brush against my ear again, featherlight and lethal.
“Then suffer,” he breathes, voice a silk-covered dagger.
And then…he’s gone.
Just like that.
No touch.
No warmth.
Nothing but the cruel, echoing silence between my thighs and the savage, icy ache of something unfinished. Something stolen.
My whole body seizes with the shock, lungs locking mid-breath. Pleasure still pulses like a ghost inside me, phantom contractions that offer no relief. Just heat. Just shame.
My cheeks burn. My throat closes around the lump of humiliation rising like bile. I’m soaked and desperate, completely wrecked , and he sits beside me like nothing happened. Like I’m not spiraling out of control under his hand, or the lack of it.
Kane’s face is unreadable. Cold. Composed.
A picture of control while I’m coming apart molecule by molecule.
He owns it. All of it.
My ruin.
My pleasure.
My pain.
All his.
To give.
To take.
To keep.
Kane