2. Phantom Limb
Phantom Limb
The pink room was breathing.
I stood in the center of it, bare feet sinking into carpet that felt like living flesh, and the walls expanded and contracted with a rhythm that matched my own heartbeat.
The lullaby was playing—that familiar melody I could never quite place, the one that made my shoulders drop and my jaw go slack no matter how hard I fought it.
"You're thinking too much again."
His voice came from everywhere and nowhere, that voice I'd trained myself not to remember.
Deep and cultured and patient as stone. I turned, and he was there—Gabriel, wearing the charcoal suit I'd seen him in a hundred times, his storm-grey eyes watching me with that particular intensity that made me feel like a specimen pinned to a board.
"I'm not supposed to be here," I said, but the words came out wrong. Slurred. Like my tongue belonged to someone else.
"Aren't you?" He moved closer, and I couldn't back away.
Couldn't do anything but stand there while his hand found my throat—not squeezing, just resting, the weight of it a claim I'd been trained to accept.
"You've been trying so hard to forget, sweetheart.
But the body remembers. The body always remembers. "
"I'm healed." The words sounded like a prayer. "Nathan says I'm healed."
"Nathan." Gabriel's lips curved into something that wasn't quite a smile.
"Nathan says many things. But tell me—when you kneel on his kitchen floor and don't know why, is that healing?
When you find pills that don't match the others, is that healing?
When you wake in the night with my name on your lips. .."
"I don't—"
"You do." His thumb pressed against my pulse point, feeling how it raced. "You call for me in your sleep, Bunny. You call for Daddy. And he hears you, and he doesn't tell you, because he needs you to believe you're free."
The lullaby grew louder, filling the room until I couldn't hear my own thoughts. The walls pulsed faster. Gabriel's hand tightened on my throat, and I felt the familiar weight of a collar that wasn't there—phantom leather, phantom metal, phantom ownership pressing against my skin.
"Wake up," I whispered. "Wake up, wake up—"
I surfaced with a gasp, my hands flying to my throat.
Nothing there. Just skin and sweat and the hammering of my pulse beneath my fingers.
The bedroom was dark except for the city lights filtering through the curtains, painting silver stripes across the ceiling.
Beside me, Nathan stirred—his arm had been draped across my waist, but my sudden movement had dislodged it.
"Bunny?" His voice was rough with sleep, but I heard the alertness underneath. Nathan woke fast. He'd been trained to, the same way I had. "Nightmare?"
I couldn't answer. Couldn't find words past the phantom sensation of leather around my throat. My fingers kept pressing against my skin, searching for a collar that wasn't there, had never been there—except it had, once, in another life, and my body hadn't forgotten.
"Hey." Nathan sat up, his hands finding my shoulders. Not restraining, just grounding. "You're safe. You're in our apartment. Whatever you saw, it wasn't real."
"It felt real." The words came out scraped raw. "He was here. Gabriel was here, and he said—"
"What did he say?"
I opened my mouth to tell him, and the words died in my throat. You call for Daddy in your sleep. He hears you. How could I tell Nathan that? How could I look at the man who'd saved me and admit that some part of me still reached for the monster who'd broken me?
"I don't remember." The lie tasted like copper. "Just... his voice. The lullaby. The room."
"The conditioning room." Nathan's hands moved to my face, tilting it toward him. "It's a trauma memory. Your brain is processing old wounds. That's all."
"Then why does it feel so real?"
"Because it was real." His thumb traced my cheekbone, wiping away tears I hadn't realized were falling. "What he did to you was real. The damage was real. But you're not there anymore, Bunny. You're here, with me, and he can't touch you."
I wanted to believe him. I'd been wanting to believe him for months, and most days I succeeded.
Most days I was his good girl, his equal partner, the woman who'd clawed her way out of hell and built something beautiful from the ruins.
But tonight, with the ghost of Gabriel's hand still warm on my throat and the lullaby still echoing in my ears, belief felt like a luxury I couldn't afford.
"Hold me," I whispered. "Please. Just hold me."
He gathered me against his chest, and I pressed my ear to his heartbeat. Steady. Certain. Alive. The rhythm of it was an anchor, pulling me back from the edge of whatever abyss the nightmare had opened.
"I'm here," he murmured against my hair. "I'm not going anywhere. You're safe."
Safe. The word should have comforted me. Instead, it made me think of cages. Gabriel had called me safe, too, when he'd locked me in the pink room and told me the outside world was too dangerous for what I was becoming.
But Nathan wasn't Gabriel. Nathan had never locked me anywhere. Nathan had given me keys and choices and the freedom to make my own decisions. The fact that my brain kept drawing parallels between them was just—what had Matt said?—trauma responses. Flashbacks. The long, slow process of healing.
"Make me forget," I said against his chest. "Please. Make me forget him."
He pulled back enough to look at me, and I saw the question in his eyes. "You're sure?"
"I'm sure."
What followed wasn't sex—not the way we usually had it, all heat and hunger and the desperate claiming of two people who'd found each other in the dark. This was something else. Something slower. Something that felt almost like worship.
He laid me back against the pillows with hands that barely seemed to touch me, and when he kissed me, it was soft as a benediction.
His lips traced from my mouth to my jaw to my throat, lingering over the place where the phantom collar still ached, and I felt the pressure of his kiss overwriting the pressure of Gabriel's ghost.
"You're here," he breathed against my skin. "You're mine. Not his. Never his."
"Yours." The word came out as a sob. "I'm yours."
His hands moved down my body with deliberate slowness, mapping territory he'd claimed a hundred times but never stopped appreciating. Each touch felt like an exorcism—Gabriel's memory driven out by Nathan's presence, old scars overwritten by new sensation.
When he reached my hips, he paused. "Tell me if you need to stop."
"Don't stop. Please don't stop."
He entered me with a gentleness that made my eyes sting, and I wrapped my legs around him and pulled him deeper.
The rhythm he set was slow, almost torturous, each thrust a deliberate act of reclamation.
He wasn't fucking me—he was reminding me.
Reminding my body who it belonged to. Reminding my mind that pleasure didn't have to come with pain.
"I love you," he said, and the words hit like a promise. "I love every broken piece of you. Every sharp edge. Every scar."
"Nathan—"
"You survived him. You survived everything he did, and you're still here. Still fighting. Still choosing to be mine."
The orgasm built slowly, unlike the frantic climaxes we usually chased.
This one was a wave that rose from somewhere deeper than physical sensation—it came from the way he looked at me, the way he spoke to me, the way he made me believe, at least for this moment, that I was more than the sum of my damage.
When I came, it was with his name on my lips and tears streaming down my face. He followed moments later, his own release a shuddering groan against my shoulder.
Afterward, we lay tangled together, breathing hard. The phantom collar had faded to a faint ache, barely noticeable. The lullaby had stopped.
"Better?" he asked.
"Better."
But when he drifted back to sleep, I stayed awake. My hand crept to my throat again, pressing against the skin where the collar used to sit. The ache was still there, buried beneath Nathan's kisses like a splinter I couldn't quite dig out.
The morning light made everything seem less threatening. Nightmares, I told myself, were just nightmares. The pill in the medicine cabinet was just a manufacturing error. The ache in my throat was just muscle memory, an old wound that would fade with time.
Nathan left for a meeting with one of his consulting clients—he'd been cagey about the details, which wasn't unusual. He kept his work compartmentalized, the way I kept my past compartmentalized, and I'd learned not to push. Some things were easier to carry in separate boxes.
I spent the morning cleaning the apartment. It was a ritual I'd developed in the early days after Gabriel, when I'd needed structure to keep myself from falling apart. Scrubbing surfaces, organizing cabinets, making everything exactly right—it gave my hands something to do while my mind wandered.
The kitchen was already spotless, but I found myself wiping down the counters anyway. The coffee maker. The knife block. The floor in front of the sink, where I knelt to check for spots I might have missed.
I was halfway through scrubbing a mark that wasn't there when I realized what I was doing.
I was kneeling.
My knees pressed against the cold tile, my hands clasped behind my back in the exact position Gabriel had trained me to hold. Back straight. Head bowed. Waiting.
I didn't remember getting into this position. Didn't remember making the choice to kneel. One moment I'd been standing at the sink, and the next—
The rag fell from my hand. I stared at my reflection in the polished oven door—a woman on her knees, her eyes wide with a fear she couldn't name, her body arranged in a posture of submission she'd sworn she'd left behind.
"Get up," I whispered. "Get up, get up, get up."