Chapter Nine - Evie
CHAPTER NINE
Evie
I WOKE TO the sound of pleading.
“No,” Mara whispered through the wall, her voice thin and breaking. “Please. I—please—”
My eyes flew open. My heart slammed so hard it hurt. I sat up, every nerve screaming awake as if my body had known before my mind caught up.
“Mara?” I whispered, already moving toward the wall we shared.
Her voice rose and fell in fragments, the words blurring, dissolving into breath. Fear bled into something softer, warped. Resistance thinning. The cadence shifted, not abruptly, but the way erosion works, grain by grain.
And then the light came. Warm. Honeyed. Alive. It seeped through the seams of the wall, bleeding gold into my alcove like a sunrise I didn’t want. The air thickened with it, intimate and heavy, and unmistakable as He arrived.
The pleading faded. The sounds that replaced it made bile climb my throat. Mara didn’t scream. She made small, broken sounds instead, soft little moans that sounded less like pleasure. It was acceptance only mistaken for consent by anyone who wanted to believe it.
My hands curled into fists so tight my nails dug into my skin. “No,” I hissed. “No. No, no—”
The light pulsed brighter from Mara’s alcove, the wall between us glowing like it had been chosen.
Something in me lunged without thought. I wasn’t being brave. It was just pure reflex. Something clicked, maybe it was the air, like a lock trying to turn. My blood warmed, then went cold, then warm again.
The gold light flickered. Just once. A quick stutter, like a candle bending in a draft that shouldn’t exist. If I’d blinked, I would have missed it, and for half a breath, the sound on the other side hitched too, the way a song skips when the needle jumps.
Hope flashed through me, but it didn’t make Him stop. So I grabbed the first thing within reach, a glass cup from the tray I hadn’t touched, and flung it at the wall with everything I had. It shattered on impact, a sharp, violent crack that echoed down the hall.
“Stop!” I screamed, my voice tearing itself raw. “Stop it! Just fucking stop it!”
But this time the sound didn’t even falter. The light didn’t dim again. He didn’t stop.
I slid down the side of the bed, my breath was coming too fast and too erratic.
I cried as I covered my ears as the sounds continued on the other side, relentless and slow and cruel in their patience.
Time lost its shape. Minutes stretched. Or hours.
I couldn’t tell. I couldn’t look at the wall anymore, but I couldn’t make myself move away from it either.
When it finally ended, the silence that followed was worse. The aftermath wasn’t peace or relief. I sat there shaking long after the light receded, long after the hall cooled and settled back into its pristine stillness, as if nothing had happened. I thought He had left.
I didn’t know how long it took for the curtain to breathe open.
But when it did, I felt Him there. The warmth crept in first, familiar now in a way that made my skin crawl.
Then His padded footsteps, unhurried, deliberate, as if He were savoring every inch of distance between us.
He stepped into my alcove as if he owned it. Like He owned me.
I looked up, and He was smiling with that small, knowing curve of His mouth. His eyes were bright with amusement and satisfaction with the certainty of someone who had just proven a point.
“Well,” He said softly, tilting His head as if we were sharing a private joke. “That was quite the outburst.”
The fury in my chest roared back to life, hot and blinding, and I surged to my feet.
“You make me sick,” I said, my voice shaking but loud. “You force… people to do things. Things they don’t want to do. Every time. You don’t give them a choice.”
He looked pleased now. “Everyone chooses,” He replied calmly. “Eventually.”
My anger folded into a weapon, and I laughed once, brittle and dangerous.
“You really believe that.”
He stepped closer, the warmth of His light leaning in with Him, so full of confidence and indulgence. “I believe,” He said, eyes flicking briefly to the wall we shared with Mara, “that resistance is just another stage.”
My vision tunneled. My pulse thundered in my ears. I didn’t look away. I didn’t bow. I didn’t shrink. I met His gaze and let Him see exactly how much I hated Him. And for the first time since He’d taken me, I didn’t care if He noticed.
His smile widened as He walked toward me, like He already knew my body would fail me before my will did. I backed up, one hand reaching blindly behind me, fingers scraping the wall, my head shaking hard enough to make my teeth click.
“No,” I said, and the word kept breaking loose, again and again. “No. Don’t.”
He didn’t rush towards me or grab me. He just kept coming, stepping into the space between my breath and my next thought, and His fucking light followed Him, caressing my skin, warm and patient, like it had all the time in the world.
“Soon, you will offer yourself to me,” He murmured, almost kindly. “And you will enjoy it. Everyone does.”
“I won’t,” I snapped, but my voice shook, and He noticed. Because of course He noticed.
His gaze moved over me with the slow certainty of someone reading a page He’d written himself.
Then His hand lifted, but he didn’t reach for my hip or my waist, not anywhere that would make this simple.
He touched my wrist right where the sigil was with two fingers and barely any pressure, like checking a pulse.
And my body answered Him without my permission.
Heat unspooled under my skin, wrong in how immediate it was, wrong in how it didn’t ask permission. My knees softened. My breath stuttered. It felt like my nerves had been tuned to His frequency and someone had just turned the volume up.
“St—,” I tried to force the word out, but it came apart in a whisper. I didn’t know if I was begging Him or my own body. “Please.”
His mouth curved, satisfied, not because I’d wanted Him, but because I’d reacted.
“Everyone begs,” He murmured, leaning in close enough that His warmth erased the cold. “Eventually.”
“No,” I breathed. “I mean stop. Don’t touch me.”
He hummed, as if considering it, as if my fear was a flavor. Then He slid His palm up my forearm, slow, deliberate, like He was mapping me, like He was learning where I kept my strength.
The light warmed as the room softened around the edges.
“This is what you were made for,” He said as His breath caressed my ear, His voice velveted with certainty. “To yield. To open. For Me.”
“I’m not,” I hissed, but the words didn’t land right. Nothing landed right. My thoughts kept slipping out of my grasp like wet glass.
He didn’t touch me anywhere explicitly. He didn’t need to.
But He wrapped an arm around my waist and pulled me against Him.
It wasn’t hard or violent. It was just final, like a door clicking shut.
His other hand slid to the back of my neck, cradling, almost tender, and that tenderness made me want to vomit.
Because it was gentleness used as a weapon.
I sagged into it, and I hated myself for it. I hated that my muscles unclenched, as if relief were something only He could offer, as if my body wanted to be held even when my mind was screaming to run.
“This is the part where you stop fighting,” He whispered.
My head tilted back as if he’d tugged an invisible thread, and my body followed. His lips brushed my temple, my hairline, a touch so soft it would’ve been almost comforting in any other universe.
Then His hand moved slowly down and flattened over my sternum, directly over my heart.
And the sensation changed. It wasn’t arousal or pleasure.
It was something deeper and colder as the warmth bled out of the room.
His palm stayed over my heart, but the pressure turned inward, as if He’d pressed through skin and found the place where I kept my last secret.
“There you are,” He murmured, almost fond, as if He’d finally found what He’d come for.
A thread that didn’t belong to Him. Luc’s. He drew it taut, slow, and patient as if He was listening to the way it trembled inside me.
My hands lifted without my permission, fingers curling into His robe, not because I wanted Him, but because my body was trying to anchor itself to something solid while He unmade me from the inside.
This was how He did it. Not by force alone. By turning your body into a doorway.
My lungs seized. I sucked in air, but it didn’t feel like enough. The light pressed in from every side, syrupy and thick, and I realized with sick clarity what was happening.
“No,” I rasped. “Please. Please don’t.”
The warmth from His palm sank into me like a brand or a claim.
I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t think. I could only wait for the impending snap.
And that was too much, so I shut my mind off.
I went somewhere else. Back to a place I felt safe.
Back to the shower. Back to the sound of water hitting porcelain.
Luc was behind me, solid and real, reaching past me to turn the heat down.
“Hey,” Luc said gently. “Easy. You’re burning yourself.”
“I couldn’t make it work,” I whispered, forehead braced against the wall. “I tried. I tried everything.”
“I know,” he said, voice low and steady. “You don’t have to do it all at once.”
His hands slid into my hair, slow and careful, washing me like it was sacred instead of necessary. Water ran down my back, grounding, real.
“Breathe with me,” he murmured. “That’s it. I’ve got you. You’re safe.”
I clung to that. To his hands. To the towel afterward, thick and warm and human, like protection wasn’t something that had to be earned.
“I’ve got you,” he said again, pressing his forehead to mine.
I held that memory like a spell. I wanted to stay in it forever.
When I came back to myself, the light had cooled.
I was alone and on the bed, fully clothed, but my sleeves were shoved up, my wrists exposed, the skin there flushed like it had been kissed by heat.
My chest ached, deep, like I’d been crying without sound for hours.
My nerves buzzed like static under my skin.
The room smelled faintly of earthy warmth, like He’d left a fingerprint in the air.
I curled onto my side, knees pulled tight to my chest, folding in on myself until I could barely breathe. I pressed my face into the pillow and cried as quietly as I could, grief and fury tangling until they were indistinguishable.
I hated Him. I hated what He did. I hated how He did it. I hated that He could touch my wrist and make my body answer, then call it choice.
My chest shook with silent sobs as the thought settled cold and heavy in my gut, not that I would die here, but that one day, if I couldn’t stop Him, I might wake up and forget why I ever fought at all.