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When he had me cornered under that desk, I was scared, but I was curious too. I wanted to know what he would do to me and then, when he put me on my knees, I didn't fight him.

I preened under him calling me a good girl, and I leaned into it because some broken part of me wanted that praise. I wanted to show him I could be good, I could be worthy of?—

No. I shut that line of thought down.

It was just the adrenaline talking, and I refused to believe it was anything else.

The truth gnawed at my gut, and I needed to shut it up. I desperately needed to silence that insidious whisper in the back of my mind, the one that suggested I liked being dominated by a powerful man.

That wasn’t who I was. That was not who I wanted to be.

Maybe under different circumstances, maybe in a different life with a different man who wasn't so dangerous I could be that girl, but not like this.

If it were different circumstances, if it was any man other than Pavel Ivanov, then you wouldn't have reacted the way you did.

The voice in the back of my head taunted me with a truth that I refused to acknowledge.

I needed to forget.

I needed to shut that little voice up and pretend that none of this ever happened.

This memory, along with the other ones too painful todwell on, would be locked in a vault deep in my mind to never be brought up or examined again.

Crawling across the cramped floor of my studio, I reached for the half-empty bottle of cheap wine sitting on the rickety nightstand. There was only one way to silence that little voice and to make sure that memory never came to the surface again.

The first gulp burned, my throat still raw from the way Pavel's cock was so rough and?—

The second gulp went down smoother, dulling the ache. By the time I finished the bottle, my limbs were numb, my eyelids heavy, and my head had finally stopped spinning with truths I refused to acknowledge.

Bright mid-morning sunlight stabbed through the broken blinds and my skull throbbed in protest.

I squinted at the clock.

The bright red numbers read 9:42.

Shit.

I was late.

I shot up so fast my stomach lurched. My head pounded from that ill-advised half bottle of cheap merlot. It was the wine. It had to be the wine. I refused to allow it to be anything else.

Stumbling to the sink, I choked down the last two aspirin in the bottle and swallowed them with a handful of stale tap water before wiping my face with trembling hands.

I could never go back to that cleaning job.

It was a death sentence, or maybe worse.

But I needed money.

Rent was due in five days and the last thing I wantedor needed was to end up on the street with Pavel hunting me like a dog.

So, I needed to show up for my bartending shift at Velvet Dreams, or as the girls and I liked to call it, Vomit Dreams.

It was the kind of place where the waitresses wore cheap satin corsets, thigh-high stockings, and heels that could double as weapons.

The dancers started in cheap Halloween costumes and ended up fully bare.

The only thing they wore off the stage was a lifeless haze in their eyes.