Page 69 of Darkest Oblivion

His scent wrapped around me, choking and intoxicating all at once. “You’ll watch your greatest fear unfold right here,” he murmured, his words a dark promise that crawled under my skin.

He dragged me across the room, until the velvet-covered chaise loomed before us—its iron frame gleaming in the lamplight.

With ruthless precision, he pushed me down, my cuffed hands pinned beneath me.

I kicked wildly, desperation fueling me, but he caught my ankles in a single, brutal movement.

The second set of restraints snapped shut, the cold bite of iron digging into my skin as he cuffed me spread-eagled against the chaise. My body was caged, exposed, trembling beneath his shadow.

And still, even as fear strangled my breath, I lifted my chin, glaring at him through the heat of tears I refused to let fall. “You can chain me all you want, Dmitri,” I spat, voice raw with rage and heartbreak. “But you’ll never own me.”

He leaned in, close enough for his breath to scorch my skin.

The reality of what he intended slammed into me like a physical blow, hollowing my chest.

My breath stuttered, my body bucking against the restraints as terror clawed its way up my throat.

“No... no, please,” I begged, the word foreign on my tongue, cracking under the weight of a fear too raw to swallow.

My defiance—my last shield—crumbled. “I don’t want it like this.”

Dmitri’s eyes darkened.

His voice, when it came, was a rasp dragged straight from hell.

“No?” His lips twisted into something cruel, “Then I’ll fuck you bloody, Penelope. Until you hate your own body. Until you choke on the truth that you’ve never been anything but mine to destroy.”

He moved with deliberate slowness, each step echoing like a verdict.

His hand reached the drawer, pulling it open with casual certainty.

My stomach dropped as I watched him lift a sleek, black device—small, humming with a low, ominous vibration as he thumbed it alive.

The sound filled the air, heavy, obscene.

I jerked against the cuffs, panic flaring so sharp it stole my breath.

He switched it off, eyes never leaving mine, and placed it beside my bound legs with surgical precision—like a blade laid beside a throat.

The silent threat of it loomed larger than its presence.

“What are you going to do to me?” My whisper broke.

My legs strained against the cuffs in a desperate, useless fight.

The iron cut into my skin, cold and unyielding, like him.

He didn’t answer. Silence was his weapon, and he wielded it with deadly precision. Instead, he drew something else from the drawer—scissors.

My pulse spiked, throat going dry.

I shrank back as far as the cuffs allowed, but there was nowhere left to go. He advanced, until his shadow swallowed me whole. Towering. A wall of dominance.

The scissors whispered through the air as he flicked them near my throat, close enough that I felt the cold metal graze my skin.

My breath caught, terror rising—not just of the cut, but of what it meant.

It wasn’t the blade I feared most. It was the exposure. The stripping. The deliberate, methodical destruction of the dignity I’d clung to like armor.