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RHAIM

I rutted her.

I couldn’t be careful with her anymore, I needed her too badly, so I granted her the only mercy I could—to be quick.

My hips beat against hers as she threw her legs around me, grunting with each of my thrusts.

I dove my face into her breasts, finally kissing them, sucking her nipples and precious flesh greedily, while it was my turn to lose control of what my lower half was doing, my cock plunging into her in its own eager rhythm, searching for pleasure inside her, until I spilled with a groan, then kept sliding myself in and out, now that she was full of me again.

I collapsed on top of her, careful to still hold most of my own weight, mostly because I wanted to place my ear to her chest and hear her heart beating, as I told her my soul’s most naked truth. “I like using you.”

“Mmm,” she hummed, while tracing a fingertip around the shell of my ear. “That’s good. Because I like being used.” Then I felt her inhale, and knew what she was going to say next before she said it. “But only by you, Rhaim. What are we going to do?”

I rose up over her slowly. My dick was still inside her, and for as long as she’d have it, I wanted to keep it there. “You are going to do exactly what I tell you to from here on out. You don’t make a decision without running it by me.”

Her eyes widened and she set her shoulders, becoming Daddy’s little soldier.

“You didn’t dig the camera out of your wall, did you?” I knew she hadn’t, because I still checked it occasionally—it’d been looking at a stack of books for two months—but it was worth throwing a bone to her pride, and, also, pretending I had more control regarding her than I actually did.

“No.”

“Good. Move whatever you put in front of it, so I can keep an eye on you, physically. I’ll get you a burner phone by dawn tomorrow—” a deadline which was quickly encroaching, “and you go back to being you. Understandably pissed off—seething, even—but compliant.”

“And completely sidelined.” She said the words like they were distasteful.

“If that’s what your father wants, yes.”

“How’s that supposed to get me on the board, Rhaim? Or help the IPO?”

“I’ll be honest with you, it won’t.” But—I couldn’t tell her what I knew about Nero—that he was going to die soon, because of his kidney cancer.

Once he did though, however, all of my machinations would become wildly easier.

As long as Lia wasn’t married off by then.

I sighed and briefly bowed my head, before meeting her eyes again. “This is probably going to get a lot worse before it gets better—and messier too. I’m going to need you to dance on a tightrope while I’m trying to thread the other end of it through a needle.”

“But…you really think there’s a way out? One in which we both survive?”

“Yeah, I do,” I lied—and God help her, she believed me.

Because she was too kind, too fair, too good, and somehow still pure, no matter how roughly I had used her. Nothing could change who she was—and nothing could change who I was, either.

Which was why I was willing to kill whoever I needed to keep her.

I made her take a shower with me after that, so I could get her actually clean, and help her wash all the knots out of her hair.

I wouldn’t fuck her again, no matter how badly I wanted to, but she did let me hold her underneath the water’s warm spray as she leaned into me and it was as perfect a moment as I could’ve wished for.

But then we both needed to get to bed.

I stepped out first and grabbed a towel, then her hand, escorting her safely out of the shower, before spotting the mess we’d both left on the bathmat. “There’s tampons under a sink somewhere here, I’m sure of it,” I said.

She rubbed the towel against her hair and made a thoughtful sound. “This is your wife’s place, isn’t it,” she said, and I looked at her with surprise. “Men usually don’t have couch blankets.”

“How did I fall in love with Sherlock Holmes?” I wondered, and she laughed.

“Why did you keep it?”

“Clandestine fucking, obviously,” I teased, to regain the upper hand.

“But, no, I guess I didn’t want to give it up.

Isabelle mostly lived at my place after we got together, but it wasn’t a big deal to keep paying the rent here.

And when we bought the farmhouse we worked on it, so it didn’t really feel like we were apart.

Everything was moving in the right direction and—” I said, then stopped.

The obvious finish to the sentence was, ‘she died’.

But when Lia pressed, “And?” I decided to give her the real one.

“I ruined things.”

It was maybe the first time I’d said what I felt out loud.

But it was what had dragged me to the cemetery every Sunday for five entire years.

Asking a crypt for penance for a sin I could never quite confess.

“How?”

I shook my head. “I’ll tell you later. Do your girl thing. Meet me down the hall.”