Page 27 of Soul to Possess (The Artmaker Trilogy #1)

I woke with a jolt, my body stiff and aching.

The pounding in my skull came first—dull and insistent, like something heavy had settled behind my eyes and refused to budge.

I tried to move, to shift my arm beneath me and ease the cramping tension there, but…

I couldn’t. Panic flickered in my chest. Why couldn’t I move?

I blinked against the blur of sleep, heart already galloping as I tried to orient myself.

That’s when I saw it: an arm. Thick, inked.

Draped across my stomach like a lock. Atticus.

The memories rushed back in staggered fragments—sounds, sensations, the metallic taste of fear.

His weight above me. His voice, low and coaxing.

His cock, unforgiving. My body betraying me at every turn.

Oh god. I had never experienced anything like last night.

Not just the physicality of it—the brutal force, the absence of mercy—but the fact that something inside me had responded to it.

Had wanted it. My thighs clenched instinctively under the weight of the covers, but the ache that answered was more shame than soreness.

Why hadn’t I said the safe word? Why couldn’t I? The question hit hard. My mouth had known the words. My mind had screamed them. But something in me—something deeper—had locked them behind my teeth. As if some part of me had wanted to see what he would do if I didn’t stop him.

And even worse… some part of me already knew he wouldn’t have stopped either way.

He must have had a key. Of course he did.

The door had been locked. I know I locked it.

And yet he’d slipped into my room like it belonged to him.

Like I belonged to him. That thought made my stomach twist. And not in the way it should.

He had planned it. Maybe not the timing, but the intention.

The control. The refusal. The calculated way he tested my limits until I didn’t know whether I was begging him to stop…

or to keep going. Marvin. The word meant nothing to him.

He’d chosen it—placed Marvin’s ghost between us like a weapon.

Did he get off on that? On imagining another man’s name in my mouth while he tore me apart?

The profile of him forming in my mind was fractured and dangerous.

Calculated. Intimate in all the worst ways.

His arm was still across me, warm and heavy, holding me like nothing violent had happened.

Like we were lovers. Like I’d asked him to ruin me.

I hated the way that made me feel… protected. Wanted. Like I was his .

No. I couldn’t admit I liked any of it—not to him, not even to myself.

That would make me weak. That would make me less .

Less of the woman I wanted to be. Less human.

I wanted him to see strength when he looked at me.

I wanted to be a challenge, not an offering.

But last night, I hadn’t been strong. I’d been…

something else. Something pliable. Something hungry.

And what terrified me most? That hunger hadn’t gone away.

I closed my eyes, trying to shove the images from my mind.

His breath in my ear. The bruising grip of his hands.

The way my body had opened for him, helpless and wet.

The way I’d ached even while he ignored my words.

Was there a version of me that wanted to be helpless?

I didn’t know. But I couldn’t pretend the question wasn’t there now.

Before Atticus had broken into my room, I’d already been thinking about the novels.

The ones where things like that happened—where women were taken, claimed, pushed past the brink and remade into something new.

I’d read those stories in secret, convinced myself they were fantasy, nothing more. But now I wasn’t so sure.

Was that why it felt so… hot? Had I primed myself for him?

Set the stage with my own lust in the shower and again in the middle of the night, then left the door wide open in my mind for a man like him to walk through?

The thought made my stomach churn—half with shame, half with something darker. Something needier.

My brain wouldn’t stop spinning, dragging me in loops I couldn’t make sense of.

Every time I landed on an answer, it unraveled into more questions.

Why didn’t I stop him? What does that say about me?

Do I want more? The worst part wasn’t that I didn’t have the answers.

It was that I wasn’t even sure I wanted them.

But one question rose to the top, louder than the rest: Do I want his help?

Because he’d offered it—clearly, unequivocally.

Not in words, but in presence. In pressure.

In possession. His body around mine was a promise: I’m not letting go.

And if the way he was curled against me now meant anything, there was no point pretending he’d let me walk out of here without a fight.

That door had closed the moment I didn’t say the mans name while he was fucking me.

And still… there was a piece of him missing. A part he was hiding behind those emerald eyes and that sickeningly calm voice. I could feel it—just beneath the surface, just out of reach. Something broken. Something dangerous.

I pushed at his arm, gently, trying to ease the tension in my legs. They ached with the dull throb of overuse. My body was sore, not just from sex, but from him . From the violence of his need and the silence of my own.

Even the place between my thighs pulsed with awareness, the kind of ache that bordered on pain.

I hadn’t had sex— real sex—in so long that I wasn’t sure how much of the soreness was from force and how much was from sheer unused sensitivity.

But it wasn’t as bad as it could’ve been.

That thought alone disturbed me. Shouldn’t it have hurt more? I pushed at him again.

He stirred behind me, but instead of letting go, his arm tightened like a chain.

And for reasons I didn’t want to unpack yet, the part of me that had panicked only moments ago…

went still again.“Why’re you shoving me, Bluebell?

” His voice was rough with sleep, gravel and warmth all at once—and I hated the way it made something flutter low in my stomach. “I’ll tie you back up if I need to.”

I should’ve been afraid. Maybe I was. But my lips betrayed me, curving slightly as I answered, “I just need to move my legs. They’re aching.”

In an instant, the weight lifted from my stomach. His hands slid down to my hips, steady and sure, pulling me back against him like he’d missed me during the few inches we’d spent apart.I shifted onto my back, the tension in my thighs easing. For a moment, it almost felt… normal.

But then his nose brushed just behind my ear, and he inhaled like he needed to memorize me from the inside out. A sharp tingle danced across my skin in response. God. Why did my body react like this to him? After everything?

“Better?” he murmured, arm locking tight around my waist like a promise I hadn’t asked for.

“Yeah,” I said, voice small, hesitant. “That’s… much better.”

I didn’t know where to look. Shame twisted inside me.

Not for what he’d done—but for the fact that I didn’t immediately push him away.

That I didn’t demand space or scream for Marvin or run barefoot out the front door.

I wanted to tell him to leave. But the fear was still there, tucked behind my ribs like a bruise: if I asked the wrong thing, would he tie me up again?

Would he drag me back into that place where yes and no blurred into something else entirely?

And worse— would a part of me let him?

I needed space. Desperately. Space to think. To breathe. To figure out who the hell I even was after last night. But I couldn’t find the words. Everything I wanted to say sat frozen in my chest, unspoken and heavy.

It all felt surreal, like I was hovering somewhere above my body, watching it all from a distance.

What happened last night didn’t feel like something I did.

It felt like something that had been done to me…

or maybe through me. I didn’t know. All I knew was the memories wouldn’t stop coming—unwelcome, vivid, and tangled in the heat of my own betrayal.

And he was still holding me. As if nothing had changed at all.