LOGINThe three months ended and I didn’t leave.Not because I couldn’t. Not because the debt was leverage or the arrangement was binding or I had nowhere else to go. I stayed because Dominic Ashe had peeled back every layer of armour I’d ever worn and found the thing underneath and held it like it mattered. And because somewhere between the rage and the reckoning, I’d fallen in love with a man made of scars and contradictions who ran an underworld and made me breakfast and knelt at my feet when he’d wronged me.He told me everything. All of it—the operations, the risks, the people who depended on him and the people who wanted him dead. He laid his empire open like a body on a table and let me see every ugly organ and every necessary vein and asked me not to look away.I didn’t.My father called once, two weeks after the three months ended. Sober this time—genuinely sober, the first time in years. He said he was i
I found out on day seventy-eight that the debt had been cleared on day one.Not day ninety. Not even day twelve, when he first touched me. Day one. The night I’d shown up at his loft with fury in my chest and my father’s sins around my neck, Dominic had already wiped the balance. Cancelled it entirely. Told his accountant to eat the two point three million like it was a rounding error, because to a man who moved the kind of money he moved, it was.I found out because I saw the ledger. He’d left it open on his desk—whether by accident or design, I’d never be sure—and there it was in black and white: Resolved. Day one. No further collection.The three months was a fiction. The arrangement was a fiction. I’d been free since the moment I walked through his door, and he’d let me believe otherwise because—Because he’d wanted me to stay. And he hadn’t known how to ask.Th
After the first time, the walls came down fast.Not slowly, not gracefully—they collapsed like a building brought down by controlled demolition, one charge after another until there was nothing left standing between us. We moved through the loft like a fever. The kitchen counter. The shower. The desk where he worked, papers scattered and forgotten while he bent me over its edge and made me forget my own name. Every surface became a memory. Every room held the echo of a sound one of us had made.But it was the nights that undid me. After the frenzy, after the bruises and the bitten lips and the sweat-soaked sheets, he’d pull me against his chest and talk. And Dominic Ashe talking in the dark was a different creature entirely from the man who ran an empire of shadows.He told me about growing up in Dorchester—the kind of neighbourhood that made you hard or made you dead. His mother, who cleaned office buildings and never complained. His father, w
The tension broke on day twelve.Twelve days of circling each other in that loft like two planets locked in a gravitational pull neither of us wanted to acknowledge. Twelve days of his eyes on me when he thought I wasn’t looking. Twelve days of me pretending I didn’t notice the way my skin prickled when he entered a room, the way my breathing changed when he stood too close, the way I’d lie in bed at night and listen to the low rumble of his voice on the phone in the next room and press my thighs together until the ache subsided.He was infuriatingly respectful. That was the problem. He didn’t leer, didn’t crowd, didn’t touch. He cooked breakfast—the man ran a shadow economy and cooked breakfast—and left food on the counter for me with a note that said Eat in handwriting that was sharp and angular and somehow intimate. He asked about the books I was reading. He argued with me about politics over dinner l
My father sold me on a Tuesday.Not literally. He didn’t wrap me in brown paper and hand me across a counter. But when a man owes two million dollars to the kind of people who collect debts with pliers and blowtorches, and the only asset he has left is a twenty-four-year-old daughter with a smart mouth and a spine made of spite, the math does itself.He called me at eleven p.m. His voice was the slurred, watery thing it became after the fifth drink—the voice that had narrated my childhood in excuses and broken promises. He said he was sorry. He said there was no other way. He said a man named Dominic Ashe wanted to meet me, and if I didn’t show up, they’d come for us both.I hung up. Sat on the edge of my bed in the studio apartment I could barely afford. Stared at the wall. And then I got dressed, because that’s what you do when the world splits open at your feet—you put on clothes and you walk into the wreckage.The a
They came to me together on the seventh night.No pretence. No pretending. Matteo opened the door and Ares followed, and the look that passed between them told me this had been discussed, negotiated, decided—the way everything in their world was. They’d shared an empire. They’d shared blood. And now, standing in the doorway of my borrowed room with matching hunger in mismatched eyes, they were offering to share me.I should have said no. I should have remembered that I was here against my will, that these men were criminals, that wanting them was a betrayal of every rational instinct I possessed. But rationality had abandoned me somewhere around the third night, and what was left—raw, electric, aching—didn’t care about should.“Both of you,” I said. Not a question.Matteo closed the door. Ares locked it.“Rules,” Matteo said, his voice carrying the calm authority that made my body respond
STACY I last eight minutes before I'm climbing the stairs to Jace's room.The door is cracked open, warm light spilling into the hallway. I can hear the shower running in his attached bathroom.I push the door open and step inside.His room is cleaner than I expected. A king-sized bed with dark sh
ELENA I raise my head, meeting Marcus's eyes. His face is flushed, his hand a blur on his cock. There are tears streaming down his cheeks — tears of joy, I know, tears of overwhelming love and arousal."You're so beautiful," he whispers. "The most beautiful woman in the world. I love you so much,
ANGEI was fully aware of what was about to happen to me, and I had no intention of doing anything about it. My eyes found mister Donovan in the middle of the crowd. He smiled and gave me a curt nod, licking his lips gently as he clicked something on his phone. At that very moment, I knew I had los
ANGE Now, bound to the door restraints, my arms stretched above me, my body bare save for the collar tight around my neck, I felt small. Vulnerable. But I wanted to be. There was no fear—just surrender, a heady mix of anticipation and the deep ache of craving something I couldn’t name. He reached







