CHAPTER 3: MINE

At ten o’clock exactly, I stood outside his door in a gray cotton robe Marta had picked for me. My hair was down, and my hands were cold.

I could still turn around, I told myself. But that was the stupidest part. The hallway was empty…no guards, and my feet still worked fine. But I couldn't move.

The contract still sat safe in a lock behind a horse, and my father’s name sat on a building across the city.

I sighed. Slow and even. Then knocked on the door. 

“Come in.” His voice came through. So low. 

I walked in. His room was darker than I expected. One lamp. A wide bed. A window that looked out over black gardens.

Alistair sat in a chair by the window with his collar open and his sleeves rolled to the elbow. A glass of whiskey in one hand.

“Close the door,” he ordered.

I closed it. And the click sounded final.

“Come here.” he commands, just like the way he always does.

“I’d rather stay here.”

“I know.” He set down the glass. “But come here anyway.”

I walked. Six steps. I counted them, because counting kept my mind from going somewhere I could not come back from. Then I stood in his front.

He did not touch me. He just looked up, his face half in lamplight. And he spoke in the same even voice he had used to destroy a company.

“I want to be clear about something.”

“Alright.” I murmured and I hated immediately how my voice came out, as if I had been anticipating whatever he had been planning to say.

“I have never forced a woman in my life. I don’t need to.” He said it plainly, no pride in it. “If you tell me to stop…at any point, I will stop.”

I smirked as I heard that. “But that's not in the contract?” I said.

“It’s not in the contract. It’s in me.” His gaze did not move. “The company stays safe either way. I’d rather you hate me for what I do than for something I took.”

I did not know what to do with that. It was the last thing I expected to hear from him, and it made everything worse. Because now, there was no one to blame except myself.

“Then why make me come at all? Why do you insist a Monroe savers as payment for the insult?”

“Because that's what I want and because you signed.” He stood. He was so much taller than me that I had to tip my head back.

“And also…I want to know what you’ll do.”

“I hate you.” I said through my teeth.

“Good. Exactly what I want.”

“I mean it. I hate you.”

“I know.” He lifted his hand and very slowly, tucked a strand of hair behind my ear. His fingers barely brushed my skin. But heat shot through my neck anyway.

“Say stop.” he whispered, just very close to my ear.

I opened my mouth. But nothing came out.

“Amarah.”

“Don’t say my name like that.” I said, and my fist curled with my nails biting into palms.

“Like what?”

“Like it’s yours.”

The corner of his mouth moved. “Everything in this room is mine.”

“I’m not a thing.”

“No.” His thumb traced the edge of my jaw. “You’re something I haven’t figured out yet, Amarah.”

I should have stepped back. I told my feet to move. But they did not.

“Say stop,” he said again, softer.

“I—” My voice cracked. “I’m not going to say it.”

“Why not?”

“Because I won’t give you the satisfaction of being kind.”

He laughed once, low, surprised. Then he kissed me.

It was not gentle. It was not cruel either. It was certain…a man who knew exactly what he wanted and had never been told no by anything he had wanted. I braced my hands against his chest to push him away.

But I did not push. Instead my fingers curled into his shirt.

When he broke the kiss, I was breathing like I had run up stairs. He looked at my face, at whatever was written there. And something dark and satisfied crossed his.

“There,” he murmured. “That’s the honesty I want.”

“That was a mistake.”

“Then make another one.”

He untied my robe himself. Slowly, giving me every second to say the word, stop. But I stood with my jaw locked and my eyes fixed on his collar while the cotton slid off my shoulders and fell.

The air touched my skin. I wanted to cover myself, I wanted to burn the whole house down…and I wanted him to stop talking and touch me again. Three wants, all at war, and my body had already picked a side.

“Look at me,” he said.

“No.”

“Look at me, Amarah.” he said again. His voice calm just like a whisper.

And slowly, I looked into his face.

His eyes were not cold. That was the horror of it. They were hungry and furious and something else I could not name. And they were fixed on me like I was the only lit thing in the dark room.

“Mine,” he said. Just low, against my throat.

“Never.” My voice came out a whisper, just like I'm talking to myself alone..

“For three years, Amarah. You have no choice.”

“Then not with my heart.”

“I don’t want your heart.” His mouth moved down my collarbone. “I want this.”

He touched me. Tender and slowly.

And I hated immediately that my head fell back. I hated the sound I made when his hand found the small of my back and pulled me against him, and I hated…most of all, that every nerve in my body knew exactly where he was.

He lifted me, so easily. Like I weighed nothing, and laid me on that wide bed. The sheets were cool. But his hands were not.

“Last chance,” he whispered. “Tell me to leave you alone.”

I looked at his face above mine. At the scar I had not noticed on his eyebrow, and at the pulse beating hard in his neck. He was shaking, just a little. The great Alistair Kensington was holding himself back with both hands.

“Stop talking,” I said. My voice came out loud, surprising even me.

And he did. He really stopped talking.

What followed wasn't love. I told myself that again and again, even as my nails dragged down his back and his name tore out of me, broken, against my will. It was heat, anger and every humiliation of the past three days burning itself down to something raw.

He took me like a man claiming territory. I let him. I fought him with my hands, my mouth and my teeth, and he seemed to like that, laughing roughly against my skin, whispering mine, mine, mine, until the word stopped being an insult and became the only thing I could hear.

When it ended, I lay shaking in a tangle of sheets, staring at the ceiling.  He rolled onto his back beside me. And neither of us spoke.

After a while he sat up and reached for his shirt.

“You can go.”

The words landed like a slap. Maybe he meant them too.

“What?” I asked, my anger climbed back in a full force.

“You heard me. Go to your room.”

I sat up and pulled the sheet to my chest. My voice came out steadier than I felt. “That’s it?”

“What did you expect?” He did not look at me.

“Flowers?”

“I expected nothing from you.”

“Good. Then you won’t be disappointed.”

I found my robe. I tied it with fingers that would not work right. At the door, I turned…hating him, hating myself, hating the heat still burning along my skin.

“You were wrong,” I said.

“About what?”

“You said you don’t need to force anyone. You didn’t. That’s the worst part.”

He finally looked at me. For one second, something cracked in his face, and then it closed again.

“Go to bed, Amarah.”

I sighed. And slowly I left the room.

But I did not go straight to my room. I took the long way, past the study. And I only did it because I could not stand the thought of lying alone in the dark with my own skin.

Then I noticed…the study door was open, just an inch. Light spilled across the marbles.

He was already there. I had not heard him come down. Alistair stood at his desk with his back to me…a framed photograph in his hand, two boys on a beach. One older, one younger, both laughing, with the older one arm crossed around the younger one’s neck.

His shoulders were shaking.

“I’m sorry, Leo,” he said, so quietly I almost did not catch it. “I did what I had to do. Forgive me, if you’re listening.”

The glass of drink I couldn't see, slipped from his other hand and shattered on the floor.

I backed away from the door without making a sound.

Leo. His older brother. The one who died five years ago.

I had always heard it was an accident. But nobody apologizes to a man for an accident.