“Open your eyes,” he says.
I don’t. He responds to my disobedience by pressing the knife harder into my chest.
“Open.Your.Fucking.Eyes.”
The blade reaches deeper into my chest, hitting that hard spot above my ribcage. I cry out and open my eyes.
“Good,” he says. “Now, you didn’t answer my question did you?”
I just stare dully into his black eyes.
“Do you want to die today, Julie?”
Fresh tears prick at my eyes and anger blossoms in my fragile heart.
He started this. He got what he deserved for killing my father and setting his sons upon a defenseless teenage girl.
“Funny,” I whisper. “I never gave your sons a choice.”
It’s suicidal talking like this, but I can’t help it. I’m battered and broken and beyond caring what happens next. Rage fills his features and he clenches his teeth so hard, I could imagine them shattering from the pressure.
But as Dornan’s knife sinks deeper into my chest, millimeter by agonizing millimeter, I can’t help but struggle. I pull at the ropes binding my wrists and ankles, twisting while at the same time trying to keep my chest from moving. Trying to keep Dornan’s blade from going any deeper.
Is this it? Is this really the end? It can’t be, not yet. Surely he’s not finished with me.
And of course, he’s not. He removes the knife from my chest with a sickening squelch noise and places it beside my head. I turn my eyes and strain to see it, laying on the coiled bedsprings beside me. It’s so tantalizingly close, but with my arms bound tightly, there’s no way I can reach it.
I’m torn back to the moment by his hands at my panties. He tries to yank them down, but my weight is on them and they won’t budge past my thighs. And I’m not exactly helping him out with my dead weight and my clenched thighs.
He reaches for the knife and with two swift movements, he’s sliced my panties off and thrown them on the ground. Now I’m wearing nothing except the shirt and the bra he’s already cut open.
In an instant, before I can blink, he’s straddling me, still fully dressed, his pants unzipped, and his cock hard and ready in his palm.
And once he begins, I want to die. I want him to stab me with the knife. Anything but this.
I can’t describe the feeling so much as what’s happening to my heart. It’s breaking, like an old porcelain mug—the crack that goes deep but just looks like an innocent little line in the pattern, until one day you lift it to your lips to drink and it shatters in your hand, sending boiling hot liquid down your chest, scalding your skin and making you scream.
That’s what my heart breaking feels like.
He leans over me, his tattooed arms on either side of my head, so that no matter where I look, all I can see is Dornan. He fills my gaze just as he fills me inside. Roughly. Painfully.
I begin to cry as I close my eyes, tears running down my face and pooling in my ears, some making it past and sliding down my neck. He doesn’t miss them either; swooping down, he presses his lips to the tender spot just below my ear.
“Does that feel good?” he asks, smiling widely, his lashes drooping ever-so-slightly from the pleasure he’s obviously feeling.
I shake my head angrily back and forth. No. It doesn’t feel good. It feels like I want to die.
The springs pull at my hair as he continues to drive into me, pushing me up the bed with every upward thrust until I’m convinced most of my hair is embedded in the bed springs forevermore.
“I’ll try harder,” he murmurs, biting my neck as he reaches down and applies a thumb to my swollen bud of nerves.
My legs begin to shake and my breath quickens as I fight to resist his touch, the way he’s scratching the itch inside me. If I weren’t tied up, if he weren’t a monster, we might be two lovers entwined, bringing each other close to the edge, to—as he called it—the little death.
I can’t. I won’t. “Please, stop,” I beg, as the circles he’s rubbing threaten to make me explode.
What’s happening to me? The way he’s touching me shouldn’t matter, because it’s Dornan. The man who destroyed everything; the man who is destroying the last pieces of me right now on this bare bed. I should feel nothing, but after weeks upon weeks of horror and pain, the primitive part of me is screaming for this release, for this small act of pleasure, for some fucking break from the relentless agony that is my existence.
But my brain interjects – my higher intelligence demands that I can’t possibly let this happen.
“Stop!” I cry, louder this time. What else can I do? This is far, far worse than any pain he’s inflicted on me yet.