Page 37 of Iron and Ivory

His obsession with me is so thorough, so perfectly engineered, it's—and I say this with the kind of clarity that only comes from distance—both frightening and genuinely impressive.

That's a terrible thing to admit, and I understand this. But wrapping an ultimatum into the syntax of devotion, making a threat sound like a love letter, dialing the frequency of control so fine you can't look away—that's a talent.

Half the women I know would scroll past it and call it romance.

Marcus has that talent. Apparently.

The total commitment of it is scary good.

Heavy on the scary, light on the good.

Because there's something really wrong with his reaction.

Obviously, he's psychotic. I don't say that as hyperbole and I don't say it as a woman scorned, I say it as someone who has had the singular and frankly illuminating experience of bein' kidnapped, cleaned, and then tied to a bed for days while he kept me sedated and compliant so he could fed me cherry pie like it’s a reasonable thing to do to a person you claim to love.

That actually happened to me.

That is a true series of events in my actual life.

And yet, the most astonishing thing about Marcus White Jr. is not the psychosis.

The truly stunning thing is his entitlement.

And I don't use that word lightly. I am not bein' careless with it, not slingin' it around the way people do on social media when they mean something that's really just annoyance dressed up in the vocabulary of grievance.

I mean it the way it's meant to be used.

Entitlement as inheritance, as atmosphere, as the particular quality of air that surrounds a person who has never once been told no and had it stick.

Entitlement is something that gets bred into a child. It doesn't arrive all at once. It accumulates. It's in the way a door is held, and the way an apology is given, and the way a room rearranges itself around a person before they've even finished walkin' through it.

It lives in the expectation that the world will continue to organize itself in your favor, not because you've earned it but because it always has, and that kind of history feels like proof.

Ask me how I know.

I was raised up in entitlement. Raised through it, the way a vine is trained up a garden wall—patiently, persistently, until the shape of it is just the shape of you and you can't remember growing any other way.

Beyond the longing for something as simple and ruinous as privacy or as desirable as Legion's hands on my body in the dark—I have never lacked a single thing in my entire life.

Not once. Not even close.

I wake up every morning expecting this ranch to be here.

Expectin' Cassia to be in her stall, warm, and solid, and smelling like hay and horse sweat. Her dark bay coat already brushed by the time I get to the barn because someone on staff has been up since four a.m. making sure of it.

I expect the grass to be green in the summer because our irrigation system doesn't know what failure looks like.

I expect the mile-long driveway to be plowed before I ever need to drive it, and I expect that expectation to go unnoticed, unremarked upon, folded so quietly into the texture of daily life that it doesn't even register as a luxury.

There is not one crevice of my mind where doubt about any of this lives.

That's entitlement.

And this is how Marcus sees me.

This is the inventory he ran when Eleanor introduced us, or sold me—whichever it was.

He didn't see me as his wife.