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“I’m not. I’m soaked through, we’re standing under a shower, everything’s wet… I…”

“Fair point but just to be sure, let’s check, shall we?” But here’s the thing, he didn’t just dive right in but instead he paused long enough to watch me. As if he knew the signs of my body language better than I did. And when I finally realized my mistake, it was too late to take it back with words. Because my body betrayed me yet again as it gave a tiny little push against where his hand remained cupping my sex through my pants. Which ultimately meant that I had just given him exactly what he wanted.

The green light.

My mouth opened, ready to tell him no but nothing came out. And I didn’t fully understand why. Not when I should have been afraid that he was going to hurt me. That was the sensible thing to be afraid of. The fact that I was tied up in a shower stall by a man with a body count and no name. A dangerous scenario any woman with an ounce of sense would have been screaming about.

I wasn’t and that… That was the whole problem.

He had put his hands on me since stepping foot in here and he hadn’t hurt me, not anything beyond squeezing my wrist for a few seconds.

Even when he had tied me up, he had wound that gauze around me the way a nurse would. He had checked it with a finger underneath and loosened it when it pulled on the left. Somewhere in the middle of one of the worst hours of my life my body had gone ahead and made its own decision about him. And what it had decided could end up being the single most foolish decision I had ever made in my life. But it couldn’t be helped as it kept coming back to the feeling of being safe. Of being protected. Of being handled with care, despite the fucked-up circumstances that led me here.

So, no. I wasn’t frightened that he would hurt me.

I was frightened of what I would let him do if he didn’t. And of how much I wanted to find out.

And now, he knew this too. Just a tiny movement of my body told him all of this. He didn’t look triumphant, which was what I had braced for. He looked like something far worse and far quieter. A kind of terrible warmth, as he let out a long breath and dropped his head so that his mouth was at my temple.

“There it is baby girl.” Barely a whisper.

“But I didn’t say anything.”

“I know exactly what you didn’t say and it…”

“…It was the beautiful silence that begged me.”

18

ALL OF YOU

ANNA

His hand didn’t move for what seemed like the longest time.

That was the first cruelty. He just held me there, his palm warm and heavy through the wet cotton, and waited. Waited and watched my face while he did it. Like he had all afternoon. Like the water could run cold and the guards’ shift could change. Like the world could end outside that door, and he would still be standing right here with his hand between my legs. Still waiting for me to give him something I had already decided he wasn’t getting.

Now I just had to get my body to agree.

“You’ve gone very still,” he observed softly, yet I didn’t answer him. In fact, I’d stopped trusting my own voice about four minutes ago.

“Look at that.” His mouth came to the side of my throat, not kissing yet, just resting there, so I felt every word land against my pulse.

“You’re holding your breath for me, little one.”

I let the breath go the second he said this and hated that he’d seen it. But I hated even more that giving it up felt like saying yes to something. Then his mouth opened against my neck and everything I’d been holding together came apart in stages after that.

He was slow about it. That’s what I hadn’t braced for, although I wasn’t sure why. Not when he’d taken his time with everything else up until now, so it made sense he would carry on this way.

But regardless, I’d braced for force, because force I understood. Force I’d survived before and had a whole set of instructions for fallout. Not just how to deal with the fucked-up present, but what came after when I was sitting in the dark replaying it over in my head. When it was time to put it away in a box and keep it there like a Kraken that belonged at the bottom of the ocean.

What he did instead was take his time, dragging his lips up the line of my throat, finding the place under my jaw where my pulse was giving me away and settling there. Sucking… kissing… nipping at the tender flesh hard enough that I knew it would still be there tomorrow. Hard enough that I understood he meant it to be. Then his teeth, a graze first, then a real bite, and the sound I made was not one I’d ever heard come out of myself before.

His free hand came up and took my breast, but he didn’t hurry that part either. His palm was so large that it covered me entirely, and a breathy moan escaped me before I could stop it. Especially when his thumb found my nipple through nothing at all, because the bra had stopped being a garment ten minutes ago. Then he rolled it, back and forth, patient as a man doing something he’d thought about for a long while and I hated how badly my body craved for more. As if he knew he was driving me wild with this slow, torturous exploration of my body. Like a puppet master promising to pull my strings in exactly the right way. Which was why my body did a foolish thing.

My hips moved.

Just once.