Chapter 17

S he hasn’t come out of her room all evening. After eating and checking over the documents Blake did for her, I took the chance and returned to Dunhaven to close up the house for the rest of the year and make sure the car had stopped burning.

After everything was in order, I returned home to find her still in her room.

Being back home always makes me feel slightly off for the first few days. It’s like putting on a thick sweater that coats my real personality beneath its weight.

It’s sad, really, that I have to become something different to survive. Though I guess a lot of us do to make it anymore. For fifty weeks a year, I do no harm. I suppress all feelings and desires within me and take care of others.

Those two weeks a year when I’m free of society’s constraints are intoxicating. Now, I’m home early. It’s after midnight, so it would’ve been my tenth day at Grimrose, and I’d be cleaning Grace’s bones right about now.

If things hadn’t gone awry.

The moments we shared in the truck yesterday were the rawest I’ve ever had with someone. Though I was already gearing up to return home, I was comfortable and bewitched by her proximity and touch.

She has this way of making me feel like being myself isn’t a crime against humanity.

When we got home, it hadn’t gone unnoticed that she was confused by my change in demeanor. She looked at me as though she were seeing me with fresh eyes.

I’ve been low-key worried about how she’d respond to seeing this side of me—when it’s absurd, really.

She should want this side of me over the other. This man is a renowned surgeon who performed two major surgeries overseas last year that not only earned me awards but also national attention.

I make over six figures a year, and I have my shit together. My home is beautiful, and I always drive the latest cars.

Nothing about this version of me is anything but desirable to women. It’s the other side of me I’ve always had to worry about.

It’s why I’ve never been in a relationship before.

But she seemed to crave the deep, dark version of me she met. She came for him, even. She begged for his touch. That’s why I thought she’d be perfect for me .

Now, though, she’s hidden away in her room like she can’t stand to look at me.

It’s confusing the shit out of me.

Finally growing the nerve, I shuffle down the hall to her room. Pushing the door open, I find her sprawled out on the bed in only her panties.

It looked like she was so tired she couldn’t even make it beneath the covers.

I inwardly berated myself for spiraling in my head while she was asleep.

“Cain?” she whispers as I flip her over and pick her up.

Using one hand from beneath her body in my arms, I peel back the covers and lay her down. “Shh, darling. I’m just putting you to bed.”

“Mm,” she answers, grabbing my wrist as I turn to exit. “Stay with me, psycho.”

My brows tug together at her request, my heart thrumming at her nickname for me.

I don’t know if it’s wise to keep her because she’s seen who I am beneath all the money and power. As much as I can hide him away beneath Armani suits and flashy diamonds, I can’t make her unknow him. Force her to unsee the things she’s seen.

Removing my pants and shirt, I get into the bed, sliding beneath the covers with Grace and snuggling close.

The feel of her cuddling against me lulls me beneath a thick, clotted fog of complacency as I close my eyes .

“Goodnight, darling.”

“God!” I shoot awake with a scream, unsure of why I’m screaming in the first place, until I look down into the hazel eyes of the blonde beauty with her mouth on my cock.

I stretch out, jutting into her mouth deeper. “Fuck, puppet. Good morning to you, too.”

Her piercings gleam in the sun streaming through the windows, and I regretfully eye them. I hadn’t known I’d keep her with me, and now she’s got them for the rest of her life. Of course, I could remove them all, but there’d be scars.

“Use them,” she says, pulling her mouth off my length, spit trailing her chin. “Tug on them,” she adds.

The thought of being who I am two weeks out of the year while actively trying to be who I am the rest of the time makes my heart race even faster.

“No. I can’t be… No.”

She wipes her mouth, climbing over me to straddle my lap. Looking down at me with fevered eyes, she asks, “Why? You put them there, yet now you look at them like they disgust you.”

I run my hands over her piercings, some of them shifting as I glide past. She hisses as if it feels good, head lolling back .

“I didn’t know I’d want to keep you, little puppet.”

“So?” she counters. “We’re going back to that house next year, right? They will be there for when we go back.” She leans down, her lips gamboling close to mine. “For when you make me dance for you again.”

A lunatic-driven chuckle heaves from me before I can staunch it. I clear my throat, trying to fight the war between good and evil in my chest. “What are you doing? What game are you playing this morning?” I ask her, grabbing her shoulders and straightening her, pushing her away from my lips for my own sanity.

“It’s no game. I’m only trying to reconcile the man you are here with the man you were there.”

Just as I thought, she’s confused.

“Think of it like two personalities, Grace. I can’t be him while I’m here. He’s not accepted by society.”

She reaches between us, standing my dick up and teasing it through her wet cunt. Now I’m the one hissing.

“But he’s accepted here. With me.”

Her words mean nothing, even if it’s enticing to think I could come home each night and take off the mask I wear for the world. It would never work.

“Stop pushing me,” I grit out as she slides down my length with her hungry center, heat, and tight muscles enveloping me.

She grabs my hand, leading it to her throat. “Choke me, master. Come on. You stole me for this. You ran me off the fucking road, pierced me, strung me up like a fucking toy, and ruined me. I can’t go back to the world, Cain. You’ve changed me. I’m fucking ruined!” she screams her words at me, rage filtering through her voice as tears stream down her cheeks.

She hasn’t stopped riding my cock, and it’s a high all its own, rivaling her words and tears.

“Stop,” I plead, feeling the mental wall in my brain attempting to shatter.

It can’t. I don’t know who I am without the structure of how I live and how I’ve survived for so many years.

“You have to stop,” I tell her.

She grips my hand around her throat. “No. I don’t. You did this to me. You did this to us. You want me to embrace this life and be your good little fuck puppet; you do the same. Or I’m leaving, Cain.”

Her words rattle me, and the wall I’ve built to keep others safe, to keep myself in check, breaks. As bricks tumble down and dust permeates my mind, I grip her throat firmly, flipping us over and driving into her at a bruising pace.

“You’re going nowhere, puppet. You are mine,” I growl, watching her eyes turn heady and fill with bliss.

“I’ll leave,” she manages. “I’ll walk away and never come back.”

I thrust harder, punishing her cunt at her words. “You’ll be chasing the fucking high I give you the entire time, darling.”

She lifts off the pillow, tiny hands wrapping around my wrist at her neck. “If you hide away beneath the plastic veil of Doctor Mordova, I’ll be chasing the same high.”

Her words ripple through me, truth slamming me over the head like a hammer.

I stop moving, cock throbbing inside her, begging me to continue.

She whimpers at the loss of movement.

For a long moment, we stare at one another.

“You know I’m right,” she says. “You made me see what I was missing, Cain. You can’t ask me to go back to before. To ignorance.”

“I can’t… It’s complicated…”

She shakes her head. “No. It’s not. You be what you need to be out there. But at home, you’re mine. And you’re free. You’re you.”

“It’ll never work,” I tell her, teasing her with one slow stroke through her pussy.

She moans, arching and dropping her head onto the pillow.

She lets go of my wrist, outstretching her arms on the bed, giving over to me completely.

“Then kill me.”

I keep taunting her with slow, deliberate strokes.

“Kill you? Darling girl, that would be counterproductive.”

My other hand rubs her clit, swirling and grinding against the little bud as Grace digs her heels into my ass.

“I don’t want to go back to before. I can’t. As much as I hate how you derailed my life, Cain, I’m addicted to this.”

Her words have me teetering on the edge. I am intoxicated by the idea of being me all year long. Will I still have the urge to kill? I don’t know. However, I do know that I found someone who seems to accept me for me.

That’s the dream, too, isn’t it? To find the one person in the entire universe that sees you. That quiets the world’s noise beyond the bubble the two of you live in.

She might be it for me.

There’s an idea in the back of my head that says she’s toying with me, trying to gain her freedom by dropping my defenses. However, she could’ve escaped while I was in Dunhaven last night. I was gone for hours.

“Cain, harder,” she begs, pulling me back to the moment like she’s my tether to reality.

I give her what she wants, curling my hand around her throat until I hear her struggling for air.

Tomorrow, she’ll have petechiae surrounding her beautiful eyes from the loss of oxygen, and it makes me nearly come at the thought.

“You want me to leave the doctor at the door and let the madman free?” I ask her, pounding into her as I feel my spine tingle and orgasm loom.

She nods, unable to speak under my power.

“As you wish, darling.”

Letting her throat go, I don’t give her time to catch her breath as I drop my face into the crook of her neck and sink my teeth in deeply, tasting blood .

Frenzy sets in for us both.

She bucks against me from below, arms wrapping around me, nails digging down my back.

I growl into her neck, fucking her with everything I have, knowing this moment is life-defining. I can feel it between us.

Like a contract, we’re both signing with blood and promise.

Promise to be ourselves within the walls of this house.

“Fuck, you feel so good, damnit,” I whimper, losing myself in her tight body, drilling as deep as I can as she grips my ass.

“Don’t stop. Fuck, don’t stop,” she begs, and the tip of my cock tingles at the tone of her voice, at the way her walls flutter around me.

“Cain!” she shouts, coming hard, and stars pepper my vision as I follow.

“Fuckkkkk, Grace!”

Our pace is unrelenting as we wring out every ounce of pleasure from the moment as our breathing melds together and our bodies shudder against one another.

“Don’t hide from me again,” she says into my ear, causing gooseflesh to rise.

I lift off her, striking her throat with my hand like a pissed-off cobra, my teeth oozing with venom. My eyes harden as I look down at her as she grips my hand to get air, her eyes growing with delicious fear. “Don’t tell me what to do, puppet. Or I’ll fuck your ass raw as you dangle from one hook. Do you understand me?”

I swear I see grim satisfaction in her eyes as she smirks and nods in my hold.

“Good girl.”

However, as I slide out of her, I realize I’m still hard. Painfully so.

Driving back inside, I don’t let go of her delicate neck as I fuck her hard and fast, racing the clock before she passes out.

“I think you were right, puppet. It feels good to be myself at home for once.”

Her pupils are blown, and panic is setting in, but I know my little perfect doll is completely fine because her pussy is squirting around my shaft like a filthy little whore.

“Fuck, look at the mess you’re making, you slutty little girl.”

The more I fuck her, the more she soaks my sheets and cock. It’s how I know everything will work out in the end.

How I know she’s mine.

“Look how wet you’re getting my cock, fuck puppet. Goddamn, you feel good.”

When I come this time, I pull out and shoot it in her gaping mouth as she tries to breathe from my hand, releasing her.

“Swallow me down, puppet. Wouldn’t want to waste your breakfast.”