I close the door to her condo behind us.

She turns to me.

Her face—she’s so fucking ready, my blood heats. Her eyes begging, her sweet mouth panting, her pale skin not merely flushed but blotchy with red. I haven’t even touched her, and I’m hard enough to bend her over the table now.

This is it.

What I’ve been imagining for days.

She’s not just ready, she’s asking for it—all the darkness, the force I’ve been taunting her with for the last week. She thinks she knows what’s coming—she has no idea. I choose not to think about what I forced her to learn and why she’s ready to ask for it. It’s time to forget all that.

It’s time to play.

And time to define the rules.

I reach for the lights and one by one hit all the switches. We’re plunged into darkness. The only light is the moon reflecting off the ocean through the bay window.

“Turn around,” I say.

I can’t see her, but I hear her feet move. I find her with my hands and pull her back against me. I grasp her wrists, then pull her hands up over my head.

She burrows her fingers in my hair.

“Tighter.” Her grip bites into my scalp, like she’s begging me with her hands. I trap her against me, one arm banding her waist, the other her chest. I lift her on tiptoe and rub where I’m hardest against her firm little ass.

“Do you like this?” I whisper in her ear.

“Mm.” She moves against me, rubbing back, her undulations as greedy as I feel.

But I need the words from her. “Answer. Yes or no?”

“Yes,” she seethes through her teeth, a demanding hiss.

I clutch her breast and squeeze. “You say no, I stop. No questions.”

“Okay.”

“Practice. Say no.”

She pauses and whispers, “No?”

I drop my hands.

She tightens her grip in my hair. “Come back.” The begging keen to her voice draws me to her.

I grab her again. She wiggles her ass against me and nuzzles her head on my shoulder. I tighten my hold, making her immobile. She struggles, but deeper into me, not away.

“I’m going to use you. Is that what you want?”

She digs fingers into my scalp. “Please.”

I slip my hand beneath her shirt and peel off the strap of her bra. Her nipple puckers between my fingertips, and she arches into my touch. “I’m going to work you until you beg me to let you come.”

Her mouth opens, and she starts to pant.

I breathe in her ear, “Then I’ll stop.”

Her body slackens. “Never stop.”

I line her ear with my tongue. Her little ribs pump beneath my arm, rapid intakes of breath. “I’m going to prime you for me. Not for you.”

She moans in protest.

I smile against her neck. “You say you’re not mine. But what I make you feel—that is mine.” I slip my hand beneath her skirt. She breathes fast but stays motionless, giving over to me.

My most primal urges come to life, the ones I pretend don’t exist. The things I want to do to her . . . I may control her, but the restraint I hold over myself is fast slipping. The emotions I repress, all the needs I keep locked away, are stirring.

I thread my fingers between her legs. “You’re wet from hearing my voice.”

She crooks her leg back around mine, opening for me, letting me in.

I stroke into her molten center. “You want me to fuck you.”

Her head falls back, and her hips grind into my fingers. “Yes.”

“Do you want me to hurt you?”

“No.”

I grin against her skin, “Good girl,” and I reward her with two fingers inside her.

She gasps out, “I’m not a—good—girl.”

“Yes, you are. You can’t help it.” I grind the heel of my hand on her clit at the same time I crook my fingers inside her and press. Her head lolls against my shoulder, and her moan makes me grate my cock against her harder. “You’re so good, you need me to fuck it out of you.”

“God, yes.”

“What if instead I do you slow like the pretty little girl you are. You’d hate me for it, wouldn’t you?”

She bites my ear and breathes into it. “I already do.”

“You’re going to hate me more for what I’m going to do. You want me to destroy you?”

Her breath catches and I worry she might say no, but she doesn’t disappoint. “Yes.”

She’s so enflamed around my fingers, the perfect softness for me to stretch and sink into. I wish I didn’t love her softness. It makes me want to wreck it.

I work my fingers, tweaking and pressing. Her hips thrust against my hand. Soon she’ll try to come, but I won’t let her. I want her to almost come and never come, until she aches so much she’s on her knees, my cock in her mouth, her eyes begging me to finish her.

When she’s quaking and stiffening against me, her breath stuttering with her growing climax, I slow my hand.

“No,” she cries.

I still. “No?”

“I mean—” She shakes her head, mindless. “Don’t stop.”

I push her skirt and underwear down her hips, trapping her thighs together. She whines, trying to separate her confined legs. I dig fingers into her ass cheek at the same time I twist her nipple. “You’re for me, remember?”

“Bite me.”

I do as she says and sink my teeth into her shoulder.

She hisses but moans with pleasure. A little pain is okay, interesting. This sweet girl who’s spent her life behind glass, within an hour of having her precious childhood shattered, is trusting me to give her the dirty things I’ve craved. Please God, let her be able to take more.

I pinch her ass, strong enough to bruise. Her ecstatic cry makes me hard enough to nail her through my jeans.

My need to torture her mounting, I taunt her. “Oh, poor good girl, does it ache?”

She whimpers in my ear, “I want to—come.”

“I don’t care.” Or I do care. I care a lot—about how she’ll come, how often, how I’ll give it to her, how she’ll beg for it, how she’ll look and feel when mindless with ecstasy.

But she doesn’t need to know that. It’s part of the game. Her in misery, I get off on it. Me in control, she gets off on it. She’s going to be wasted with my refusal to give her what she wants. And my torture is only starting.

I need to bury myself inside her, to fuck the sweetness out of her until she is spoiled for anything but sex. “I’m going to strip you and bend you over that table.”

Her feet slip, her knees weakening. “Now.”

“Once I start, I won’t stop.”

Her voice drops, groveling like she will when she’s on her knees. “What are you waiting for?”

I give in to the desire storming all caution from my brain. I wrench off her clothes and knock the chairs away. They land with a crash on the floor.

I grab her neck and press her naked breasts onto the table.

* * *

My cheek flattens against the lacquer tabletop. My nipples pebble and ache against the cold surface. I hear him open his pants and rip a condom wrapper.

I wait with euphoric bated breath, a blissful panic, hungering for what he’ll do next.

I turn to look at him, but he presses my face into the table. “Don’t move.”

His voice, the tones sound so low I can feel them vibrate in my ears. Each time he speaks, his words grate harsher. He grows more animal, more forceful with each sound, each movement. And it makes me hotter, wetter, and so painfully desperate for him that I’m ashamed of myself.

I like being ashamed of myself.

If anyone I know saw me, spread out naked on my dining room table for a man, they would be appalled. I want them to be. I want to shock them, to rid myself of everything I’ve defined my life by. It’s all a lie. I want it gone. And I want him to take it from me.

His breath comes hot on my neck, and his nails scrape down my back. My spine arches like he commands it to. He grips my ribs, breathes against my skin, and it’s like he’s molding my lungs, my heart, my blood to how he wants them to be. I am nothing but what he wants me to be.

His cock is heavy sliding on my back, and I ache for him to do what he says. For him to fuck me into oblivion. He lifts off of me, and the loss of his weight makes me moan with emptiness. I need him to fill me. To chase away everything else in this cruel world.

He spreads me open and probes me with his fingers where I’m wet. “So sweet. So tight,” he growls, the words detached from himself, more animal than man. I shiver. He said he would destroy me. He said he would use me. But what does that mean?

What’s he going to do to me?

He said he’ll never let me come. I can’t fathom that. The tabletop rubs me in the spot I need. If I move my hips just right . . .

“Nuh-uh.” He pulls my hips backward, bringing the edge of the table to my waist.

The pressure gone from where I need it, I thrust my hips on open air and I moan for the loss, the ache, the insatiable yearning in me that I fear he will never satisfy. “Pleeease.”

“Poor sweet girl,” he says. “Is this what you want?” He reaches beneath me and massages my clit.

I respond on instinct, my body crying out for “More. I need—”

He takes his hand away. “This isn’t about what you need. This is about what I want.”

My protests are silenced by his cock edging inside me. The rounded head stretches me. I want to see him, but it’s too dark. I have no idea how big he is.

He probes deeper, and it’s like being carved open. Like he’s reshaping me to fit him, like I’m a vessel made only for him.

Fear shakes me. I can’t do it. I can’t give myself over to him. I’ll lose myself. I’ll lose everything I am.

“No” is on my tongue. I inhale the shape of the word. I don’t want him to re-make me. What will happen to me when he’s done and I’m no longer me? Who will I be? I’ll be nothing and no one except who he tells me to be.

I’m afraid of being nothing. The nothing I have been since I heard those recordings . . . with his sister’s voice . . .

The nothing I will become if he keeps taking me like a god reshaping me to his will.

He starts to move, and I am as full of him as I am with fear, but it feels so fucking good the fear only makes it better.

He thrusts into me, his hips slapping my ass, his hands gripping my waist like a vise. He drains me. I’m slipping away. Each time he pulls out, he takes more of me with him. Each time he pushes back in, he replaces more of me with himself.

I’m disappearing. Me and everything that is me. I’m a gaping hole of ecstatic fear. I shake. I dig fingers into the table, desperate to hold onto a piece of myself.

He groans louder with every pump of himself into me, pounding me harder, compelling me to take more. My skin slides against the table, my whole body rocking and quaking in time with his movements. I cannot fight him. I am overtaken with sensation.

He rakes every pleasure point in me over and over again, until I’m screaming with the need to come. The orgasm claws at my insides but cannot get out. One touch of my clit, and I’ll come. One touch is all.

But he doesn’t help me. My hands can’t reach me.

My cries morph to words. “Please—please—please.”

If I orgasm, I’ll have something of mine. I won’t be nothing. I’ll be ecstasy. But I can’t come. So I am only his. His to wreck, his to destroy, his to use—his.

A shout explodes from his throat, and he spasms into me, ramming me full of himself, spilling everything he has into me.

I am full of him, and a vacant well of agony. My skin throbs.

He falls onto me, his chest holding me down, keeping me from bucking in protest. It enflames my explosive need to come—and the fear he’ll never let me.

My skin, my body screams for more. But words aren’t forming, only sounds—desperate, pathetic whimpers I thought could never escape me.

“Do you think—you deserve—to come?” His growl in my ear rumbles low like that of a beast asking if I’ll consent to being his prey.

I can only make one-syllable cries. Words won’t form, only the echoes of every synapse in my body pleading for him to give me what he says. I try to nod.

“Ask me,” he orders and licks me like the ravenous animal who’s only just begun his meal.

My lips and tongue—they try to work, but can’t.

“Say it,” he growls and bites my ear.

I stammer, “I . . . need . . . please . . .”

He moves in me, reminding me he’s still hard, then reaches beneath me. His fingers connect with my clit, and I shudder, the sensations he rubs into me firing through my nerves like biting flames.

He murmurs things in my ear, descriptions of how hard he’s going to make me come and how it will never satisfy me, how it will never be enough—not with him. With him, I won’t be sated until he’s through with me.

I shatter, detonating around him. The explosion of bliss numbs my mind from the emotional turmoil he’s brought to my life, and as I come down, I know he’s right.

My gyrations against him fade, and in its place comes a hurt, a vacant sadness that craves the climactic numbness he knows I’ll need forever.

To torment me more in the worst possible way, he pulls out of me—lets go of me.

Without his support, I slide off the table. My knees hit the floor, and I start to shake, a quaking from my heart into my bones.

More. I need more.

My breath huffs in ragged drops, like hiccups. I open my eyes to see his toes lit in the moonlight.

“Look at me.” His gruff order is like something from the bottom of an abyss, an invitation to fall inside, to lose myself in the darkness of him.

I’m too weak to lift my head. I’m a throbbing mess of bliss and soreness. I can’t think or feel anything except the pain of emptiness and the yearning for him to fill me again.

He cups my chin and lifts my face. My gaze sweeps up his body. A pattern of moonlight and shadow plays across his skin. I cross over his bare cock, hanging thick and long between his thighs. He took off the condom. I can’t help licking my lips.

He raises my gaze to his face. His mouth I can’t see, but his eyes are striped with white light. His irises glow green like a wolf’s in the night, ferocious and heated.

I swallow. He’s far from finished with me, and I can’t hide my hope he’ll give me what I need, but if I ask, he might say no.

“You think I’ll let you come again.” It’s a warning, not a question.

My tongue stutters. I’m afraid to speak, afraid he could leave me here on my knees begging him for more.

He lowers my face to his cock and turns my head so my lips brush the length of him. “Say no.”

I should.

I shouldn’t want this. I should make him stop.

But I don’t.

Instead, I open my mouth.