His lashes flutter, and he turns his face toward me, but he still doesn’t look me in the eyes. Coward. Or maybe survivor.
His voice is a whisper. A ghost of something that should’ve never been born. “He made me feel… seen.”
My stomach clenches.
Julian exhales like it hurts to say it out loud. “Like I wasn’t just some flashy rookie with pretty stats and a fake smile. Like I mattered. Like I was… wanted. Needed. Important.”
He still won’t meet my gaze. I press my forehead to his, forcing the air between us to go still, to go honest.
“You are important,” I say, voice low, ragged. “But you never fucking mattered to him, Jules. You were a hole to bury his secrets in.”
“I know,” he whispers, and that’s the worst part. He does know.
I move my hand again, just enough to make him gasp, to make his thighs twitch against the ache, to remind him he’s still here. Still alive. Still mine to fix. To break. To rebuild.
“You don’t get to miss someone who left you like this,” I growl, teeth scraping his jaw. “You don’t get to ache for the man who filmed you and smiled while you drowned.”
“I’m trying…” he whimpers. “I don’t know how.”
And that’s when I finally kiss him again hard and possessive. I don’t care if his lips bruise, if his mouth splits again. I need it. Need him—the taste of him, the breath he gives up when I take, the broken moans I force out of his throat until he stops thinking about Nathan fucking Grant and starts thinking only about me.
Only me.
My name.
My hands.
My rules.
When I pull back, he’s panting, pupils blown, mouth red and wet and swollen.
“You want to feel important, Julian?” I growl, voice thick with heat and fury and something that might resemble devotion if it weren’t so savage. “Then you better fucking remember who you belong to now.”
I brace one hand on the mattress beside his head, the metal creaking beneath us, and let the other drift lower—down his belly, over the sharp line of his hip, between his trembling thighs. He’s already shaking, breath catching high in his chest, eyes half-lidded and wet. And when I slide my fingers lower, brushing him open with the slow, cruel patience of a man taking apart a lock, Julian makes a sound I’ll be hearing in my fucking skull for years.
I press the tip of my finger against his hole—already clenching for something he’s terrified to want—and I don’t let him look away. I want to see the exact second his past loosens its hold on his throat.
“Rafe…” he breathes, voice thin as glass.
“Shh.” My lips graze the corner of his mouth, the ghost of a kiss he’ll beg for again in a minute. “Open up.”
And he does. Barely. Enough.
I push my finger inside him, slow and deep and unforgiving, and Julian jerks under me—back arching, mouth falling open in a broken gasp. His hand shoots up to grab my forearm, nails digging in, but I pin him harder to the bed with my weight, make him feel every inch of what I’m giving and every inch of what he didn’t get from the man who lied to him.
His breath is shaking so hard I feel it against my mouth.
“That’s it,” I whisper against his lips, voice low and dark, “feel something real for once.” I curl my finger just slightly—just enough to make his eyebrows pull together, just enough to make his throat work around a whimper. “Tell me, Jules… did he ever touch you like this? Slow? Deep? Like he wanted to memorize the way you break?”
He shakes his head, cheeks flushed, tears streaking down his face like surrender.
“No?” I breathe, dragging my mouth along his jaw. “Of course he didn’t. Secrets don’t get treated gently. They get used.”
Julian whimpers—soft but sharp, his hips pushing down like he can’t stop himself.
I push my finger deeper and he gasps. Good.
“I want you to remember this,” I murmur, my lips brushing his, each word a threat dressed up as worship. “I want you to feel my hands every time you think about watching that video again.”
