I try to turn my head but Rafe’s voice cuts through the air like a blade. “Don’t look away.”
I freeze.
“I said,” he growls, “don’t fucking look away.”
My eyes snap back to the screen. My gut flips. I watch my own mouth stretch open around a moan. I know what’s coming. I know this part. Nathan always knew how to build tension. How to film it like love, fuck it like theater, lie like he meant it.
“You still touch yourself to this?” Rafe asks.
I want to lie. Iwantto. But my throat stays silent.
“You watch it when you want to feel wanted,” he says. “When you want to remember what it felt like to bekept.”
I nod. Barely. My face burns. My stomach’s doing flips and my chest feels too tight and I don’t know what this is—punishment? Exposure? A fucking lesson?
“But it wasn’t real,” Rafe snarls. “You know that now.”
My jaw clenches. “Doesn’t matter.”
“It does.”
The screen flickers. Nathan moans something sweet. I flinch. My nails dig into the bedframe. “Stop it—”
“No.” Rafe’s voice cuts me off like a whip.
“Watch it, Jules. Watch what he made you believe. Watch what he used to fuck you and sell you. Watch it, andfeelhow fucking fake it is.”
My mouth opens. No words come out. I’m sitting there, trembling, soaked in my own sweat and Kai’s high and shame that tastes like vomit. Watching myself beg a man who threw me away like trash to fuck me harder. Watching myself cry from it—thinking it meant love.
And Rafe is across from me, silent and staring, seething in a way that fills the entire room, but he doesn’t touch me and he doesn’t stop it. “You want me to destroy this?” he asks quietly. “Say the word.”
I can’t say it. Not yet, because some stupid, broken part of me still wants to remember what it felt like to be loved, even if it was all a fucking lie, even if Rafe’s right about everything, even if this—him, the tape, this chair, this room, this suffocating silence—is the only real thing I’ve got left.
When the tears finally come, they don’t start slow.
They crash. One blink, and they’re just there—hot and humbling, streaking down my face before I can bite them back. Before I can steel my spine or make a joke or snarl something filthy to hold my dignity together with spit and string. No. I fall apart. Messy. Ugly. Cracked down the middle like the glass behind Nathan’s smile.
“Make it stop,” I whisper. Then louder, hoarse and breaking, “Please, Rafe, make it stop—make him go away—make me forget—please—”
And Rafe moves. He crosses the room in three long strides, the remote hitting the floor with a clatter I barely hear because my pulse is screaming. My hands are fists. My breath’s a riot. I’m bracing for the slap of tape across my mouth again, bracing for the silence and the rough hands and the punishment, because that’s what he does when I spiral, right?
But he doesn’t tape my mouth. He tapes my fucking throat. A single strip of black, ripped clean and fast, pressed tight just under my jaw like a collar. One perfect line, sealing me in.
My breath catches. My fingers go to it immediately—not to tear it off. Not to resist. I just touch it. Slowly. Wonderingly. Thumb brushing along the adhesive line like I don’t understand what just happened. Like I’m trying to memorize the pressure. The claim.
“Rafe…”
“Look at me.”
The command is low. I obey.
He grabs the remote again and presses another button, and the screen behind him flickers—no longer Nathan, no longer betrayal, but me.
A live feed from a camera I didn’t even notice. There I am on the screen right now, kneeling on Rafe’s bed, tear-streaked and flushed, the tape tight around my throat, my eyes wide and my lips parted like I’ve forgotten how to breathe.
Collared.
I look… glorious.
