CHAPTER 1
Birdie
Something isn’t quite right.
My eyes snap open, and my heart is about to explode. Two nights in a row, I’m yanked out of my sleep with a terrible feeling shooting my anxiety through the roof. Yesterday, it was because I thought I missed Butterfly Man’s note. Tonight…I don’t know.
Although I should feel safer I have Jacob in my corner along with Tristan and his team, and more in control after the moves I’ve made this morning, I can’t shake the feeling something bad is going to happen, like the sudden death of your favorite character in a book.
What are you up to, Butterfly Man?
Without getting up—I don’t want Tristan to barge in again—I reach for my phone on the nightstand to check the time. 1:36 a.m. Great. I only got two hours of sleep. I guess stress and fear do that to you.
Emotions are little, tricky things. As a woman who, at a very young age, has been taught not to show her emotions—or there will be heavy consequences—for self-preservation purposes, I’ve learned to keep them locked. With time, however, there was no closet big enough to contain them, no lock strong enough to hold them back. That’s why I write. I let my feelings out in my stories, a safe haven where they roam free without fear of being caught.
Opening the nightstand top drawer, I glance at the many journals and notepads hogging most of the space. I need an outlet for the emotions that are tearing me apart. Tempted, Ibrush my fingers over the engraved leather cover of the journal on top.
Swiftly, I draw my hand back and shut the drawer. If I start writing, I won’t stop, and I need to get some sleep. So I open the second drawer and settle for the next best thing to blow off some steam. The rose.
Unpopular opinion, but wands, dildos, even bullets aren’t my best friends. The idea of inserting anything that runs on batteries inside my vagina is terrifying, and if I’m being honest, nothing works better than my own fingers while my all-time favorite written smut scenes play together in my head. The rose, though, has changed my perspective about sex toys. Whoever invented it must be a woman as she clearly understands female body anatomy and the annoyance a cock-shaped toy—anything man-related in general—could bring.
Glancing up at the security camera, I hesitate to start. What’s Monarca’s protocol on intimate privacy? I don’t think it’s detailed in the contract, and I’ve never bothered to ask. Sexual pleasure in any form has been at the bottom of my priority list since my performance for Butterfly Man. The last thing I want is another self-pleasure scene caught on camera.
Should I put a towel on the camera and text that I need a moment?Could you be more obvious, Birdie?I blow out a frustrated breath. “I just need to get some sleep.”
My eyes dart between the camera and the drawer. “Fuck it.” I slip the rose under the covers. It’s a covert toy—hopefully the men don’t know what it’s for—and the room is dark. If I stay very very quiet, no one will even notice.
The team in the control room, maybe, but you know Tristan is also watching, and he will notice.
I don’t care. It won’t be the first time he sees me come. My need for some shut-eye is bigger than my shame.
And if he comes in? Right in the middle of it? Or just when you’re at the edge and desperate for release? Will you have the clarity to tell him to leave? Will he have the decency to listen?
Images of shirtless Tristan barging in while I’m spread open, a sex toy between my thighs, play in my head. My whole body throbs with forbidden desires. I close my eyes, and I see it. The hunger that will spurt in his intense gaze, the swelling in his pants that will grow with every undulation of my body as I chase my pleasure. Every contort of my face, every gasp, an invitation, a call to everything primal in him to take over. To punish. To claim.
I bolt out of the bed and lock the door.
“Okay. He can’t come in. Let’s do this. Nice and quick.” I slide under the covers, pulling them over my head, and give my back to the camera. Setting the rose on my favorite mode, I pull down my panties.
As soon as the vibration hits my wetness, my dirty imagination does its thing. Vivid visuals of my antiheroes come alive, in my room, in my bed, touching and tasting every inch of me, doing, together, naughty wicked things to my body, each in their way.
Then it sneaks up on me. A face I haven’t written yet, fully masked with a neon butterfly for a mouth, peeking in from the dark like a flash of lightning that disrupts the night.
My heart skips a beat as my eyes snap open. The rose humming its vibrations along with my accelerated breathing arethe only sounds in the room, but, for a second there, in sync, another breath joins mine.
I pause the toy and sit upright. In the darkness, my gaze bounces from one wall to the next. “Are you there?” I whisper.
When silence answers, I swallow and switch on the light on the nightstand. Bracing for the worst, I hold my breath and look around like a maniac. Except no one is there. It’s just me, alone, with made-up monsters to fuck me to sleep.
“It’s all in my head. You’re not here. You can’t be.”But I can feel you getting closer, watching me, as if you were here, in the same room with me.
I switch off the light and bury myself under the covers. With the rose back in position, behind my eyelids, I banish my familiar dirty friends and stare at the neon butterfly. A beautiful, terrible trap I’m falling into.
My fingers tremble as I restart the toy, the vibrations seem to intensify at the perverse fantasy. The terrifying glow pulses, a symbol of my madness, a hypnotic reminder of the danger that both frightens and entices me.
I imagine his breath on my neck, phantom fingers trailing across my skin. My own touch becomes his, and I shake at the thrill it gives me. The line between fantasy and reality blurs. Butterfly Man isn’t a fictional villain written to entice. He’s a stalker obsessed with me to the point of killing, and I’m soaking the sheets with my arousal picturing him in a scary mask claiming me.
“This is wrong,” I whisper to myself between gasps, even as my nipples harden painfully against the satin of my gown, and my legs spread wider in desperate need. The thought ofhim watching my fingers between my thighs, drinking in my vulnerability and darkness, comes into play, and it sends a shiver down my spine. Is it revulsion at the violation or the desire for more?
