I settled between her thighs and looked at her.
“Look at me,” I said quietly.
Her eyes found mine.
“I’m here,” I told her. “I’m not going anywhere. Understand?”
“Yes, Daddy,” she said, and the words were soft and entirely unguarded, stripped of every layer she typically armored herself with. I had waited years to hear her say things like that without the anger underneath them. Without the running.
I pushed forward slowly, nothing like the night before, nothing urgent or overwhelming. I watched her face as I entered her and she exhaled, long and trembling, her hands moving to my shoulders and gripping there. I held my weight on my forearms and stayed close, close enough that she could feel the warmth of me and moved with a steadiness that was its own kind of demand.
“You’re mine,” I said.
“Yes,” she breathed.
“Say it.”
Her eyes, already dark, went darker. “I’m yours, Daddy.”
I moved deeper and felt her gasp against my jaw. I pressed my lips to her neck, just briefly, and felt her pulse racing under my mouth.
I took my time. That was the gift I could give her that no one else ever had. I was not going anywhere, and I wanted her to know it with every single thrust. I had spent years learning her, reading every flicker and shift in her face, understanding the difference between the sounds she made when she needed more and the sounds she made when she needed me to hold exactly where I was. I knew her. I had made it my business to know her completely.
Her nails pressed into my shoulders.
“Daddy,” she gasped. It wasn’t urgent, more like a reminder. Like she was anchoring herself to me because she needed the anchor.
“I’ve got you,” I told her. “I’ve always got you.”
I felt the orgasm build in her the way I always did. I noticed the subtle shift in her breathing, the tightening of her thighs against my hips, the way her back began to arch up from the mattress seeking more of me. I felt the moment she was close and I held her there on purpose, maintained the same unhurried pace, refused to let her rush it or chase it or take it before it was fully ready. She had spent her whole life grabbing at things before she was sure she was allowed to have them. Not with me.
“Daddy—”
“Give it to me,” I said against her ear. “All of it. I want all of it.”
She came with my name on her lips—not Daddy, this time, but Jaxon—full and unguarded, screamed into the morning light of the room we shared, her body shaking beneath me in waves I could feel everywhere. I held her through it, and through the second one that rolled in behind it without warning, and her scream dissolved into a wordless and desperate whimper. I pressed my lips to her temple, her cheek, and the corner of her jaw and told her she was good and she was mine and I had her, I had her, I had her. Because I did. Because I always would.
When she finally stilled, she was crying. It was the quiet kind of cry, just tears tracking sideways down her temples, nothing broken about it. I recognized these tears. They were the ones that came when she had run out of walls.
I brushed them away with my thumb.
“There you are,” I said softly.
She turned her face into my hand. “There I am.”
I rolled to my side and gathered her in, her back against my chest, my arms wrapped around her from behind. She tucked her knees up and pressed herself into me, and I held her there in the quiet golden light and felt the specific rightness of having her here. Of having kept the door open all those years she spent running through it.
“Jaxon,” she said after a while.
“Mm.”
“I’m sorry I touched your phone.”
“I know,” I said. “It’s done. You were forgiven the moment I stepped into the room.”
A pause.
“I didn’t actually read anything.”
