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“I am going to look forward to knowing that you’re painted in my cum all day.” I relished the blush I saw bloom across her skin, and I decided to reward her beautiful submission with a gentle caress as the back of my fingers stroked her heated cheeks.

“You came so beautifully for me… my good girl,” I praised granting her a kiss on her forehead, looking forward to the day it would be her lips… Soon.

“And I want you to know, while you’re busy writing your report that I will be thinking of this and…

“I will be looking forward to my next taste and painting my next masterpiece.”

34

IN TROUBLE HERE

ANNA

Isat down in that chair outside a locked steel door with a pen on a string and a clipboard on my knees, and I swear I couldn’t have told you my own name.

Either of them.

I could, however, have told you exactly how many times he had made me come.

Four times.

Four.

That was the number, and I have gone over it more than was good for me. Sitting in a cold corridor at the bottom of that building with my legs still not entirely steady. Four times, in under an hour, in a room I had walked into as a professional. I am twenty-six years old and admittedly, it has been three years since I have been with a man at all. But in fairness to the years of accidental celibacy, it had never once happened to me before that either.

Not with anybody, not ever.

I had honestly begun to assume it was one of those fabled things that happened to other women and simply wasn’t ever going to happen to me. Something I had made my peace with somewhere around twenty-two.

Peace, he shattered with four orgasms in under an hour. And on a mattress in a locked room, with my own observation chart lying beside my hip.

But that wasn’t the part that undid me.

Because I could explain the orgasms. A body was a body, and it did what it did. Meaning if you put a woman starved of sex on her back and you are extremely good at something for the better part of an hour, then eventually a body will oblige you. There didn’t have to be anything else in it.

What I couldn’t explain was the rest of it.

The way I didn’t fight him.

Not really. Not truly. Every single thing I said in that room came out of my mouth without any weight behind it whatsoever. Because some part of me had already decided before I ever opened that door, and everything after it was a performance I was putting on for my own benefit. A way to pretend I didn’t have a choice, when I knew the truth.

He hadn’t taken anything from me against my will.

Which was why I could still feel him. That was the thing. I got up from that mattress and let a man pull my underwear back up over me and then cup his own hand over me through them. Still wet, still warm, still absolutely covered in him.

He had rubbed it into my skin like a man putting a mark on something and claiming it.

And I had let him.

And God help me, I had fucking liked it.

There was something wrong with me and I had decided to stop arguing with myself about that. Because if anybody had told me a year ago that a man would bite me hard enough to make me cry out and come from it, I would have laughed at them and told them they needed to be in a place like this.

I knew what a man’s hands felt like when they were used on you with the sole purpose of inflicting damage. Which was why I had four marks across my belly that never went away and therefore became a reminder as to why I kept running.

Which was also why I had spent every single one of those years understanding precisely what men like that are at their core. And I knew first-hand how quickly kindness can turn into something else.

Yet a murderer put his teeth in my neck hard enough to make me cry out. Then he licked the sting out of it, gently put my clothes back on me and tipped my chin up.