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“Come,” he says. “Let me feel it.”

The orgasm rips through me in long waves, and he doesn’t slow for a second, fucking me straight through it.

“Again,” he demands.

“I cannot,” I sob.

His thumb finds my swollen clit and rubs hard, and a second climax rips through me before I have recovered from the first. I sob openly now, wrecked and used and overwhelmed.

“Good girl,” he says, and his rhythm turns ragged. “Your cunt is fucking perfect. I’m close.”

He buries his cock deep and finishes with a low, guttural groan, and I feel him pulse and spill hot inside me. His whole body shudders against mine.

We stay joined, both of us breathing hard while the sweat cools on my skin. My legs are still locked around his waist. His cock is still buried in me, softening slow.

He pulls out, and I wince at the loss and the slow, filthy drip of him that follows. Then, almost tenderly, he draws my skirt back down over my thighs, and the softness of the gesture sits at odds with how thoroughly he just took me apart.

I push myself upright, my face on fire. Normal assistants don’t get fucked over their bosses’ desks. Some far-off part of me notes, again, that neither of us said a word about protection, and that the pharmacy I keep promising myself is still a corner I have not turned. I shove the thought down for later, the way I shove everything else down.

“Where is my underwear?” I ask, as the cool air becomes a real problem.

“You will not be wearing any for the rest of the day,” he says.

“I’m not walking around this office with nothing on under my skirt.” I scan the desk, the floor, the chair, but the red fabric is nowhere at all. I have no idea when he made it disappear.

“Focus on your work, not on hunting for your ruined wet panties,” he says, and his grin is pure wickedness.

There is no arguing him out of it. My size is hard enough to find in a store, and he holds every card in this room. He’s left me no other door.

The next few hours are their own slow torture. The seam of my skirt lining drags against my swollen, oversensitive cunt, and more than once I have to bite back a sound, swallowing it under his knowing gaze from across the room. He does it on purpose, I’m sure of it. Every time I shift in my chair his eyes lift from his papers, patient and amused, waiting to catch me squirming. By the third hour, I have learned to sit perfectly still and hate him quietly, which seems to please him even more than the squirming did.

Near the end of the day, he slides a plain black gift bag across the desk to me. “Put these on,” he says.

I hurry to the bathroom and open it to find a pair of panties so fine and delicate they can only be absurdly expensive. The fabric costs a small fortune just to touch. They fit as though they were sewn straight onto me, every curve accounted for as if someone had my exact measurements in hand. That certainty, more than the luxury, makes my skin prickle with suspicion.

Relieved and unsettled in equal measure, I study my flushed face in the mirror, and my heart sinks all over again.

I cannot make sense of how sharply he turned after I said the word control. Maybe cold and possessive is simply the shape of him underneath the manners. Maybe he wants to own the way a woman’s body answers him, right down to the last wet shiver.

This is only day one. This morning I was still tying on my apron at Sablo, and now I’m a woman with a powerful man’s bruises on her hips and no underwear left in her drawer. I dread trying to picture the rest of it, and I dread more how quickly I’m learning to stop fighting each new thing he decides for me.

Over the days that follow, my job stretches into keeping the books for his businesses. Restaurants, bars, jewelry stores, and the ones he only ever calls “special.” The ordinary records live on a computer. The rest he brings to me himself, by hand.

He drops a thick stack of ledgers onto my desk hard enough to rattle it. “Handwritten,” he says. “No photographs, no copies, nothing electronic, ever.”

I open the top ledger to rows of initials, dates, small symbols, and enormous numbers. Some lines are struck through in red, with a few clipped words scrawled beside them.

“What do the symbols mean?” I ask.

“That is not your concern.”

“I have to organize them. It would help to know what I’m looking at.”

He sets a heavy fountain pen down in front of me. “Copy them exactly. Not one mistake.”

“And if I write a number down wrong?”

“One extra zero can hand a man his life or take it from him,” he says, perfectly calm.