Page 44 of Taken Online

The towel in his hand is already clean, but he keeps wringing it like it might bleed answers if he squeezes hard enough.

I smile. Slow. Sweet. Just a little bit cruel. I sip from my coffee like it’s the most interesting thing in the room.

“No,” I say simply.

He steps forward. Measured. Intentional. His voice drops.

“Don’t be cute, bambi.”

My breath stalls in my throat. The mug stills in my hand.

He hasn’t called me that in months. Not since that night, the night when everything broke open. When I found out Kaleb and Blake were always the same man. When I realized the person I trusted most to protect me had already claimed me long before I said yes.

He steps close. The air shifts. I can smell him, clean skin, black coffee, the faint bite of his cologne.

“You know I don’t like sharing,” he says softly, brushing his knuckles against my jaw like it’s an apology he doesn’t know how to give.

I meet his gaze. My stomach twists. I should be angry. Should be afraid. But all I feel is that familiar ache, the one that sits somewhere between desire and surrender.

I don’t answer. I don’t need to.

He knows.

He always knows.

He leans in, lips brushing the corner of my mouth, and I let him. My pulse stutters, betrays me. When he kisses me, finally, it’s soft. Not sweet. Just quiet. Possessive. Like he’s reminding me who I belong to.

And I let him.

Because I'm taken by him.

Whether it healthy or not,I don't care.

BLAKE

He doesn’t think I know when he’s baiting me.

That little smile over the rim of his coffee mug. The slow turn of his body so I catch the outline of his hips. He’s been doing it since our first session. A long con with no name, no rules, no end.

Six months in, and he still thinks he’s in control. That this is a push and pull. A dance. A negotiation.

It’s not.

I knew what I wanted the moment he walked into my office. No, before that, when I saw him in that dingy club. A little cracked thing, playing hard to get with his pain like he wasn’t dying for someone to catch him bleeding.

I caught him.

And I’m never letting go.

People ask if I’m happy now. Colleagues. The one or two friends I haven’t entirely abandoned. Even Wendy, when she texts on occasion. Am I happy?

What a stupid question.

What I am is full. Anchored. Finally living in a world where he wakes up tangled in my sheets, where his toothbrush sits beside mine. Where his hair clogs my drain. Where he screams at me just so I’ll drag him into bed and remind him what it feels like to be owned.

I used to think I needed him compliant. Sweet. Cured.

But no. I love him wild. Teeth-bared. Poison-tongued and dangerous. It means I get to be the one who tames him. The one he always returns to.

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