Page 140 of Penance

“Now,” I say, leaning over her. “I’m gonna take you back to the apartment so we can start packing. You are gonna be a good girl, and you are going to walk out of this house, to the car, and then all the way into the apartment with my cum painting your pretty face so everyone can see who owns you. Understand?”

She doesn’t fight me or argue.

She nods.

“Yes,” she says, still watching me. I watch her pretty pink tongue dart out and taste the cum dripping from her lips. “I understand.”

Chapter 25

Mercy

Istand in Draco’s bedroom, the early morning light filtering through half-drawn blinds, casting zebra stripes across the polished floor. Sunday arrives again, just like it has my entire life, but for some reason, this one feels different.

It feels… heavier?

My fingers trail across the hangers in his closet—my small section of it, really. Draco has gone to my apartment quite a few times over the last week to get things for me. Pretty much whatever I ask for, he jumps at the chance to get it.

It’s weird, but I won’t lie and say I don’t like it.

I love it.

Draco is my king, and he makes me feel like a princess.

Who am I to look a gift horse in the mouth?

Everything has its place here, even me, though sometimes I wonder if I truly belong.

Three weeks of keeping clothes here, and still the closet feels like foreign territory. Draco’s wardrobe dominates, obviously—dark shirts and darker pants, fabrics expensive enough that theywhisper against my skin when I brush past them. I don’t feel good enough to touch most of his suits, so I simply don’t go near that end of the closet.

The apartment is quiet around me, quiet except for the distant hum of traffic three floors below me. Draco is… somewhere? The apartment isn’t that big, but he’s gone somewhere, even though I can still feel him near me, so I know he’s still at home, at least.

I told him I loved him.

I had been scared at first, terrified, when he didn’t say it back, but after a while I came to realize that that was who he was.

He didn’t need to say it.

He showed it in different ways.

I was even more scared when I realized I meant it.

I was in love with him, and we were getting married. I couldn’t remember a time in my life where I had been happier.

I pull out my Sunday dress—pristine white cotton with a hem that falls well below my knees. Mother would approve, which is precisely why I chose it when I first saw it hanging in a shop downtown. Now, it doesn’t even feel right anymore. It feels like one of my old school uniforms that I’d long outgrown.

Holding it against myself, I look down, and the first thing I see is the swell of my belly.

It’s getting bigger.

It seems like it doubles in size every day when I wake up, but I know that isn’t true. It’s just the anxiety of impending motherhood that’s suffocating me.

Draco seems almost happy about it. More often than not, when I wake up in the morning, I have to move his hand off of the bump before I can get up. He holds the baby in his sleep, which is comforting, but also somehow a little bit exhausting in a way I can’t quite put my finger on.

But am I happy about it?

I can’t deny that the baby is already so loved, and I look forward to the day I can hold them in my arms and whisper all the secrets of this world into their tiny ears. Yet at the same time, I’m scared of how the baby was created. It still seems like a dream.

What if it’s born looking nothing like either of us?

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