“And let’s not forget Preston,” I add softly, voice edged in cold satisfaction. “He’ll hear how you spread your legs for another man. How you clawed my back, how you moaned into my sheets, how you begged me to ruin you. Tell me, Camille, is that a conversation you’re prepared to have?”
She flinches, visibly recoiling at the mention of his name. Her jaw trembles, fists clenched, knuckles white with fury and fear and humiliation.
“I didn’t think so,” I whisper, leaning back just enough to give her the illusion of breathing room…but never enough to let her escape. “So tell me again, Princesa…who’s delusional here?”
She exhales hard. Her hands curl into fists in her lap. “You’re fucking insane.”I shrug. Lazy. Calm. Dangerous.
“No,” I say, voice dropping low, lethal and intimate. I watch her throat jump. She doesn’t even notice it. But I do. “I’m just a man who doesn’t like unfinished business.”
She turns her face toward the window, eyes locked on the city blurring past. “There is no unfinished business,” she says, voice tight. “What happened at the Langford was a mistake and If I knew you’d be this fucking unhinged, I would’ve never let you touch me.”
The words are a knife.
But I don’t fucking bleed.
I laugh. Quiet. Dark.
She goes still.
Because she knows.
I let her words hang in the space, let the weight of them fold back in on her like poison. I watch her shoulders rise, her spine stiffens.
She’s bracing.
She already knows what’s coming.
I lean in, slowly, deliberately. Close enough that my breath skates over her cheek, warm and dangerous, without touching her skin. Just enough proximity for her to feel the air ignite between us, thickening with every heartbeat, every desperate inhale she tries and fails to steady.
Her breath quickens sharply.
A fragile tremor she can’t hide.
“A mistake?” I whisper, voice velvet-edged and ruthless, silk sliding over a blade. “Is that the lie you’ve been telling yourself, Muñequita?”
She stiffens instantly, eyes blazing as she bites back at me, sharp and fierce. “I’m not your fucking doll.”
A slow smile tugs at my lips, not just from her defiance, but from how quickly, how flawlessly, she understands. The weight behind her words, the sudden realization, the tiny fracture in her composure.
She knows exactly what Muñequita means. Not the sweet, innocent kind of doll, dressed up in pretty lace and set carefully on a shelf. Not the polite, proper version her expensive education taught her.
No. Mine.
Possessed.
Controlled.
Played with.
And she knows I’ve marked her with it.
It shouldn’t surprise me. Of course, Camille Sinclair speaks Spanish. A girl born into privilege, raised on a pedestal, groomedfor the international stage since childhood. French, Italian, Mandarin and this. She’s fluent, worldly, precise.
But I guarantee no professor ever murmured it against her skin in the backseat of a car while her thighs shake and her breath still hitched from the things I’m going to do to her.
I lean closer, lips brushing gently, deliberately, against the sensitive skin just below her ear. The silence pulls the breath from her lungs as I linger, letting anticipation choke the air between us.
“Do you know the best thing about dolls?” My voice is low. Lethal. Soft as sin and just as dangerous. “They don’t get to decide how they’re played with.”