Adison’s POV
The study door clicks locked behind us.
The sound is small. Insignificant. But in the silence of my father's sleeping penthouse, it feels like a declaration of war.
Jake's eyes find mine across the dim room. Manhattan glitters below us through floor-to-ceiling windows, all those lights belonging to people who have no idea what's happening in this room. What we're about to do in the heart of Richard Ward's empire.
"We shouldn't." My voice comes out broken. "Someone could hear."
"Then be quiet." His hands find my waist, lifting me like I weigh nothing. My back hits the bookshelf—leather spines and first editions pressing into my shoulder blades—and my legs wrap around him on instinct. Like he's oxygen and I've been drowning for hours.
This isn't tender. This is survival.
His mouth crashes into mine with a desperation that steals my breath. I taste whiskey and grief and fury—everything we cannot say in daylight, everything we'll have to hide when morning comes.
My fingers claw at his shirt, yanking it over his head because I need skin. Need contact. Need something real in this house full of lies.
"Jake." His name tears out of me when his teeth find the curve of my shoulder. Sharp. Claiming. The kind of mark that will bruise and remind me tomorrow that this actually happened.
"Quiet, baby." His voice is gravel against my throat. "Unless you want the whole household knowing what I'm doing to you."
I don't want that. But I also can't stop the sounds building in my chest—the whimpers and gasps and desperate little noises that threaten to carry through walls and down hallways to where my dying father sleeps.
His palm covers my mouth. Firm. Controlling. My eyes go wide, then dark with pleasure instead of grief.
"That's it." He watches my face while his other hand works between us. Belt. Zipper. The rustle of fabric that means he's freeing himself. "Look at me. Right here. Just us."
I nod against his palm. Feel my own wetness as he drags my silk shorts aside and positions himself at my entrance.
"This won't be gentle." A warning. A promise. "Tell me you understand."
I lick his palm. Watch his eyes go nearly black.
He thrusts into me so hard the bookshelf shudders.
My scream dies against his hand. The stretch is perfect—that fullness I've become addicted to, that sense of being claimed completely. He doesn't give me time to adjust. Just sets a punishing rhythm that drives all thought from my head.
Every thrust carries weight. Frustration at my father's manipulation. Fear of what tomorrow brings. Fury at circumstances that keep forcing us apart.
He fucks me like he's trying to brand himself on my soul, like if he goes deep enough he can mark me somewhere no one else will ever reach.
My nails rake down his back. I feel skin break under my fingernails and don't care. Want him marked too. Want evidence that this happened, that we're real, that no amount of separate bedrooms and professional distance changes what we are to each other.
"You feel so fucking good." His forehead presses against mine, breath ragged. "So tight. So wet. All mine."
I can't answer. Can't do anything except take what he's giving and try not to shatter completely.
The pleasure builds like a wave I can't outrun. That coiling tension low in my belly, winding tighter with every brutal thrust.
His thumb finds my clit—rough, demanding—and I arch against the bookshelf hard enough to knock something loose.
A book falls. Neither of us cares.
"Come for me." His command is barely a whisper, his palm still covering my mouth. "Let me feel it."
The orgasm rips through me without warning. I scream against his skin—the sound trapped, muffled, mine alone—and my whole body convulses around him. I feel every pulse, every clench, every wave of pleasure that threatens to unmake me completely.
Jake follows seconds later. His groan is low and broken as he shudders against me, forehead pressed to mine, both of us breathing like we've run for miles. Like we've survived something.
Maybe we have.
Afterward, we don't speak.
The silence feels different now. Heavier. Loaded with everything we just said with our bodies that we can never say out loud.
He lowers me to the floor slowly, carefully, like I might break now that the desperate edge has passed.
My legs don't want to hold me. I lean against the bookshelf while he retrieves his whiskey from where he abandoned it. Watch him finish it in one long swallow.
His back is to me. I can see the scratches I left—red lines against tanned skin, evidence of my desperation. Tomorrow those marks will exist under his shirt while we pretend to be strangers.
"We should go." My voice sounds foreign. Hoarse from sounds I couldn't make.
"Yeah." He doesn't turn around. "Separate rooms."
The words cut deeper than they should. I knew this was coming. Agreed to it. But hearing him say it after what we just did makes something inside me crack.
I straighten my pajamas. Smooth my hair. Try to look like someone who hasn't just been thoroughly fucked against her father's bookshelf.
We leave the study separately. Jake goes first—checking the hallway, making sure we're alone. I count to sixty before following. The penthouse is dark and silent, full of expensive shadows that swallow every secret.
My bedroom door closes behind me with a soft click.
I lie awake for hours.
The ceiling offers no answers. Just darkness and the ghost of Jake still burning against my palms. Between my thighs. Everywhere he touched me and everywhere he didn't.
I knew this would be hard.
I didn't know Manhattan would try to erase us.
The ring sits in the drawer on the nightstand. Cool metal that belongs on my finger but can't live there in daylight. I open the drawer and touch it once. Feel the weight of everything it represents.
Then I curl into sheets that smell like nothing. Like anonymity. Like the performance we'll have to give tomorrow.
Jake is somewhere in this penthouse, probably staring at his own ceiling, probably feeling this same impossible distance that shouldn't exist between people who just promised each other everything.
My father is dying in his bed, surrounded by machines that track his heartbeat while he schemes to control my future.
And I am lying here alone, pretending I don't feel him everywhere.
This is what sacrifice feels like.
I just didn't expect it to feel so much like losing.