Zach looked down at the useless phone and his empty flat and made a quick decision. He stood up and grabbed his coat. He fled his building in one minute and hopped on the train in ten more. He wouldn’t turn into his father, he told himself. Not tonight.

* * *

On their third morning together, she woke up in his bed and found it empty. Slowly, she sat up, careful of her bruised and aching body. Last night had been the roughest yet, and she smiled at the memory of the sensual crimes he committed against her flesh. He’d spent two years mentally preparing her for what he would demand of her once they finally consummated their relationship. Although she’d known what was coming, had even watched him with others, she hadn’t truly known how much it would hurt until the first blows landed on her virgin back their first night together as lovers. Waking up the next morning with welts on her body and blood on her thighs and his sheets, her first thought was not of regret or fear, but that it had all been worth it—the wait, the pain, the sacrifice that now felt like no sacrifice at all. She belonged to him and always would. He’d said those words to her but now she felt them singing in her skin. The collar he’d locked around her neck now encircled her heart. She raised a hand to her neck and found it bare. He’d taken off her collar in her sleep. Knowing he did not expect total submission from her right now, she rose from the bed and followed the sound of running water to the bathroom. She found him in the shower and without asking permission joined him under the steaming water. He was not angry. She knew he wouldn’t be. Everyone she knew was intimidated by him—by his intelligence, by his imposing height and strength, by his ethereal beauty—but she knew him as a man of flesh and earthy desire who loved her beyond comprehension. She knew his kindness, his generosity, and although he could make the surface of her body ripple with fear when as he locked her in her bonds at night, underneath that fear moved deep ocean currents of trust. For five years he’d been teaching her how to trust him. And as he bent his head to kiss her, she laughed into his mouth, proud of how well she’d learned the lesson.

His hands, as gentle this morning as they’d been brutal last night, explored every corner of her body. She ran her fingers through his hair and slicked it back. When he moved his mouth to her neck and drank the water from the hollow of her throat, she taunted, “No toys, no chains—how are you going to dominate me now?”

It happened so fast that she didn’t even have time to gasp. She was pinned with her stomach flat against the shower wall. At first she wasn’t scared.

“Like this,” he whispered in her ear. “This is how.” And he pushed into the one part of her body he hadn’t yet penetrated. The pain was beyond anything he’d ever inflicted on her. She screamed in the back of her throat, screamed broken formless words, words ripped in half as she was. She knew there was a way to stop it, but in her panic and her agony, the way was forgotten. On her lips she tasted blood and realized she’d bitten her own arm. He continued to thrust as her tears mingled with the water and ran down her face. It was over then as quickly as it began. He pulled out of her and left her in the shower. Her legs gave out and she sank to the floor. The water continued to beat down on her. When he came back to her, he was dressed.

Slowly, she forced herself to look up at him and in a hollow voice she whispered, “I forgot my safe word.” Horror dawned in his eyes. Slowly, he knelt on the floor, knelt like he meant to pray. He reached for her and she shrank back instinctively in fear. He waited and did not move to touch her again. Finally, she pulled herself slowly up. He held open a towel and she stepped into it, leaning into his body as he wrapped it around her. Picking her up he carried her back to the bedroom. He sat in the armchair by the window and held her to him, rocking her in his strong arms while she cried.

He did not apologize and she did not expect him to.

She never forgot her safe word again.

Nora read the words with a slight smile on her lips before deleting the last hour of writing with a wistful sigh. She opened her email and found a new set of notes from Zach on the last chapters she’d sent him. Although he liked where she was taking it, Zach was back in attack mode and she couldn’t stop grinning as she read some of his more sarcastic comments.

“Nora— Forgive me for copyediting, but it must be said—you have raped the semicolon yet again. Stop it. It wasn’t asking for it no matter how it was dressed. If you don’t know how to use punctuation then do away with it altogether, write like Faulkner and we’ll pretend it’s on purpose.”

Bite me, Easton, Nora said to herself as she corrected her sexually compromised semicolon in chapter eighteen. Seriously, bite me.

“Nora— Aristotle said character is plot. Aristotle is dead and can’t hurt you. I’m alive and I can. Plot is plot. Find one and keep it.”

You want to try to hurt me, Zach? I’d love to see you try.

Nora looked up as Wesley entered her office. She smiled but he didn’t smile back. He merely sat her red cell phone on her desk, turned around and walked out.

With relief Nora noted that her one missed call was from Kingsley and not Søren. She called back, but only out of courtesy.

“Bonjour, ma chérie, ma belle, mon canard,” Kingsley started in on her as soon as he answered.

“King, calling me ‘your duck’ isn’t going to change the fact that I’m still busy.”

“Too busy for a 10K evening with a dear friend of yours?”