Page 119 of His Game His Rules
But my plea dissolves into the space between us, and he doesn't pause, doesn't turn, doesn't acknowledge that I've spoken.
The door closes.
The lock doesn't click—he doesn't lock me in—but it might as well be bolted shut with iron and intention.
I sit up on the edge of the bed, trembling. Naked. Covered in welts and the remnants of two men's desire. My body aches with a dull, spreading soreness—the kind that lives deeper than surface pain, that settles into muscle and bone and memory.
Alone.
Just me and the silence and the terrible, crystalline clarity that I've just watched something fracture.
Not break—not yet—but fracture.
And fractures, once they form, have a way of spreading until the whole structure collapses under its own weight.
Hours pass.
I count them by the way my skin cools and my muscles stiffen. By the way hunger creeps in, then fades, then returns sharper.
The door stays closed.
No footsteps on the stairs.
No crop tapping against leather.
No Giovanni filling the space like smoke.
Just silence.
The door stays closed.
Jino isn't coming back.
He won't come back.
Not until I convince Giovanni that he should learn how to share.
22
I wake up to the taste of blood and a faint throb behind my eyes. The ceiling above me is familiar—white plaster, crown molding, the chandelier I hate but never bothered to remove.
My bedroom. Not the dungeon.
That's the first coherent thought I manage.
The second is that my sheets are damp with sweat.
I sit up slowly, cataloging the damage. My knuckles are bruised—split across two of them where I caught Jino's teeth. My ribs ache on the left side. Probing fingers find a cut above my eyebrow I don't remember getting.
The fight comes back in fragments. Fast. Chaotic. Then… after…
The dungeon.
Her.
Images of Emmaleen return with clinical precision, like surveillance footage playing back in my mind. She is spread-eagled, face down on the dais, hands cuffed to the legs of the throne, ankles secured to the bolts in the floor.
The nipple clamps pressing into the platform beneath her, adding pressure with every breath she took.
