Chapter 3: The Mirror 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️

The penthouse had been built for fucking.

The terrace was enormous and had a swing. The kitchen island was wide enough to set her on. The bathroom had a tub and a mirror that took up an entire wall — there was no avoiding her own reflection in it. Right now the steam was wrapping around her body in soft white outlines.

She wasn't a girl anymore. She was still slight, still had that lightness to her, but her breasts, her waist, her hips — all of it had filled in. Twenty-one. Every inch in its best year.

The most innocent kind of pure, the most innocent kind of sexy, fitted together flawlessly. No wonder she'd ruined him.

A man like AUSA Halloway — the man who'd fired a junior secretary for hemming a pencil skirt an inch shorter — was the same man who'd chosen to put up with her temper, anything, just to keep owning her.

Owen had taken her here so many times. He'd held her by the waist, pulled her thighs open, and pushed slow and deep into the soft wet flushed pink of her again and again. He'd watched in the mirror as her tight little entrance pulled him in, until she was crying out in long, drawn moans and the woman in the mirror was the one being fucked, on display, completely.

That moment she didn't look like the daughter of an old family. She looked like a kept thing in his bed.

She'd lived in the Emory dorms since she'd started college, so for the first two years Owen had ambushed her at night and driven her here. She used to wonder how he always found her wherever she went, like he had a tracker on her. Later she figured it out — Owen had connections all over the law school by then. Knowing where Adelaide Beaumont was wasn't hard.

She'd thought, at first, that the first time had been a lapse. That he wouldn't do it again. She found out otherwise. All of it had been planned.

The penthouse had been a Beaumont property to start with. Her mother's name had been on the deed. After Augustus's conviction in 2014 the IRS had seized it and put it up for federal auction.

Owen — given who he was — hadn't been able to bid on it personally. A real-estate-developer LLC bought it, on paper.

On paper it had nothing to do with the Beaumonts.

She'd been seventeen the second time he had her in this apartment. He'd lured her over with "your parents left some things here." Then he'd walked her up and down the place and shown her nothing. She'd told him she hated games, and turned to leave.

That was when he stepped in behind her and pinned her in his arms. Before she could fight, he'd put a key into her hand.

"It's yours now."

She didn't want anything of his. She wasn't going to accept his charity.

But you don't escape a wolf in his own den. She'd lost the strength contest. He'd ended up bending her over the glass coffee table in the entryway and fucking her until the cum dripped down her thighs. A vase had gone over. Pieces of ceramic had scattered across the marble. Roses lay in the puddles.

He'd bought her with this apartment, basically.

After that, the place became the nightly cage.

Eleven years ago, the night before everything went to hell, her father had told her the Halloways would take care of her like their own. They had. They had absolutely done that. Which was exactly why she was so tangled. How did she look Edmund and Helena in the face after their eldest son had taken care of her in bed?

She'd buried the relationship deep. She'd quietly put distance between herself and the rest of the Halloways. There was no other option.

She wished it was simpler. She wished he were a real enemy. Then she could hate him cleanly.

He wasn't. There was too much in the way.

She'd treated him like family. The night of her eighteenth birthday, until the second he'd actually pushed inside her, she'd been clinging to his shoulder, crying, begging — please, please, wake up, please — no — ah!

The closer they'd been before, the worse that moment was.

She hated the bathroom mirror because every time she looked at it she could see him. She could see how he held her breasts. She could see how he opened her.

The breasts had been raised by his hand, every full curve grown under his palm.

The pink between her legs had been kept wet by his cock.

She had grown into something pornographic, exactly suited to his appetite.

Adelaide pulled the garden shears off the rack in the potting closet — the ones for trimming the hedges. The housekeeper had stood there pleading. "Ma'am, please don't do anything — Mr. Halloway is on his way—"

She'd smiled. "If I were going to off myself I wouldn't have waited this long."

There wasn't going to be any of that. Eleven years ago when her family had gone down she hadn't sat in her room sobbing — she'd hit anyone who came at her. She wasn't going to be melodramatic now. Most of the time when Owen had her, she told herself this was a transaction. She was trading.

Bang. The first stab. A crack ran top to bottom in the mirror. It didn't shatter.

She pulled the shears out, walked to the other side of the mirror, and slammed them in again. Another crack split out from the new point.

Three. Four. Five.

Upstairs the bang bang bang kept going. Pilar paced downstairs in a panic, finally lost her nerve when Owen's car pulled in, and ran up.

On the sixteenth strike the mirror gave a long deep crack like a bone breaking and the whole wall came down in a silver waterfall. The housekeeper gaped.

Owen had heard it from the driveway.

The princess was having one.

The driver, Diego, asked carefully, "Mr. Halloway. You still want to head up?"

This had happened before. Sometimes Owen would tell him to drive on, leave her to it. Diego always thought that meant Owen spoiled her. Not many men would have let it go.

But sometimes Owen was actually angry. Diego had stopped trying to tell.

Pilar had just gotten the words "Mr. Halloway is back" out when Adelaide heard the steady steps in the hall.

She looked up and there he was. His face was flat. But there was something under it that made her stomach drop.

He watched her a moment. Then he asked, with a small twist of the mouth, "Is this how you ask?"

She didn't answer.

Pilar came in with a broom. He held a hand up. "Leave it. She'll do it."

Then to her: "Clean every piece up. Miss a single one and I'll keep you in that bed for a day."

Threats with the help in the room. Adelaide bit her lip. She set her face. She didn't move.

The air got tight.

Owen walked closer. He looked down at her.

"Addie. You need to rein it in. You just started this internship and you've made the entire office hate you in a week. Small thing, blown up. If I hadn't stepped in, you'd be done. Could you have fixed this yourself?"

"Small?" She looked up. "Who are you to call this small? Do you have any idea what they said to me?"

"And Owen Halloway," she said, getting to her feet. Her bare foot came down on a shard. "Three nights in a row you've had me. This is what I'm owed. Don't act like you're doing me a favor."

The glass had cut her ankle. Beads of blood rose on white skin.

He glanced at it once. Looked away.

"Come here." Cold. Two words. He turned and walked out.

The bathroom echoed with her breathing.

She found him gone from the bedroom. She knew the game. He was giving her room to soften first. Then he'd be reasonable. Men.

She lay back on the bed, drew her knees up, parted them. She slid her hand down between her thighs, slow, pressing against the lips of herself. She didn't need much. Just a few passes and the slick was rising up to meet her hand.

She had on no panties. Her open thighs were aimed at the doorway.

Two trembling fingers parted her open and slow-rubbed the soft pink interior, until both lips were a wet darker pink, sticky and glossy, opening and closing in tiny pulses.

"Mm — ah—" she let out a long shaking sound, her body trembling under her own touch, a hot rush of slick welling up between her lips.

Right then Owen pushed the door open. What he saw was her cunt — pretty and wet and faintly twitching — and her looking back at him.

She'd timed it.

Any man would have wanted to push her open and fuck her into the mattress. Owen kept it together. He walked over.

She lifted one leg. The arch of her bare foot landed on his chest, slid up, slid down.

She looked up at him with an arrogant kind of dare in her eyes. "Why are you looking at me like that? I broke a mirror. I didn't like it. So what?"