She flinched—a sharp, visible tremor—but her mind was too far gone to truly register the sensation.
Her eyes remained locked on the words he was writing. Sentence after sentence, the dark ink bloomed across the soft skin of her hand like a brand. They were orders—commands too shameful to mutter, too raw to imagine without a fresh wave of heat staining her cheeks.
Her breath caught. She blinked, the reality of the script finally sinking in.
"Wait… I-I can't say these things," she whispered. Her voice cracked, thin and fragile. Her free hand instinctively reached up, fingers fumbling to pull the edges of her blouse over her exposed chest.
Cruxius didn't look up. He finished the final stroke of the sentence and tossed the pen aside. It clattered against the wood, the only sound in the suffocating silence.
"You told me you love me," he said, his tone dangerously calm.
