MY VIRGIN MAID

Chapter 1: You Can't Run Away From Me, Little Girl

"Ah, no..."

"Please, gently — I can't take much more of this." Anastasya's voice broke against the sheets, her body caught beneath his, every nerve in her lit up with something too tangled to name — pain and pleasure knotted so tightly together she couldn't separate where one ended and the other began.

She'd just turned twenty. Five-foot-five, with round hazel eyes and skin so pale and fine that the lightest touch left a mark — a fact that, tonight, felt less like a description and more like a warning she should have heeded. Her cheeks flushed easily, prettily, at the smallest provocation, and her long golden-brown hair spilled across the pillow like something out of a storybook.

She looked, people always said, like a fairy tale come to life.

Her life had never once agreed with that comparison.

Tonight, more than ever, that beauty felt less like a gift and more like the thing that had led her here — into the bed of a man whose gentleness was somehow more devastating than force would have been, because it left her nothing to fight against.

He was twenty-eight. Six-foot-five, built like something deliberately, cruelly perfect, with a jaw that looked carved and eyes the color of open, deep water — the kind of blue that made people's breath catch and then, a beat later, made them want to look away.

Alexander De Graham. A name that made rooms go quiet.

Above her now, he wore a grin with nothing soft in it.

"Trying to run again, little girl?" His voice was low, amused, utterly unbothered by her tears. "You really do love running from me."

"But you should know by now." His grip on her tightened, deliberate, possessive. "I'm not letting you go until I've had exactly what I want from you."

He bent close, lips brushing her ear. "I paid a very high price for you, Ana. I intend to get my money's worth."

There was no love in the words. He wasn't pretending there was.

Ana's eyes burned. Her chest ached with something too large for the room they were in.

She closed her eyes and let him take what he'd already decided was his.

"Nnh—" Her hands twisted into the sheets, searching for something, anything, to hold onto.

"It hurts," she gasped. "It hurts so much—"

Her breath against his ear only seemed to spur him on, his hold tightening, his voice dropping into something rough and satisfied that had no mercy in it at all.

"Wait—" She tried to pull back, tried to put some distance between them, and in one motion he caught both her wrists and pinned them above her head, holding her completely still beneath him.

"Haha." He watched her face — flushed, tear-streaked, undone — like a man admiring something he'd finally, after considerable effort, managed to catch.

"You're exactly what I wanted, Ana," he murmured, voice thick. "Every bit of you."

Her eyes, wide and glassy with pain, turned away from his. She couldn't look at him. Wouldn't.

"Then do it," she whispered, voice cracking. "Do whatever you want."

"I was never anyone's treasure to begin with." A tear slid down into her hair. "You said it yourself — you'll let me go the moment I stop being interesting to you. So don't hold back on my account."

The words landed somewhere in Alexander's chest he didn't examine too closely. His jaw tightened, his eyes going sharper, darker.

"Yes," he said, low. "I'll let you go when I'm bored of you. That's the deal."

"But I'll tell you something else." His thumb brushed the tear track on her cheek, almost gentle, entirely at odds with everything else about him. "These tears of yours — I like them far too much. I want you crying like this every time I touch you."

"So cry all you want, little girl." His voice dropped further, rough with something that wasn't quite tenderness but wasn't only cruelty either. "I'll turn every one of those tears into something else before I'm done with you."

Ana went still at that, eyes shut, and let herself cry silently rather than give him the satisfaction of hearing it.

He pulled her closer, kissed her hard enough to steal whatever breath she had left, and made absolutely certain, in every way that mattered, that she understood exactly whose bed she was in.

The room — usually so cold, so controlled, so much like the man who lived in it — filled instead with heat and sound that neither of them tried very hard to quiet.

His grin never once looked like love.

For four hours, that room belonged entirely to him. By the end of it, Ana had nothing left — no fight, no voice, nothing but the ache in every part of her body and the strange, hollow exhaustion of having survived something she still didn't fully understand.

Even then—

"Mm. Not quite satisfied," Alexander murmured, sitting back finally, studying her with something almost thoughtful. "But I'd rather you conscious for round two some other night than passed out after your first. I'll let you off. This time."

He rose from the bed. Ana yanked the blanket up around herself on pure instinct, even though there was nothing left to protect, nothing left he hadn't already seen and marked.

"Pfft." A low, humorless laugh escaped him at the sight of her clutching the sheet like armor. He pulled on a robe from the back of a chair, unhurried, entirely composed, like the last four hours had cost him nothing at all.

"I'll shower in the other room," he said, tying the belt. "I'm covered in sweat, and honestly, I'd rather take it with you — but I already know what I'll do if I see you naked again tonight, and you need the rest. So consider this me being generous."

"You should feel lucky, being with someone like me." He lifted his chin, every inch of him radiating the kind of arrogance that came from never once being told otherwise. "I'm considerate enough to think about your health. So don't waste your energy running from me. Just let me have you until I get bored."

Ana stared at him, stunned into silence — not by the cruelty of it, exactly, but by how effortlessly he said it, like lucky was simply the correct word and there was no version of reality where she'd disagree.

He left without waiting for a response, the door clicking shut behind him.

The moment he was gone, Ana finally let herself breathe.

She turned toward the wall of glass, where the moon hung fat and silver over the grounds outside, indifferent and impossibly beautiful.

"How can you look like that," she whispered, throat raw, "when I feel like this?"

"Are you laughing at me too?"

She swallowed hard and forced herself upright, blanket clutched around her, every muscle protesting as she made her way slowly toward the bathroom.

"It hurts," she breathed, each step sending a fresh ache through her. First times weren't supposed to feel like this — or maybe they were, and she simply had nothing else to measure it against.

When she finally reached the mirror and let the blanket fall, her hand flew to her mouth.

Marks. Everywhere. Her chest, her throat, her hips — a map of him left across her skin in shades of red and violet, more than she could count, more than she wanted to.

"Sigh." She stared at her own reflection like it belonged to someone else. "I look like I got mauled."

'Like his plaything', she thought, and the thought landed harder than she expected. 'When did my life turn into this?'

Her eyes blurred again, and this time she didn't bother fighting it. Her hazel eyes, wet and catching the bathroom light, looked exactly like the crystals he'd once compared them to — which was, she realized bitterly, probably exactly why he liked watching her cry so much.

Standing there, marked and hollowed out and achingly tired, Anastasya let her mind drift back — back two weeks, to the very beginning of all this. To the night that had somehow, impossibly, led her here, into the bed of a man named Alexander De Graham.