YOU ARE MINE

The heavy lined curtains left an opening, from which the morning light shone in. Elsa Black Opened her eyes slightly and could feel a throbbing pain in her head. Her body was achy and sore, like every muscle in her body had been overworked or pulled.For a long moment she simply lay there, aware of light and pain in equal measure — a dull throb behind her eyes, and beneath it, an ache in muscles she didn’t remember using. The ceiling above her was wrong. Too high, too ornate, plaster work picked out in pale gold.

This isn’t my apartment. Is she dreaming ? While rubbing her head, she tried to sit up but felt an arm, heavy and warm, resting across her waist.Elsa went very still.

Fragments of the night before surfaced unevenly, like objects rising through water. A gala she’d crashed for exactly forty minutes, meaning to hand a single business card to a single donor before slipping out to finish a set of drawings due in nine days. Her sister’s laugh, too bright, too careful. A glass pressed into her hand — just one more, Elsa, you work too hard — and the sweet, sharp taste of champagne she still remembered on her tongue.She drank too much. She remembers someone telling her to go lay down and rest. She tried to refuse but couldn't

The person put her in a hotel room, and then he made an excuse and left

She grabbed for the bed in the darkness , and to her surprise , there was someone in it! A pair of hot hands wrapped around her wrist . She could feel her body being pressed under a man's body, it made her dizzy.She was so hot and sweaty as his body rested against hers. His face was so close that she could feel his hot breath on her face. It seemed as though she was being watched. She could see a dark shadow lurking from the window; then, she heard a low, magnetic voice saying , let do it

His kiss was warm and wet, and he caressed her lips with his, his big hands ripped off her skirt impatiently as she struggled to get the word “No” from her month. She was incoherent, she groaned unconsciously. He entered her slowly and she grabbed him by the shoulder and said “it hurts!” the man stopped and said, “ are you a virgin? She was speechless from the pain. He stretched out his hand, gently moved her hair from her cheeks, and whispered, “ you sweet little things, how you have pleased me.”

He instantly moved fast and hard. It's rough, it's urgent, it happens. She feels a burst of worm rush through her body, and all her muscles tighten. She blushed as the blood came rushing into her face.

She turned her head carefully and saw the side of a perfect face, with dark features, thick eyelashes and jet black eyes. Hot thoughts suddenly froze. I have no idea who this man is.

She eased up onto one elbow, sheet clutched to her chest, and turned to look at the man beside her.

He was still asleep, one arm flung above his head, dark hair falling across his forehead in a way that made him look, for one unguarded moment, almost young. Even in sleep his face had the particular composure of someone who had learned early to control every room he entered — a sharp jaw, dark lashes, the kind of face she was certain she’d have remembered if she’d ever seen it before last night.

She hadn’t. She was sure of that much.

I don’t know this man.

The thought detonated the last of her calm. She scrambled back against the headboard, sheet gathered around her like armor, heart slamming so hard she could feel it in her throat.

He woke at the movement — not startled, just alert, the way she imagined men who ran companies worth billions were trained to wake. Dark eyes opened and found her instantly.

“You’re awake,” he said. His voice was low, unhurried, faintly amused in a way that made her want to throw something at him.

“Who are you?” Her own voice came out cracked. “What happened last night?”

Something shifted behind his expression — the amusement fading into a more careful, assessing stillness. He sat up slowly, raking a hand through his hair.

“You don’t remember,” he said. Not a question.

“No.” The word shook. “I don’t remember anything.”

For a moment neither of them spoke. Somewhere beyond the heavy curtains, the city was already awake — car horns, a distant siren, the ordinary sounds of a world that had no idea what had happened in this room. Elsa stared at the stranger across from her and tried to hold herself together through sheer force of will, running through the mental list of everything she had to do in the next nine days as if reciting it could anchor her to a version of her life that still made sense. Client presentation. Structural revisions. A deadline that did not care what had happened to her the night before.

“My name is Julian Ashford,” he said finally, watching her reaction with an intensity that made her feel examined. “Does that mean anything to you?”

It did, distantly — a name from business pages she skimmed and never quite read, attached to buildings that scraped the skyline of the financial district, attached, she realized with a fresh jolt of unease, to a name she had seen twice in the last month on a shortlist of quiet investors behind the Meridian Waterfront Cultural Center — the commission she had spent four months of unpaid nights chasing.“Should it?” she asked, and didn’t tell him why it already had.

Something like disbelief crossed his face, gone as quickly as it came. “You really don’t know.” “Know what?” Her hands were shaking. She pressed them flat against the sheets to stop it. “I need — I need to know what happened. Last night. To me.”

Julian’s jaw tightened. Whatever answer had been forming behind his eyes, he set it aside.

More ever he was Also a victim here

“Get dressed,” he said, already reaching for his phone on the nightstand, his tone shifting into something clipped and businesslike, a man accustomed to problems arriving before breakfast. “We’re going to find out together.”

Elsa didn’t move. “Together?”

“Someone drug me and also paid for this room,” Julian said, and for the first time she heard something beneath the calm — an edge of real anger, banked and controlled. “Someone made sure I was in it last night. I intend to find out who.” His eyes flicked to her, not unkind, but weighing. “And it seems, Miss —”

“Black,” she said faintly. “Elsa Black.”

“Miss Black,” he said, “that whoever arranged this made you a part of it too. Which means we have the same questions. And I don’t like leaving mine unanswered.”She was so lost in thought about what happened last night and also— a set of revised elevations due to a review panel in nine days, a business partner who would be frantic by now, a commission she could not afford to lose to distraction, least of all a distraction wearing his name on half the buildings downtown. She said none of it. There would be time, she told herself. There had to be.

Across the city, in an apartment two floors below street level that smelled of stale coffee and old paperwork, Elsa’s phone buzzed against a nightstand it wasn’t currently resting on — seven missed calls, all from the same name.

Nora. Nora. Nora.

Nora Vance had called Elsa’s phone eleven times since midnight, and precisely zero of those calls had been answered, which was how she found herself standing outside Elsa’s apartment at seven in the morning in yesterday’s clothes, banging on a door that clearly had no intention of opening. “Elsa Black, if you are dead in there, I am going to be so angry with you,” she muttered, digging out her spare key.Nora Vance had called Elsa’s phone eleven times since midnight, and precisely zero of those calls had been answered, which was how she found herself standing outside Elsa’s apartment at seven in the morning in yesterday’s clothes, banging on a door that clearly had no intention of opening. “Elsa Black, if you are dead in there, I am going to be so angry with you,” she muttered, digging out her spare key.The apartment was empty. Bed untouched. Purse gone, coat gone, phone location services unhelpfully off. On the drafting table by the window, a set of section drawings sat exactly wher