Virgin Dot Com Novel

[Jasmine's POV] Monday. First day of the decision week. Jackson Blackwood arrived at Cadence Records at seven fifty-five looking like power personified, and I knew immediately that I'd fucked up every calculation that had led me to this moment. Silver hair that caught the morning light with aggressive precision. Tailored suit that probably cost more than six months of my rent. The same green eyes as Liam but emptied of anything resembling human warmth, replaced with something colder and infinitely more dangerous. Predatory. He'd taken over Liam's office overnight.

Through the glass walls, I caught my reflection superimposed over his figure as he settled behind the desk like he was claiming conquered territory. The symbolism wasn't lost on me. Prey trying to dress like predator. Failing spectacularly at the performance. The nausea ambushed me the second I crossed the lobby threshold. I'd been feeling progressively worse all week. Each day stacking new symptoms onto the last until I was barely functioning. Exhaustion so profound it felt like drowning on dry land. Waves of sickness without warning. Weakness that turned my bones to liquid.

I told myself it was stress. The psychological cost of watching everything I'd built disintegrate. I didn't let myself examine the other possibilities taking root in the darker corners of my consciousness. The ones that whispered about missed periods and tender breasts and mornings spent dry-heaving into toilets. Five minutes after settling at my desk, his voice crackled through the intercom. Not a request. A summons that bypassed civility entirely, assuming my compliance before I'd even stood. Walking into what used to be Liam's sanctuary felt like voluntary sacrifice.

Like I was laying myself on an altar I'd built with my own fucking hands. Jackson didn't look up from the papers spread before him. A power play so textbook it would have been laughable if I wasn't the one being dissected by it. I stood there, waiting, feeling my autonomy erode with each passing second of his deliberate silence. The thing is, I'd survived worse. Foster care. Addict parents. Poverty that ground people down until there was nothing left. I'd thought I was equipped for this. I was wrong.

"I'm used to having coffee waiting on my desk each morning." His voice was measured, almost bored. Still not looking at me. "Black, two sugars. Tomorrow, make sure it's here before I arrive." The words landed in my stomach like concrete. Not a request. An expectation wrapped in the certainty of my compliance. A test designed to establish hierarchy, to make me demonstrate submission through the performance of menial service. And we both knew I couldn't afford to refuse. "Of course," I heard myself say, and hated how steady my voice sounded.

Hated that I could perform professionalism while rage burned beneath my skin like acid, eating through every layer of dignity I'd wrapped around myself as protection. He outlined his expectations with the casual entitlement of someone who'd never encountered resistance. I would manage his schedule, prepare his meetings, handle his correspondence. The language was corporate, appropriate, designed for HR documentation. But beneath the professional terminology lived something darker. The understanding that I wasn't just his assistant. I was his to command. His to control.

His to remind, every moment of every fucking day, that I existed entirely at his mercy. I returned to my desk feeling hollowed out. Made the coffee he'd demanded with hands that wanted to tremble but didn't because I wouldn't give him that small victory. Black, two sugars, in the mug that used to be Liam's favorite. Another calculated insult I was meant to swallow without comment. When I brought it to him, he barely acknowledged the cup. But as I turned to leave, his hand connected with my ass.

Casual, proprietary, the touch lasting only seconds but branding itself into my nervous system with permanent fucking ink. "Good girl," he murmured. My body froze before my brain could process the command. Every muscle locked down in primal response, adrenaline flooding my bloodstream with contradictory imperatives. Fight, flee, freeze. I did the worst possible thing. I stood there, paralyzed by the collision of rage and calculation, feeling the phantom imprint of his palm against me like a burn that wouldn't stop spreading. Good girl. Like I was a pet who'd performed a trick correctly.

Like my compliance was adorable rather than coerced, a survival strategy rather than choice. The rational part of my brain whispered that this was nothing. A brief touch. Words that could be explained away as paternal approval if I tried to report them. What HR department would believe me when his name was carved into the building's foundation, when my complaints would be dismissed as the desperate machinations of a woman whose scandal was still fresh in public memory? So I swallowed everything.

The rage, the humiliation, the visceral revulsion that made my skin crawl with the need to scrub away his touch until I bled. I forced my face into careful neutrality and continued walking to the door as if nothing had shattered inside me. This was day one. The violation didn't stay localized. It spread through my body like poison, infiltrating my bloodstream with each heartbeat until I felt contaminated everywhere. His touch had lasted seconds, but I carried it for hours.

Felt the casual dismissal of my autonomy, the reduction of my worth to something he could grab and assess and find satisfactory. The knowledge that this was just the beginning. That compliance would breed further violation. That each small surrender would pave the way for larger ones. The nausea intensified. I barely made it to the bathroom before my body was rejecting everything. The coffee I'd made for him, the breakfast I'd forced down, the situation I'd voluntarily walked into because I thought strength meant endurance rather than escape. Jesus Christ, I'd miscalculated so badly.

At lunch, my phone rang with an unknown number that I answered despite every instinct screaming otherwise. Some self-destructive impulse toward accumulating pain, toward confirming that everyone I'd ever trusted would eventually reveal themselves as users and manipulators. "Jasmine? Baby, it's Mom." My mother's voice, thinner and shakier than memory had preserved it. I should have hung up. Should have protected myself from whatever fresh manipulation she was orchestrating. Instead, I agreed to meet her that evening at some quiet café across town. Maybe I wanted to hurt.

Maybe I needed the pain to feel like something other than Jackson's good girl, compliant and hollow. Maybe I was already so numb that adding more seemed irrelevant. The rest of the day passed in dissociative fragments. The brothers tried constantly to reach me. Liam appearing at my desk with concern carved into every line of his face, Asher sending messages I deleted without reading, Finn trying to intercept me in hallways I deliberately avoided. I couldn't face them.

Couldn't bear to see their impotent fury at a situation they had no power to fix, their rage that would only make everything worse. I saw Liam through the glass walls, watching me work under his father's observation. His jaw was tight with barely restrained violence, hands clenched into fists that couldn't strike without destroying everything we were trying to protect. That evening, I drove to the café in a fugue state, exhaustion making my movements sluggish and disconnected.

The place was tucked into an unfamiliar neighborhood, quiet enough that running into anyone I knew was mercifully unlikely. My mother was already there, hands wrapped around tea in a corner booth. She was skeletal and pale, her face gaunt in ways that spoke of hard living and harder chemical dependencies. This wasn't the version who'd shown up at Leo's apartment high and incoherent. This was someone who'd been using so long that sobriety looked like illness, her body consuming itself in the absence of the drugs that had sustained it.

She looked up when I approached, and something in her eyes made my chest constrict with an emotion I couldn't name. Not manipulation. Not the calculation I'd braced for. Just exhausted desperation and the faintest flicker of something that might have been shame. "You came," she whispered. I slid into the booth across from her, suddenly too depleted to maintain the anger that had fueled me for years. Too empty to feel anything except the dull ache of Jackson's touch still burning against my skin like a brand I couldn't escape. "I'm here. What do you want?" Virgin Dot Com