THE BILLIONAIRE’S POSSESSION

Chapter 9: Caught by his tracking

Lying to him was harder than I expected.

Tuesday, I cancelled the usual coffee at his office. I texted him: *Swamped with work, can't get away.*

He responded immediately: *You'll make time. 3 PM.*

I texted back: *I can't. I'm sorry. Client emergency.*

He didn't respond for an hour, and the silence was worse than any words could have been. When he finally texted back, it was three words: *We'll talk later.*

By Wednesday, my morning sickness was visible to anyone who looked closely. I was running to bathrooms between meetings, claiming client calls as an excuse. My face was pale. My hands shook slightly when I held things.

Marcus noticed.

He called me to his office under the pretense of discussing the Blake brief. When I arrived, his assistant was instructed to leave immediately, and the door was locked.

"You're lying to me," he said. It wasn't a question. It was a statement of fact, delivered with absolute certainty.

"I'm not—"

"Don't." His voice was deadly quiet. "Don't insult my intelligence. You've been avoiding me. You've been making excuses. You're avoiding eye contact. You're nauseated in the mornings, I've heard you. You're pale. Your breasts are tender because you keep rubbing them when you think I'm not looking. You're changing your routine, changing your eating habits, changing everything about yourself. And you're not telling me why."

I couldn't speak. My heart was racing, my hands were shaking.

"Is it the baby?" he asked, stepping closer. "Are you having complications? Are you in pain? Are you—" He stopped, and I watched as realization dawned on his face. "You're hiding something from me."

"No—"

"You went somewhere without telling me." His voice was cold now, controlled fury barely contained. "You left the apartment and you lied about where you were going. You made an appointment and you didn't include me. You're making decisions about my baby without my involvement."

The word "my" hit me like a slap. Not "our" baby. "My" baby. Like the child inside me belonged to him, not to me.

"It's my medical care," I said quietly. "My body. My doctor's appointments—"

"No." He stepped closer, his hand gripping my face, forcing me to meet his eyes. His expression was a mixture of possessiveness and fury and obsession so intense it was almost demonic. "Your body is mine. Your medical care is mine. Your decisions about our baby are mine. Everything about you belongs to me, Lily. Everything."

"Let go of me," I said, but my voice came out weak.

"Tell me the truth." His hand tightened. "Tell me everything, or I swear I will make your life difficult in ways you can't imagine."

I felt fear spike through me, real fear, the kind that makes you understand that the person you love might actually hurt you.

"I went to the doctor alone," I admitted. "I made an appointment without telling you. I wanted... I wanted to have something that was just for me. Something I could control."

His hand dropped from my face. He walked away from me, his jaw clenched so tightly I thought his teeth might break. When he spoke, his voice was dark and dangerous.

"You're never going anywhere alone again," he said. "Every appointment, I'm there. Every decision, I'm involved. Every moment of every day, you're accounted for. Do you understand me?"

"Marcus—"

"Do you understand me?" he demanded.

"Yes," I whispered.

"Good." He grabbed me, pulling me close, burying his face in my hair. "I'm not trying to control you, Lily. I'm trying to protect you. Both of you. But if you keep lying to me, if you keep trying to hide things from me, I'm going to have to take more... aggressive measures."

"What does that mean?" I asked, terrified of the answer.

"It means I'll monitor your phone. It means I'll have you followed. It means I'll track your location every minute of every day. It means I'll know where you are and who you're with and what you're doing, because I can't trust you to not make decisions that could harm my baby."

"Our baby," I said quietly.

"Our baby," he repeated, but the way he said it suggested he still meant "mine."

For the next three days, I was a model girlfriend. I texted him constantly. I told him exactly where I was going, who I was with, what I was doing. I went to work, came home, submitted to his possession completely. I stopped trying to have any sense of autonomy.

But it was eating me alive.

Thursday night, I lay in bed next to him, my hand on my stomach, feeling the tiniest flutter of movement that might be the baby or might just be my imagination. Either way, it was a reminder: this life inside me was partly mine. This baby was partly mine. And yet, I had no control over its future. Marcus had already decided everything. Where the baby would be born, who would deliver it, what the baby would be named, where it would sleep, how it would be raised.

I had become nothing but a vessel for his possession.

"I can feel you thinking," Marcus said in the darkness. His hand covered mine on my stomach. "Stop. Trust me. Trust that I'm doing this for us."

"What if I can't?" I whispered.

"Then I'll make you trust me."

The threat or was it a promise? hung in the darkness between us.

By Friday, I'd completely lost myself. I was eating what he told me to eat. I was wearing what he told me to wear. I was saying what he told me to say. The girl who'd been brilliant and ambitious and independent was gone, replaced by a hollow shell of compliance.

And yet, the fear was growing.

The fear that this would never end. That I would never escape. That he would control me for the rest of my life in the name of protecting our baby. That I would spend the next eighteen years or more completely subjugated to his obsession.

I needed to do something. I needed to make a plan. I needed to find a way out before he completely consumed me.

But I didn't know how. And with each passing day, the walls of his possession grew higher and more inescapable.