Chapter 6: Tower of Desire
The silence in the penthouse was absolute, a vacuum sealed by triple-paned glass. Donald stood at the floor-to-ceiling window, Manhattan laid out like a spilled jewel box below him. The gallery catalogue lay open on the Italian marble console, his own handwriting glaring back from the margin. Can’t build.
He snorted, swirling three fingers of amber cognac in a heavy crystal snifter. A useless sentiment. He built. That’s what he did. He took dreams, even the stupid, inefficient ones, and he hammered them into reality, into steel and profit and legacy. This… thing with the girl. It was a shoddy foundation. A zoning nightmare. His lawyers, his advisors, the few remaining friends who dared, they’d all said it. A liability. A spectacular risk.
He drained the glass, the heat a poor substitute for the one burning in his gut.
His fingers itched. Not for a phone, but for the feel of graphite on paper. An absurd impulse. He hadn’t drawn for pleasure in decades. Schematics, sure. Floor plans. Not the foolish, fluttering line of a sketch meant to capture a feeling.
He stalked from the living area into the master bedroom, a cavern of gilt and cream. A fire crackled in the grand fireplace, casting dancing, demonic shadows across the portraits of buildings that bore his name. He shrugged out of his jacket, tossed it over a silk-upholstered chair. The tie followed, a slither of dark blue against the pale rug.
He saw her. Not as she was in the gallery, cloaked in caution, but as she’d been in that shabby café, leaning over her notebook. The fierce concentration on her face. The way a loose curl had escaped and brushed the paper as she drew. The clean scent of her, cutting through the coffee stench. Youth. It wasn’t just smooth skin and bright eyes. It was a kind of fearless focus, an absorption in the moment that he’d bartered away for perpetual future-tripping decades ago.
His cock stirred, a thick, insistent pressure against his fly. He unbuttoned his pants with impatient, practiced tugs, freeing himself. He was already hard, achingly so. The sight of his own erection, thick and flushed in the firelight, was a stark, physical echo of his frustration.
He wrapped a fist around himself, hissing at the contact. He leaned back against the cold marble of the fireplace mantel, the heat of the flames licking at his side. He didn’t close his eyes. He stared into the fire, and he let the fantasy unspool with deliberate, brutal clarity.
He was in his office. The big mahogany desk, the one cleared of everything but a single ledger. She was there, in that pencil skirt she’d worn to the library, the one that hugged the sweet curve of her ass. He could smell her—soap and ambition and a hint of nervous sweat.
“You think you’re so smart,” his voice was a low rumble in the quiet room, spoken aloud to the empty luxury around him. “With your flowcharts and your quiet buildings.”
In his mind, she turned, those strange, beautiful eyes wide. One blue, one green. Captive. His.
He didn’t ask. He never asked. He reached for her, his big hands finding her hips, spinning her around to face the desk. A startled gasp from her lips. He crowded her from behind, his body pressing her down until her cheek was against the cool, polished wood.
“This,” he grunted, his strokes on his own flesh growing rougher, faster, “this is what you want. Don’t lie. I see it. You want to be more than a footnote in a gallery catalogue.”
He yanked the skirt up, his fantasy vivid, merciless. The simple cotton of her panties. He hooked a finger in the waistband and tore. The sound was obscenely loud in his head. She cried out. Not in pain. In shock. In relief.
His other hand pushed between her shoulder blades, holding her down. “You wanna be the fucking building, Lyra. You wanna be the thing I build.”
He spat into his palm, a crude, wet sound, and smoothed it over the head of his cock. He was leaking, pre-cum slicking his furious strokes. In his mind, he positioned himself at her entrance. She was tight. So fucking tight. A hot, virgin clutch he hadn’t felt in half a century.
“You’re mine,” he growled to the fire, to the fantasy. “Say it.”
A whimper. Then, her voice, trembling but clear, “I’m yours.”
He shoved into her, one brutal, claiming thrust. She screamed, the sound swallowed by the wood of the desk. The fantasy was hyper-real, a violent daydream. The crush of her body taking him, the impossible heat, the way her back arched, presenting herself to be taken even as she shook. He fucked her with deep, piston-like drives, the desk rocking with each impact. His name became a chant on her lips, a sob, a prayer.
“You take it,” he grunted, his own breath coming in ragged pants, his fist a blur. “You take all of it. My cock. My name. Everything. I’ll put my name on you so deep you’ll never forget who owns you.”
The obscenities poured out of him, filthy, degrading words that in the fantasy only made her wetter, made her clench around him tighter. He described what he’d do to her—bend her over the gilt rail of his bed, make her suck him off in the back of the limo, fuck her on the balcony for all of New York to see. Brand her. Claim her. Ruin her for anyone else.
His balls tightened, a savage ache coiling at the base of his spine. The room blurred. The fire roared in his ears.
“Lyra,” he choked out, the name a guttural, broken thing.
With a final, ragged groan, he came. Thick, hot ropes of cum shot across his abdomen, splattering against his tailored shirt, dripping onto the priceless rug below. He rode the convulsions, his body shuddering, his knuckles white where he gripped the mantel for support.
Slowly, the world solidified. The fire was just a fire. The portraits were just paint. The wet heat on his skin cooled rapidly, a sticky, shameful mess.
He looked down at himself, at the spent, softening flesh in his hand, at the evidence of his impotent rage and longing splattered across his own shirt. A deep, hollow disgust washed over him, colder than the marble at his back.
This was pathetic. An old man jacking off to a violent fantasy about a girl young enough to be his granddaughter. A girl who saw gargoyles in stonework and dreamed of community centers.
He pushed himself upright, his body feeling heavy, used. He stripped off the soiled shirt, balled it up, and threw it into the fire. The fabric caught with a whump, the flames licking hungrily at the expensive cotton, the semen sizzling away to nothing.
He cleaned himself with a monogrammed towel from the ensuite, his movements brisk, clinical. When he was done, he walked back to the living area, naked from the waist up. He picked up the gallery catalogue again.
Sometimes the best dreams are the ones you can’t build.
Bullshit. Sentimental, weak bullshit.
He picked up his phone from the console. Scrolled past the numbers for his lawyers, his COO, his architect. He found the new, unlabeled number. He typed a message, his thumb hard on the glass.
The heating costs on that spire were a fantasy. The wind shear calculations were juvenile. The whole thing would have been a lawsuit waiting to happen. It was a stupid dream.
He sent it. Three dots appeared immediately. He watched them, his heart pounding with a ferocity that shamed him more than the act he’d just performed.
Her reply came, swift and sharp.
You didn’t think it was stupid when you were standing in front of it. You said it had ambition.
He almost smiled. There she was. Pushing back. Not cowed. Not owned.
His fingers flew.
Ambition without execution is a fairy tale. I prefer reality.
Reality is overrated.
She fired back.
He stared at the words. Reality is overrated. Spoken like a true twenty-one-year-old. Spoken like someone who still believed they could redraw the blueprints.
He sat down in a deep leather chair, the cold air raising goosebumps on his skin. The empty, silent opulence of the tower pressed in on him. He thought of her tiny, cluttered studio. The smell of her cheap coffee. The rabbit with one ear.
He typed one last message for the night.
We’ll see. Dinner. Tuesday. My driver will pick you up at 8. Wear something… uncompromising.
He put the phone down, screen facing down. He didn’t wait for a reply. He was already building the next scene in his head. Not a fantasy this time. A plan. The table, the food, the conversation. The inevitable, terrifying, necessary next move.
Outside, the city glittered, a kingdom of hard edges and conquered dreams. And in the quiet heart of it, he waited, a king in an empty castle, plotting the one acquisition that felt, for the first time, utterly beyond his reach.
The hollow feeling didn’t leave with the dawn. It expanded, filling the vast, silent spaces of the penthouse as Tuesday loomed. He tried to work. Seated behind the monumental mahogany desk, he stared at a prospectus for a Dubai development, the numbers blurring into gray static. The memory of her laugh in the café, that bright, surprised sound, pushed its way in. Then, the imagined feel of her body under his hands, the fantasy he’d stained his rug with. Shame curdled in his stomach, acrid and unfamiliar.
He shifted in his chair, his tailored slacks suddenly tight. The erection was a slow, stubborn resurgence, a physical rebellion against his self-disgust. He tried to ignore it, focusing on the bleak financial projections. His blood, however, had mapped a different course, a hot, insistent pulse that pulled all thought south. He let out a frustrated groan, a rough sound in the sterile office quiet.
This time, his hand moved differently. Slower. Softer. He didn’t grip himself with that punitive, claiming fury. He palmed the hard length through the fine wool, a tentative, almost questioning touch. He thought not of bending her over, but of the exact curve of her neck as she’d studied the gallery model. The intelligent focus in her heterochromatic eyes. The way she’d handed him that torn sketch of his own ugly gargoyles, a peace offering made of napkin.
He unzipped his pants, freeing his cock. He leaned back in the throne-like chair, his other hand rubbing at the tight ache in his chest. He stroked himself with a loose, languid rhythm, a world away from the frantic need of before. He imagined a different scenario. The fireplace, but not the violent claiming. Him sitting in that same chair, her standing between his knees, his hands coming up to frame her face. Not to force. To hold.
“Lyra,” he whispered to the empty office, the name a sigh this time, not a snarl. The fantasy unspooled with a terrifying tenderness. In his mind, he was asking. “Can I?” His thumbs stroked the fictional apples of her cheeks. He saw her nod, her eyes holding his, that fearless focus now turned on him, seeing all the way down to the pathetic, lonely core of him.
He imagined undressing her with a reverence that felt foreign in his own hands. The slow reveal of skin, not a conquest but an uncovering. He thought of her straddling his lap in the chair, not him taking her on the desk. The heat of her sinking onto him, not a brutal impalement, but a gradual, breathtaking acceptance. A joining. Her forehead resting against his, their breath mingling. “You’re so beautiful,” his fantasy-self murmured, the words ash in his real mouth, a language he’d forgotten. “Let me… let me just be here.”
His strokes matched the phantom rhythm, a deep, rolling cadence of possession that felt like shelter, not branding. He wasn’t fucking. He was moving inside a woman he was, for one delusional moment, loving. The climax, when it came, was a deep, full-body shudder that felt less like an explosion and more like a surrender. “Lyra.” He cried out, a choked, broken sound, as his release painted his hand and stomach. This time, there was no roar of triumph. Only a vast, echoing quiet, and a wave of something dangerously close to grief.
He sat there for a long time, spent and shaking, the fantasy’s afterglow a cruel mirror highlighting the emptiness of the room. The silent phone. The grand, empty bed in the next room. He cleaned up mechanically, his mind a numb blank. The dinner. It was a step on a path, but he no longer knew if it led to a summit or a cliff’s edge.
Lyra stared into the profound blackness of the little dress she’d bought with money she couldn’t really spare. It was uncompromising in its simplicity—sleeveless, high-necked, skimming her body to just above the knee. It felt like armor. She clutched Bartholomew, his one ear damp from her anxious twisting.
“He said ‘uncompromising,’” she told Isabella over the phone, her voice too high. “What does that even mean from him? A suit of armor? A neon sign?”
“It means he’s trying to sound mysterious instead of just saying ‘wear something sexy,’” Isabella replied, her tone strained with forced calm. “Because that would be too direct. Too normal. Remember your exits. The car door. The restaurant bathroom. My phone is on.”
The black sedan was idling downstairs precisely at eight, a uniformed driver holding the door. The restaurant was not a public place. It was a private dining room atop a building she didn’t recognize, all dark wood and panoramic views. He was already there, standing by the window, a silhouette against the glittering grid of the city.
He turned when she entered. His eyes tracked her from the door to the center of the room, a slow, comprehensive scan that missed nothing. She felt it like a physical touch. “You understood the assignment,” he said finally, a faint, approving rasp in his voice.
“I rarely don’t.” She didn’t smile.
Dinner was a series of small, exquisite courses that she barely tasted. The conversation was a minefield navigated with tense, polite tools. They talked about the midterms she’d aced. About a zoning law change impacting the Westchester property. About everything except the thing that thickened the air between them. The waiter disappeared after delivering dessert, a delicate construct of chocolate and gold leaf.
“Why did you really send for me that first time?” The question left her lips before she could cage it. She put her fork down. “The library. You could have had anyone. A call girl. A socialite. Anyone less… complicated.”
He swirled the red wine in his glass, watching the legs slide down the crystal. “A call girl doesn’t write thesis proposals about ethical urban renewal,” he said, his voice low. “A socialite wouldn’t have torn a sketch out of a notebook and told me not to tear down a fucking house.” He looked up, and his gaze was stripped bare. “I was bored. And then I was… arrested.”
The word hung there. Arrested. Not captivated. Not intrigued. Arrested. As in stopped. Halted in his tracks. It felt more honest than any compliment.
“You frighten me,” she whispered, the admission pulled from her.
“I frighten me,” he answered, without a trace of mockery.
The drive back to Trump Tower happened in a silence so profound it felt like a third presence in the car. He didn’t invite her up. He simply held the elevator door open after stepping out in the gilded lobby, his expression an unreadable question. She could have turned, walked back into the night, back to her messy studio and her rabbit and her sister’s worried texts. That was the exit, right there.
She stepped into the elevator. The doors sealed with a soft, final sigh. He didn’t press the penthouse button. He already had. The ascent was a weightless, terrifying levitation. They didn’t speak. Didn’t touch. The mirrored walls showed her a dozen Lyras, pale and wide-eyed, standing beside a dozen solid, silent Donalds.
The penthouse was as she’d imagined and nothing like it. It was colder. More like a museum. He led her not to the grand living area, but to a smaller, book-lined study. A fire burned here too. He went to a sideboard and poured two glasses of water, his back to her. His shoulders were rigid.
“I think about you,” he said to the bottles and glasses. “In ways that are… not appropriate.”
“I know.” Her voice was a thread.
He turned, handed her a glass. Their fingers brushed. A spark, static and warmth. “The things I’ve imagined. They’ve been… aggressive.”
“I know that, too.” She took a sip, the water doing nothing to dampen the desert in her mouth.
“I don’t want that tonight.” The confession seemed to cost him. He couldn’t meet her eyes. “Not with you. Not the first time.”
Her heart hammered against her ribs. “What do you want?”
He finally looked at her, and the raw need there was more vulnerable than any lust. “I want to see if it’s possible. To be… gentle.”
The word was alien in the room. It hovered. He set his glass down with a sharp click, the sound breaking the spell of hesitation. He closed the distance between them in two strides. His hands came up, but they didn’t grab. They framed her face, just as he’d imagined at his desk. His thumbs stroked her cheekbones, a mimicry of that lonely fantasy. His skin was surprisingly soft.
“Can I?” he breathed, the question mirroring the one from his reverie.
She nodded, her jaw trembling under his palms.
He kissed her then. It was nothing like she’d prepared for. It was slow. Searching. The press of his lips was firm but yielding, asking a question her mouth answered instinctively. He tasted of wine and a deeper, darker regret. When his tongue sought entrance, it was a request, not a demand. A low moan escaped her, vibrated into him. His arms slid around her, pulling her close against the solid wall of his body. She felt the hard evidence of his arousal against her stomach, but the embrace itself was encompassing, sheltering.
He walked her backwards, never breaking the kiss, until her knees hit the plush leather of a sofa. He sank down, pulling her onto his lap, straddling him. The black dress rode up her thighs. He broke the kiss, his breath ragged, to look at her. His gaze was a physical caress, moving over her face as if memorizing it.
“You are so fucking beautiful,” he whispered, the obscenity softened by the awe in his tone. His hands slid up her bare thighs, pushing the dress higher. He found the waistband of her plain cotton underwear. He didn’t tear. He hooked his fingers under the elastic and said, “Lift up for me.” She did, arching her hips, letting him slide them down and off. The air hit her exposed skin, a cool shock.
His big hands returned to her thighs, smoothing, kneading. He leaned forward and took her mouth again, one hand coming up to cradle the back of her head. The other hand slipped between their bodies. He fumbled with his own belt and zipper, his movements clumsy with a need he was visibly trying to leash. He freed himself, thick and heavy in his own hand.
He guided her, his eyes locked on hers. “Slowly,” he rasped. “You set the pace.”
She positioned herself, the broad head of his cock pressing against her slick entrance. She was wet, achingly so, her body betraying her fear with a fierce, primal readiness. She sank down an inch, the stretch exquisite, burning. A sharp gasp tore from her throat. He groaned, a deep, gut-punched sound, his forehead falling against her collarbone. His hands gripped her hips, not to force, but to steady them both.
“That’s it,” he mumbled into her skin, his voice muffled, strained. “Just like that. Take all of me, Lyra.”
She lowered herself further, a slow, relentless descent that felt less like penetration and more like a profound, flesh-deep recognition. He filled her completely, a fullness that stole her breath. She was seated fully in his lap, impaled, yet held. They stayed like that, motionless, panting into each other’s necks, feeling the frantic drumbeat of each other’s hearts. His cock twitched inside her, a hot, intimate pulse.
“Okay?” he gritted out, the single word freighted with a concern that undid her.
She answered by moving. A slight, experimental rock of her hips. The friction was electric, blinding. He threw his head back with a choked curse, his hands tightening on her. She did it again, finding a rhythm, riding him in the deep leather chair. He met her movements with shallow, upward thrusts, his control fraying at the edges. The slap of skin, the wet, obscene sounds of their joining, filled the quiet study.
“Look at me,” he demanded, his voice rough. She forced her eyes open, met his burning blue gaze. “You see this? You feel it? This is real. This is me. Not the… the other thing. This.”
It was a plea masquerading as a statement. She nodded, her hair falling around them like a curtain. He surged up, capturing her mouth in a searing kiss, his tongue plunging in time with his cock. The careful gentility shattered into raw, desperate need. He fucked up into her with powerful, piston-like drives, the force of it pushing cries from her lungs. The possessive beast was there, just beneath the surface, but it was channelled, not into violence, but into a devastating, focused intensity.
“Come for me,” he growled against her lips, one hand slipping between their bodies, his thumb finding her clit. He circled it with a brutal, perfect pressure. “Let me feel you come on my cock. Now.”
The command triggered it. Her orgasm detonated, a white-hot cascade that clenched around him in rhythmic, pulsing waves. She screamed, the sound swallowed by his mouth. The ferocious grip of her inner muscles tore his own release from him. He shouted, a raw, unvarnished roar, as he emptied himself deep inside her, his hips stuttering, his whole body shuddering with the force of it.
The aftershocks left them trembling, clinging to each other in the wreckage of the leather sofa. He was still inside her, softening. He kept his arms locked around her, his face buried in her hair, his breaths hot and damp against her neck. The fire crackled. The city lights spun silently beyond the glass.
He hadn’t said he loved her. He’d shown her a version of it, flawed and desperate and real. And as she felt his strong, aged body tremble against hers, she knew, with a cold, clear certainty, that this gentle possession was infinitely more dangerous than any brutal claim could ever be. It was a hook sunk deep, past flesh, past reason. It was the thing she wouldn’t know how to remove.