Deep Domination (Bought by the Billionaire #2) by Lili Valente

captivity.
    Before those eerie sessions, Hannah had understood Stockholm Syndrome, but only in a textbook way. Coming face to face with an innocent young girl who had been stolen from a loving home, raped for the first months of her “marriage,” and forced to live a nightmare for years—but who seemed unable to wake up from the false belief that her cult husband was a decent man who tried his best to provide—was more chilling than she’d expected it to be.
    It brought home in a new way the immense power of the human mind.
    The mind was innovative, beautiful, and endlessly creative, but it could also be terrifying. Ella’s body had been liberated from her prison, but her mind was still locked away, trapped in a dangerous pattern of thinking that allowed the man who had stolen her youth to continue stealing from her long after he was behind bars.
    For months after those sessions, Hannah had suffered from horrible nightmares. In her dreams, she’d been working as a therapist, but was unable to get through to the children who had come to her for help. The children were the saddest of sad cases, innocents who had been violently victimized and bore mental and emotional scars that tore her heart in two. She would wake up covered in a cold sweat, her pulse racing, consumed by the fear that she might not be up to the challenge of freeing her future patients from the unhealthy machinations of their own minds.
    But when Jackson left her alone in bed—disappearing as soon as he thought she was asleep—Hannah didn’t have one of her therapist anxiety dreams. She dreamed that she was one of those lost girls.
    She was a teenager trapped in the same shack where Ella had shared a single bedroom with six other women, waiting for her husband to come home. She cooked fried chicken in the nude while her sister-wives watched and laughed when the hot oil leapt out of the skillet to scald her skin.
    Later, she waited for her husband on her knees by the door and allowed him to take her on the filthy carpet as soon as he stepped inside. His touch made her sick to her stomach, but she parted her legs and endured it because she knew she had no choice but to obey.
    And then the dream skipped ahead and she was pregnant with the man’s child and happy, feeding chickens in a threadbare dress not adequate to protect her from the crisp autumn air, daydreaming about how wonderful things were going to be now that the baby was coming. Some part of her mind was horrified by the shift in her thinking, but that part was growing weaker and more distant with every passing day.
    Soon, she wouldn’t be able to hear it at all.
    One morning, she would wake up and no longer see that she was being tortured, degraded, and abused. And on that day she would be as much a captive of her own mind as of the man who had taken her away from the people who loved her.
    Hannah moaned as she sat up in bed, rubbing at the tops of her aching eyes with her fingertips, shivering as she tried to shake off the lingering emotional fog the dream had left behind. She couldn’t remember the last time a nightmare had made her physically ill, but right now it was all she could do not to race to the bathroom and be sick.
    It had been so real, so horribly real.
    Because it is real. The setting is prettier, but the scenario is the same.
    You’ve been taken by a dangerous man, isolated, put under his control, and sooner or later you will bend or you will break.
    “No,” Hannah mumbled softly to herself, hugging her knees to her chest. She wouldn’t end up like Mary or Ella. She wasn’t an impressionable, terrified young girl. She was a strong, intelligent woman capable of doing what it took to survive without breaking down or falling under Jackson’s dark spell.
    She refused to think about how close she’d felt to him last night or how much it had hurt when he’d lashed out and refused to let her say his name.
    Last night was last night. She’d been exhausted, vulnerable, and