She was very obviously not expecting me because when I shouted out a hello that could’ve been construed as slightly too loud and maybe even a little aggressive—hey, I was strange—she let out a small squeak and almost dropped the tray she was placing on the dining room table. Instead of falling to the floor, it hit the surface with a clatter, sending a sugar bowl toppling over.
White crystal granules spread across the black tablecloth.
I rushed forward, intending on helping her. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you.”
The older and sharply featured woman looked up upon my approach. She swept up the sugar in a graceful move that looked like something someone would do at a magic show.
“No, it is I who should apologize. I was not expecting…”
“Me?” I finished helpfully for her.
I didn’t blame her. Of course she knew she was preparing more breakfast than just the one she had previously, so she knew Lukyan had a houseguest. And my laundry always seemed to be magically taken away while I was reading in the library or stretching in my yoga studio, so she had most likely known Lukyan’s guest was a woman.
She’d also most likely met Lukyan. Seen him in all his cold magnificence. So she was most likely expecting a lithe Amazonian woman of Eastern European descent with painful and unique beauty wearing designer clothes.
She was not likely expecting a rather short and petite, bony, brown-haired American who wore pain awkwardly and seeped sorrow and weakness from her pores. No designer clothes to be seen, just the simple black jeans I was coming to like, despite how much they showed, and a flowing black tee—long-sleeved, of course.
She shook her head, a kindness coming from her face that didn’t suit her rather cruel-looking features.
“No, it’s just you normally don’t come for breakfast this early. Not that that’s a problem. Oh, not at all,” she said quickly.
I smiled, or at least attempted to. I hadn’t done so in years, so I feared my lips were rather grotesque and lopsided, like a stroke victim.
“I’m Elizabeth,” I offered freely.
Mostly because this woman, with her neatly pressed gray blouse and matching slacks and severe bun, deeply lined face and kind eyes somehow reminded me of Agna, of that half-remembered kindness.
She paused, still cradling the sugar she’d swept up. “Vera,” she said finally, after likely deciding her employer wouldn’t kill her for exchanging names with his captive.
His contract.
His complication.
I opened my mouth to say more, maybe to probe her, despite the strangled feeling in my stomach from being in another room with someone other than Lukyan. Someone who may very well be kind. Human.
That was more terrifying than being in a room with a murderer. With a monster. I knew what to expect from monsters. Humans were another story. Their kindness could hurt more than any kind of physical or emotional torture.
But I needn’t have worried, because she gave me a brisk nod and a half smile. “Enjoy your breakfast, Elizabeth.”
And then she left the room on light feet, as most staff of hit men probably mastered within days of their employ.
You had to act like a ghost around murderers; otherwise, they’d realize you were alive and vulnerable. I’d learned that from my mother. From my father. From my husband. Not that it had helped.
“Please,” I coughed, blood spattering onto the white carpet. It had to be color treated almost every week.
Christopher told the cleaner it was red wine and I was clumsy. The cleaner pretended to believe him.
Christopher’s classically handsome face came at me like a bullet, or perhaps that was my rattled and pounding brain unable to properly process speeds.
My scalp screamed as he yanked my head backward. I did not. I knew screaming only made things worse. Only made him more excited. Only made it last longer.
“Please what, Lizzie?” he asked. “You’re my wife. You’re mine. You were given to me. I own you. You know this. You know there’s no escape, only death.”
I coughed again, or tried to, but the angle of my neck meant I only choked on the blood trying to escape my body. My desperation, my fear paralyzed me. Though not my fear for my own well-being.
“I’m pregnant,” I croaked.
His grip did not loosen, though his face turned pensive. “You’re lying,” he decided.
I only stared at him.
He saw something in my eyes. He saw a lot of things most likely. Pain, sorrow, defeat, weakness. But he also saw the truth, because the pressure at my head released and he let me fall to the ground.
I was resigned to lying there, sinking into the fabric of the carpet until I had enough strength to push myself up, to crawl to the bathroom. Instead, gentle hands grasped my bruised forearms. It was surprise that had my body limp and malleable, so he could gently place me on the sofa.
Christopher pushed my matted hair from my eyes. “I’ll need to see a doctor’s confirmation, of course,” he said. Then he did something more terrifying than anything else he’d done that night. He smiled. “If you’re correct, you better hope you’re giving me a son. For both your sakes.” His eyes went to my still-flat belly. Then he stood up, smoothed his suit, and left the room.
I blinked against his words. Then I threw up.
I cradled my stomach in my hands.
“I’ll protect you,” I promised.
Of course, that was a lie.
I couldn’t protect anything.
Not even my unborn child.
10
My day, like every one for the past week, was haunted—worse than it had been since I came here. Since I’d sequestered myself in that farm a thousand years ago. I felt a thousand years old, lugging around centuries’ worth of pain, suffering and self-hatred.
It didn’t escape me that with Lukyan it was all still there. If anything, it was heavier, but I somehow felt stronger, more able to carry the load.
Again, grossly illogical.
I didn’t even know the man’s last name. He knew mine. And most likely a lot inaner and highly personal details about my everyday life. He probably knew more about me than I did. He’d watched me from the outside for months. It was people who spent a great deal of time and attention watching strangers without the burden of affection or love who got an accurate depiction of who that person was.
You could never know someone you loved. Not properly. For all their flaws and ugliness. You became blind to all that. You only knew what you wanted to know. Because if you properly knew someone, every part of them, love wouldn’t ever exist.
People were ugly.
He knew that about me.
So he knew me.
It’s what gave him occupancy over my mind since he’d left. Since the kiss. Since before that, if I wanted to be honest with myself.
There was also the fact that I hated him. With a passion. I hated him for what he’d done to me. What he’d made me feel. For his coldness. For the fact that he could kill me as easily as kiss me. For the fact that, to him, my life was disposable. I was disposable.
I hated him because when I came to dinner that night, out of habit rather than hunger, he was sitting there, cut from steel and staring at me. He didn’t say a thing. Barely blinked at me, in fact. His eyes flickered over me with disinterest bordering on distaste before they lowered, focusing on his dinner once more.
It took everything in me to act with the same detachment, to pretend that I hadn’t stuttered a step when I’d laid eyes on him, pretend my lungs hadn’t filled with lead and my palms hadn’t become sweaty. To pretend his lips hadn’t been on mine one week ago, that he hadn’t thrust his darkness into my soul and blackened it, singed it so beautifully I didn’t care about what was left.
Silently, I pulled out my chair, sat in it and laid my napkin on my lap. With effort, I wrenched my gaze from him to stare down at my plate.
Poached chicken tonight. Steamed vegetables. Sauce on the side. Warm bread on the
small plate beside me. Salad in a heaped bowl in front of me. I catalogued them with intensity, with focus that took up my whole brain.
I wanted to yell, scream, rip apart that fucking bowl of lettuce and throw it at the wall.
Instead, I took the tongs and spooned a generous amount on my plate. I picked up my fork, letting it hover above my food, suspended in the air. The thought of trying to force something down caused my already sickened stomach to roil.
I dropped the fork to the plate and it clattered against the porcelain, mingling itself with the food that would go uneaten.
The obnoxious sound in the silent room got Lukyan’s attention. This time, barely visible irritation tickled at the corner of his eyes. I was getting good at it now, examining Lukyan’s almost never-changing face for subtle hints as to what he was feeling.
But the look in his eyes, etched into his body, it wasn’t subtle.
“You hate me,” I accused.
Ash filled my mouth. I hated him. Had been marinating on that hatred for this entire week. But seeing his real hate speared me in a place I didn’t think I was able to feel pain anymore.
“No,” he said without hesitation. “You’re not of enough consequence for me to hate you.”
The apathetic way in which he was addressing me, treating me, hurt me more than I would care to admit.
“Not of enough consequence?” I repeated, my voice flat and bland like his. “If I wasn’t of enough consequence, you would’ve put a bullet in my brain the first moment you stepped into my bedroom.” I pushed out of my chair and this time, I didn’t fight my urge to throw things. The salad bowl went flying and shattered against the wall, leaves of lettuce raining down, mixing themselves with shards of glass.
“If I wasn’t of consequence, you wouldn’t have brought me back here, kept me alive, lorded your fucking superiority over me!” I yelled, my plate meeting my fury as it met its end on the hardwood floor. I narrowed my eyes at Lukyan. “If I wasn’t of consequence, you wouldn’t be torturing me with dispassionate disposition, caressing my death, and fucking kissing me.” I was breathing heavily at this point. “You say you’re not a sadist, but you don’t have to draw my blood, bruise my skin to gain gratification from my torture.” My hand ghosted over the only now fading purple bruising on my neck. “You’re a sick and sadistic fuck because you’re playing with my fucking sanity for kicks, yanking at the loose threads of my soul for entertainment.”
My water glass was my next victim, hurtling through the air in the same direction as the salad bowl. It exploded against the wall and water sprayed everywhere, a faint splash settling on my cheek. I barely noticed, because my focus was once more on Lukyan.
“Say what you will about my weakness. How it makes me pathetic, unworthy, ugly. I will admit to it. I know I turned myself into it,” I hissed, stalking around the table, pacing, searching for more things to throw.
I itched to send something in Lukyan’s direction, but at that moment I was angry, furious, not suicidal. So I continued my screaming rant.
“Because horrible things happen, and you survive or you die. Two options, right? That’s what you said that day you ripped me from my home. And you have the right to say that, because whatever horrible things happened to you to make your eyes cold and empty and your heart black and twisted and your humanity die, you survived them. Isn’t that right, Lukyan?”
I glared at his impassive face with hatred, with heat, with accusation. He made no move to speak, to interrupt, to fucking punch me in the face like I half expected him to. I expected him to meet my violence with his own. To trump it. But instead he faced my fury with peaceful contemplation. Of course, this made me even more manic.
“You survived your horrors, and then you utilized the cold creature the world turned you into. You accepted it and you started to kill things. People. For profit,” I spat with a disgust I didn’t exactly feel.
I wasn’t shocked or even overly offended with his business. I’d grown up around such things. They didn’t shock me or make my skin crawl. It was all part of the human devolution. The food chain. It was becoming more sophisticated these days, but it was the way of the jungle. I was saying it for a reaction, for a twitch in Lukyan’s façade. I got nothing.
“You killed beautiful things so you could own them, look at them and collect them,” I continued. “Then you killed things that were once people, but they stopped being people when that little message on your dark web came in. Maybe they were all dark too. All ugly people who did ugly deeds, and that’s what landed them in that dark place. Maybe. But that didn’t matter to you. It wasn’t the why. It was the name on the screen. Then they were nothing but a target. A task.”
This time I did have enough bravery—or stupidity—to pace closer to him, to give my words more of a chance to hit their target.
“You killed beauty and you killed ugliness and you survived. And then you get the right to tell me my horrible life was not an excuse for all of this.”
I pointed to my temple, to my craziness, to make my point.
“But maybe that’s because I have a soul, humanity. And there’s a limit to how much a human soul can take, whatever you say to the contrary. So maybe the ones who survive the horror of being beaten, raped, degraded in every possible way—the people who know they’ve killed the one pure and innocent thing in their ugly and tainted life, maybe the people who survive that don’t have a soul to crush. Because you’re not meant to survive some things and continue to be human. To be a person. There’s a limit. I’m not a saint, but I have a soul. And it reached its limit. To survive, I would’ve had to sacrifice being a person. That’s what you did.”
My eyes ran over every inch of him with disgust and desire.
“That makes you just as weak and pathetic and ugly as me. You made a choice and so did I. It killed us in different ways, but it doesn’t really matter because dead is dead, right?”
He nodded. “Dead is dead.”
The words echoed in the room, bounced around the heavy silence, tore through the ghosts hanging around us. My chest rose and fell erratically, my breath coming in harsh pants with the force of the words I’d spewed out. The emotion that had come with pouring them out of me. My throat was scraped and raw from the force of them. My rib cage ached from the force my heart was slamming against it.
At some point during my contemplation of my body, Lukyan had placed his napkin gently on the table and gotten out of his chair.
“But I don’t need to be alive to fuck you,” he said, stalking toward me. Glass and china crunched underneath his feet like bones.
I didn’t retreat. Maybe I couldn’t. Maybe I didn’t want to. It didn’t matter why, because he was there. In front of me, hands settling tightly on the bones of my hips, pressing past the point of pain.
I didn’t cry out. Didn’t fight.
I’d done enough of that. Why would I want to fight my own destruction? The thing I’d been craving, in some filthy and hideous part of me, since I’d locked eyes with Lukyan beneath the mask the night he came to kill me?
He leaned forward so his mouth brushed mine. “Maybe I’ll fuck you back to life,” he rasped. His teeth fastened against my lower lip. More pain. Warm blood pooled in my mouth. He lapped at it with his kiss. “Or maybe we’ll both stay dead.”
I didn’t speak because I had no words left. I’d reached my quota. Because words were done at this point. For once in my life, words were meaningless. Everything that held weight was Lukyan and me, our bodies and the frantic desperation I had to link them together.
His hands were ripping—literally ripping—at my clothes at the same time his mouth attacked my own, as his furious touch ripped at my walls, at my soul. I cried out in protest as his mouth left mine, but the sound was quickly replaced with pain and pleasure as Lukyan’s mouth and teeth fastened around my nipple.
His smooth hands ran over my stomach, gliding over the scarred skin and not hesitating in plunging into my panties.
I l
et out another gasp as he didn’t gently caress me, build me up, just shoved his fingers inside me. My body had been waiting for this, expecting this, so it provided him with the lubrication to do so.
My knees shook with the effort of keeping my body upright as his fingers moved violently but gracefully inside me. His mouth left my nipples, and the cold air was an assault on the tender skin. I welcomed it. The comfort in the pain, in the discomfort, melding beautifully with the pleasure of his touch.
Ice blue eyes met mine. There should’ve been words. Some kind of growl declaring I was his, that he owned me. That there was no going back from this.
But there was none of that.
Because we both knew it.
He’d owned me since the night he’d decided not to kill me. There had been no going back from that moment forward.
So instead of words, there was just another violent kiss as he brought me to my climax. I didn’t know how to weather it. How to survive it. My body had never experienced an orgasm before. Not once. No one, not even myself, had been interested in giving me pleasure. Pain had always been the goal.
There was pain in this. Because with every quiver, every explosion, there was a reminder of other hands, of being defiled with everything from hands to the hilt of a knife. I didn’t fight against it. Try to put it to one side and experience this separate from everything that came before it. No, I let them mix together, let them taint each other and somehow make everything more powerful because pleasure only worked with pain to counteract it.
My scalp cried out in pain as Lukyan grasped my hair, yanking my head back so he could fasten his lips at my neck, so he could sink his teeth into the skin, brand me with his touch.
We were moving. I hadn’t quite realized it until my back slammed into the table. Pain ricocheted from my kidneys upward from the force. I gasped but didn’t stop Lukyan from pushing me roughly down on the cold surface. Candlesticks and serving dishes crashed around me. I barely noticed them.