That mouse hadn’t been as lucky as I had. Apex could have killed me just the same when he found how I’d tried to run away from him. Instead, he’d only made me kneel for him, pressed ice to my swollen lip and stolen a kiss.
I stepped out of the shower and dripped my way over to the mirror above the sink. When I rubbed the fog away from it, I leaned in close to examine the damage. My lip wasn’t swollen anymore, thankfully. The skin was just a little ragged from where I’d bitten it, and it was healing fast. Apex’s kiss against it probably should have hurt a little. He’d kissed me hard, but the ice had numbed my lips and he’d been surprisingly…well, not gentle, but at least sensual. He could have harmed me then, too, I knew. Taken me over his knee like he’d threatened—or worse.
But as I grabbed a towel and dried myself off, I wondered what worse from Apex really would have looked like. The shirt he’d given me to wear had already been torn open. I hadn’t been wearing anything underneath it, either. It would have been so easy for him to rip the final buttons apart, strip me bare, take liberties…
I watched the cheeks of my reflection turn pink at the thought. Normally, this would have been the point where my inner floozy chimed in, but she was being surprisingly silent today.
Which didn’t change the fact that I’d just felt myself get a little wet while imagining exactly the kind of liberties Apex could have taken.
If we’d been back on Earth, I might have even wanted him to take me. God—back on Earth, I would have been thrilled to have a man look at me the way he did, force me to my knees like that, steal a kiss. I hadn’t exactly been allowed to have boyfriends, no matter how bad I might have wanted one.
But this wasn’t Earth, I reminded myself, and Apex wasn’t a man—as he reminded me just about every time I opened my mouth. He didn’t just look dangerous. He was dangerous. Whatever these specters he kept talking about were, they were obviously something a lot more menacing than normal soldiers.
Just because he hadn’t beaten me or tried to kill me didn’t mean that he wouldn’t in the future. I had to hold that truth as firmly in my mind as I could—before my inner floozy woke up for the day and started making me forget.
I wrapped the towel tight around my body and stepped back into the bedroom. Apex’s gaze prowled all over me as soon as he saw me. The heat of the shower was nothing compared to how hot I felt when he looked at me like that.
“Dress.” Apex nodded to the bed, where a fresh outfit was laid out over the now-straightened sheets. I hadn’t heard any servants come in while I was washing up, so he must have made the bed himself. They were pulled so tight that I could have bounced a coin off of them and caught it in my fist.
The outfit was black, just like the clothes that Apex wore. Harem pants and a short, low-cut top, just like usual. He’d already gotten himself dressed while I was showering and looked completely refreshed, though I didn’t know how he’d done it. Even the dark circles were gone from his eyes. If I didn’t know any better, I would have never guessed that he’d spent all night awake and watching me sleep.
“Turn around, then,” I said as I picked the clothes up off the bed.
“Why?”
I froze. Was he really going to make me explain it to him?
Apparently.
“Look, I know you’ve already gotten a more than generous view of my naked body,” I said slowly, recalling the little show I’d put on for him when I got out of the bath. “But that doesn’t mean you get to look at me as much as you like whenever you like. I’ll call you master or sir or whatever stupid thing you want when we’re around other people, but I’m not your slave right now. I get to decide when you see me naked. If you’re ever so lucky as to see me naked again.”
His lips twitched, not into a smile, but into something that kind of looked like one. For a second, I feared—hoped?—that he’d tell me no.
Oh, crap, oh, crap, oh, crap. At this point, I would have been grateful for my inner floozy to pop up and start doing the sexy, horny commentary again. It had been easier, I was quickly realizing, when I’d been able to project those feelings onto some slutty, deranged voice in my head.
Apparently, that kiss last night had changed more than I’d imagined. For the worse.
But after a long moment, Apex shrugged and rose up out of his armchair. He made a big show of turning his back to me, and after a few seconds of waiting for it to be some kind of trick, I determined that he wasn’t going to turn back around as soon as I dropped my towel.
“What are we doing today, then?” I asked as I pulled on my pants and struggled with my top.
Getting the heck out of here, I hoped he’d say back to me. As far as I was concerned, now that I was out of the dungeons and out of my cage, we couldn’t leave this place fast enough.
“Breakfast with Queen Lieja and her court,” he said, to my great disappointment. “Then, if you behave yourself and nothing else
