How could this beast have ever been born as a baby?
Whatever else he’d been doing, Isak was still a fit man. Muscles shifted, enticingly, as he breathed.
Enticingly? It was true.
My response to this specimen of abomination was unnerving. Below, from between my legs, heat spread, flooding outward. My body automatically readied itself… for sex. My nipples tightened. I could feel how they pressed at the thin material of the dress.
I shut my eyes.
Forget him, forget the feel of his hands running over my skin, the clench of his fingers in my hair and around my neck, the smell of him as he fucks himself into me. The wet, slapping sounds of our bodies meeting.
As easily forget the feel of air in my lungs. He was in my very pores, injected into me in as lust, blood, and come. I’d had so much of him in me and on me, our genetics had probably merged.
I wanted to throw up.
If he took control of me again, as thoroughly as I had been controlled until today – subsumed by his persona – I might never surface as myself again.
My courage rebooted, and I raised my head, ready to snarl like a cornered bitch.
I took a step.
I had been important, once upon a time? I frowned. I’d been a CIA analyst. I’d made myself learn the techniques of a sniper, for no other reason than that it would help me to make him dead. That had not been a weekend attempt – I’d trained for years.
Yet I had failed, and my failure had brought me to the verge of destruction. I cranked my mind back through the more recent blurred days, the nearly soundless days that ran together like sticky syrup. Smell, sound, taste, touch, all my senses had been made lesser. Even the pain had been lessened.
Though I vaguely recalled screaming for hours.
Isak had my volume control.
Why was I not dead?
The last exquisitely clear memory in my timeline was of crawling into the suitcase, of being strapped in, and then—
My breath rasped. My hand shook when I raised it, and my eyes stung. Why had he not killed me as he had threatened to?
I took another step and found the timber floor cool under my sole. I placed my other foot beside it. Should I say something? To him? My throat constricted.
No.
Not yet.
Not fucking yet. Not until I buried a knife in his chest? If only I could.
Think. If he was in a coma, maybe I could leave? How long had he been like this? This was surely why I was awake – because he was not.
A foil sheet of oblong pills lay on a glass-topped coffee table. Three pills were left. Was he drugged?
Cautiously, I took another step.
A Porsche was parked downstairs.
I crept closer until I could look down at him and run my gaze from those naked toes – feet were always ugly – up his long legs to the bottom of his black gym shorts. I twitched my gaze past the swell of the cloth above the join of his legs, past the waistband with the knotted cord and that starkly bared navel, past the twists of hair. The T-shirt was thin, like my dress, and clung to his chest. I paused at that and the masculinity of his neck, breath caught, mind caught. Begrudgingly, I found his face.
I almost made it, almost said goodbye, I’m gone, I’m fucking walking out of here, when his eyelids rose.
They opened. The shutters to his not-soul. The heralds to my Hell.
“Greetings, Red.” He saw my gasp, my step backward, and my fear.
I was gutted, breath stilled.
“I have a task for you.”
“What?” I whispered that, as if by being quiet I could deny he had spoken words.
Then I swallowed as unobtrusively as I could – not that there was much point in concealing my reactions from him, because of course… he knew.
How many days had he lain like this while I was oblivious?
Days and days, maybe.
“I decided to take the drug Wolfe gave me.”
Oh. That? I glanced at the pills. Was he being truthful? Once, just once, I had tried to sneak that into his drink. The punishment had been harsh and evil, as his punishments tended to be. It was the reason he had drowned the girls and made me wade out to touch them.
So evil. I shuddered.
“Really?” I gulped down my misgivings. Was this good or bad?
“I have been titrating the dose, figuring out what to take and when.” He hadn’t bothered to shift or sit up. Could he even move?
At that thought, he sat up – pushing and pulling himself upright by using his hands on the sofa’s edge and back. He swiveled into a position facing me then smiled. It was such a full-on I see you smile with the lines of his mouth a precision engraving. He might have been a sculpture.
I flinched.
Had I turned into a pussy?
Probably. I should not blame myself. This man, this mesmer, had wrecked me, torn me apart. I could never be who I once was.
“What do you want?”
“You.” He smiled then un-smiled, so quickly this time I barely caught it. “I feel something is missing, inside me.”
“Fuck me.” I stared, gaping, then I actually snorted in amusement. “You’re not serious?” A stupid bravery kept me talking. “What you’re missing is a heart, a soul, or even a shred of fucking goodness or humanity. Hell would reject you.”
Isak slowly rubbed across his mouth with his fingers then beckoned me. “That was unwise. Come. Sit.”
He patted his knee.
I turned and ran.
I felt the tug of his
