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His eyes darken, though I have no idea how that’s even possible. When he speaks, his voice is like ice skating over my heated skin.
“You don’t get to ask a single fucking question right now.” His hands are still on my shoulders, the leather soaked, and he’s bent over the bathtub. The ceramic digs into my spine as he holds me in place. “What the fuck were you thinking?”
“What was I… What? What are you talking about? I was having a bath!” I feel even hotter, and it’s not just from the water. It’s from his proximity. What he found me doing. His probing interrogation. A quick glance down tells me the bubble layer is still thick and opaque, so at the very least he probably didn’t see me masturbating.
“A bath where you stay under the surface and don’t fucking breathe?” he asks, deadly quiet. I see now how his own breathing matches mine – quick and ragged. Unsteady. Like maybe he was holding his breath too, though I don’t see how that’s likely.
“It’s none of your business!” Why, why, why did he have to come back now? If he’s going to leave me alone, why can’t he just do it for good?
“Everything about you is my business,” he snaps. I get the sense he’s trying to maintain a very strained leash of control on himself and his emotions. His words are clipped and tight. “I made you my business six million dollars ago. You’ve been my business for fucking years.”
That just makes me even angrier. The reminder that I’m a transaction to him. Something to put on his accounting books. I stiffen and try to yank myself out of his grip, but his fingers tighten on my shoulders. His face gets closer, and something odd flickers in his gaze. A mere moment of emotion, an emotion I don’t recognize in him, and then it’s gone. He shoves his hands under my arms and straightens, dragging me dripping out of the bath.
He doesn’t stop until I’m out of the bath entirely. He pins me naked to the wall, one hand at my shoulder, the other on my jaw, forcing me to look at him.
“Let me go. Let me-”
“Shut up,” he grunts. “Shut up and look at me, Deirdre.”
The use of my name stuns me. No pet nickname, no Songbird that makes me feel like an animal he owns.
My name.
He takes advantage of the momentary silence, the way I’m caught off-guard.
“This is my house, Deirdre. This is my city. You are in my fucking world.” His eyes practically burn a hole through my head as he hisses out his next words. “And don’t you ever, for a single fucking fraction of a second, think that you can take yourself out of it. I will not allow it. Do you hear me? I will not let you do it.”
His eyes drop to my mouth, and for a dazed moment I wonder if he’s going to crash his lips against mine.
Then the meaning of his words sinks in, piercing through the strange haze of the moment.
“Oh my God,” I whisper, shock and fury spinning out inside me. “You think I was trying to kill myself? You think I would throw away my own life just to get away from you?” I laugh in his face, the sound bitter and harsh. “The fucking nerve. Your ego is absolutely insane. You actually think I’d commit suicide just to escape from you? You think you matter that much?”
The doorless entry to the bathroom is directly behind Elio, catching my attention.
“That’s why you took the doors off the rooms, isn’t it?”
I remember now that Valentina had found me holding my breath in the bath that first night, and that not five minutes later, Elio had stormed in with a hammer in his hand and barely controlled violence on his face.
He doesn’t answer me, but I know I’m right.
I laugh again, and his mouth and gaze tighten at the same time.
“I have news for you, Elio Titone. You may be a bigshot, you may think you’re everything to me now, but you’re wrong. You are a mere blip on the radar of my life. I will get out of this. I will get away from you. And I promise you that I won’t need to die to do it.”
I’m half bluffing, half vowing with that statement. Bluffing because Elio is already far more than a blip, no matter how much I want to deny it.
Vowing because, come hell or high water, I will find a way to regain my life.
And I absolutely refuse to die trying.
Chapter 28
Elio
Deirdre looks so pissed off, so offended, that I actually believe her. I try to soothe the side of me that wants to grab the sledgehammer and smash the bathtub to bits, the side of me that wants to fist her hair and tell her, “Only showers from now on.” Because even though I believe her now, I don’t think I’ll ever forget coming home, switching on her room’s feed on my phone as I head upstairs, only to see her slip below the water.
And stay there.
