Page 83 of Savage Don

His words are a punch to the gut, and I almost keel over from the shock.

“You threw out my birth control pills?”

“Flushed them down the toilet,” he says with no apparent regret.

“Why?” My whole body is strained from the tension I’ve been carrying around all day. Add in this new wave of fear and I feel like I might unspool at any second.

“Are you not listening, kitten?” Ray asks, raising his brow at me. “I said, you don’t need them anymore.”

“Of course I need them!” I rasp, a sudden burst of primal instinct lifting me to my feet. “Especially after what we did last night.”

“Last night was all part of the plan,” Ray says, and I can finally distinguish the smirk from the snarl. He’s playing with me.

But that doesn’t make his confession any less searing.

“Fucking me was part of the plan?” I choke, feeling used. But this isn’t the hot kind of servitude I pledged myself too. That was just naughty fun. This… well, this is something else.

It sounds like Ray wants to impregnate me.

“Did I not make that clear enough?” he teases, the old, snarky him coming back out with a new vengeance.

“You never said anything about throwing away my contraceptives.”

“I didn’t know you had any until after we made our deal.”

“So, you’re trying to get me pregnant?” I hold my breath as I wait for Ray’s response. If it’s true, I might just melt from dread. That’s too fucking intense for me. Way too fucking intense.

“Do you not want to have my child?”

When Ray steps towards me, I instinctively wince away.

This is a fucking nightmare.

“You’re crazy,” I rasp. “Why the hell would I want to have your child?”

“So that you could escape your father,” Ray says, the dark mischief in his eyes morphing into something far more sinister. “Don’t you want to escape your gilded cage?”

“Having your baby would just throw me into a different cage,” I respond, my voice creaking against the ever growing pressure.

“Then, what do you want, Francesca Galli?”

“I want to escape my family,” I confirm. “But that’s not all. I want independence. I want an education. I want hope. I want freedom.”

It all comes gushing out as I realize that none of that is happening. I only agreed to stay here as a way to protect what I’d already built. But now I’m being shoved into a whole different prison. And my house of cards is being demolished right before my very eyes.

Tears well up in my eyes and Ray becomes a giant blur as he takes another step towards me. I’m running out of space to back up in

“Freedom is overrated,” Ray says. “Do you know what I want, kitten?”

“Yes.”

That seems to catch the monster by surprise. But that surprise only seems to amuse his twisted sense of humor.

“Then tell me.”

“You want power. Control. Respect. Wealth. And you’ll do whatever it takes to get it.”

“How did you know that?” he teases.