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So I did.
“Fucking stubborn little cunt,” he said, getting off my body and reaching down to haul me onto my feet. I wavered and, in absolute horror, had to reach out to Damian's chest to steady myself, making him chuckle. His arm went around my shoulders, hauling my front against his side as he led me awkwardly outside toward his truck.
But he didn't lead me to the trunk, watching at a house across the street like he had somehow made someone watching though I couldn't see anyone. He pushed me into the passenger seat and belted me. I didn't even see the cuffs that were draped around the seatbelt until I felt one of the bracelets snap around my wrist.
“What's the matter, Damian? You afraid I might hurt you while you're driving?”
“Shut the fuck up or I'll knock your ass out, Wills,” he said, closing the other bracelet and slamming the door.
All I could think as we drove and then pulled in and stopped at our destination was- it was supposed to be mine. The city I had been calling home since I ran far the hell away from Damian thirteen years before, it was supposed to be mine. It wasn't supposed to be tainted by him. But with the deft, comfortable way he drove the streets and the fact that he obviously owned the building he was taking me too, well, it suggested I had been sharing Navesink Bank with him for a good, long while. How long had he been watching me? Weeks? Months? God... years? That thought had a sick feeling coating my tongue as I watched him hop out of his side of the car in front of a building I had driven by almost every day of my life since I moved- an old, what I thought was abandoned, carpet store.
Maybe I should have known better. The windows were intact; the small patch of lawn out front was mowed; there were no broken bottles or used condoms littering the parking lot. I just never had any reason to notice those things before.
Thirteen years with no word, well, it would give anyone a false sense of security.
“You're going to really like what I have been working on here,” Damian said, a smirk on his face that I suddenly wondered how I never recognized as evil when we were young. Maybe, though, it hadn't been there then. Maybe he had been teasing and sweet as I remembered. Maybe the shit he had gone through overseas, maybe it did something to him, warped him. I had seen countless cases of that with the men and women who showed up at Hailstorm over the years, ready to offer their skills only to have to be expelled because of uncontrollable outbursts or a purely sadistic nature.
I took in plenty of people with their own issues- PTSD nightmares, an inability to connect with 'normal' people, men too scared to go home and taint their families with their dark souls.
I'd seen it.
But Damian, well, he was the worst of the worst.
I couldn't imagine how the government released these men and women onto the general populous. There's no way he could have passed an in-depth psych evaluation.
Hell, I always made sure the people I booted got put away and got care. I guess I fucking cared more than the government did.
“I'm sure I'll be just tickled,” I said, rolling my eyes, one that was unmistakably swollen yet again as he unlocked one of my wrists and slid off my belt. The cuff stayed hanging off my left arm as he used it to drag me around the back of the building where he stopped at a door to punch in a pass code.
Inside was simply an abandoned storefront. There was a service desk and racks that the carpets stood in on the sides of the room. The floor was littered with dust and dirt. The unbroken windows were grimy with years of filth.
Damian tugged the cuff and led me into the back storage room, then to a door, and down. Of course... the basement. How stereotypically cliché. The temperature dropped a good ten degrees once we hit the bottom that was still blanketed in darkness. He wanted to be able to watch my reaction. God, he was such a sick fuck. I felt my cuff go slack for a second before he wrapped it around the railing and I heard him shuffling away from me in the dark.
I was determined to show nothing, no shock, no fear, nothing.
The light clicked on and I found myself in a genuine, indescribable awe.
Because it wasn't the torture chamber I had been expecting with chains on the walls and a display of weapons on a table or whatever the hell sick fucks with a screw loose came up with to hurt someone.
No, this was an entirely different kind of torture chamber.
It was an exact fucking replica of our old apartment. He had it down to the same tiles on the backsplash in the kitchen. He had the same fucking comforter on the bed, sans the blood stains from the last time I had seen it. There was even the tub I had sat in and contemplated taking my own life.
Jesus Christ.
“Welcome home, Willow,” he said, giving me a white-toothed smile that I wanted to scratch off his face.
“You're fucking crazier than I thought,” I said, shaking my head at the array of perfume bottles on the dresser beside the bed. It had been thirteen years, but I knew that every last one of them was exactly where I had left them.
“That language has got to go,” he said casually, walking toward the center of the room. “Women shouldn't talk that way.”
“Don't like hearing my language then maybe you shouldn't have fucking kidnapped me.”
“You're my wife,” he said, rolling his eyes as he reached down for something in the center of the floor, something I had missed before, literally the only thing in the whole space that was out of place: a U-shaped metal bar attached to the cement floor with a very long, very heavy looking chain with an ankle cuff.
