AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“She isn’t, or you aren’t?”
My jaw clenched painfully at his blatant challenge.
“I was wrong thinking you could be brought into this life, Lucas. I thought I saw something—I was wrong.”
I gripped the phone tightly in my hand and threw it across the room when he hung up. Launching myself away from the couch, I paced like a caged animal in my office as adrenaline surged through me and my anger grew.
Anger at the little blackbird in the level above this one for driving me insane and making my mentor question my abilities. Anger at myself for wanting to go easy on her when I knew that was the worst thing I could do for the both of us.
The girl had to be taught. I knew that.
Despite how much the thought made me want to offer up my own name on a bullet, I had to break her. I knew I couldn’t let her turn into what William’s fourth was for him: a weakness.
I stalked toward the doors leading to the rest of the main level of my house, and at the last second, grabbed my tie from the day before that was draped over a chair.
Chapter 7
The Devil
Briar
I woke slowly when my door was thrown open. The sound of it slamming into the adjacent wall reverberated throughout the room, but I didn’t attempt to move from my curled-up position.
I didn’t have the strength to.
Other than the times the man had forced me to move that day in a vain attempt to eat, I had stayed right there, facing the wall.
I had wondered how long it would take my body to shut down from lack of nutrition, and I tried to figure out if it already was.
I hadn’t had anything Sunday morning before Kyle and I had been on our way out the door and had been abducted before I could take my lunch at work. I remembered being given one small cup of water while they’d prepped me for my buyer, but other than that, I hadn’t put anything in my stomach since Saturday night. I’d vaguely noticed that during all of my crying today, there hadn’t been any tears, and I couldn’t remember when I’d last used the restroom. I was just so tired.
Just as my eyes slid closed again, the man roughly forced me onto my back. It was easy to keep my eyes closed now—I wondered briefly if I could sleep through this attempt at giving me food.
A scratchy whimper of protest sounded in the back of my throat when he grabbed my sore wrists and yanked them high over my head. “Please let me go,” I whispered hoarsely as something smooth slid over one wrist . . . and then the other.
For a second, the material felt so nice that I wondered if he was doing something to heal my cuts, but then it tightened painfully and my hands were pulled higher until my shoulders were screaming in pain.
The tension eased momentarily, but when I tried to move my arms down again, I couldn’t.
I sluggishly leaned my head back on the bed and peeled my eyes open, but it took me a second to understand what I was seeing. My hands were tied to a wide section of the wooden headboard. I pulled harder with no give from the wood, and looked down, panic flooding me when the man opened my robe, exposing my body.
I pressed my legs together and tried to pull them up, to curl into as much of a ball as my position would allow, but the man gripped the tops of my thighs and slammed them back onto the bed, spreading them wide.
“No, no. No!” I screamed, and tried to thrash with what little energy I had left. “Please, no.”
“You are mine, do you understand that?” he seethed, and the muscles in his arms flexed as he held me down.
He was shirtless, and the jeans he’d been wearing throughout the day were unbuttoned and barely staying up. He was tall, with a broad chest and shoulders that tapered down to narrow hips. Every inch of him was tanned and muscled, but the scars and tattoos that littered his body didn’t seem to fit a man who bought kidnapped women.
They didn’t seem to belong to a man who spoke to me the way he did. They didn’t boast of his money or power.
They screamed he was dangerous. They screamed to run.
My head shook subtly as a sob burst from my chest. “No,” I whimpered.
His head snapped up then, and I froze as I got my first glimpse of this man.
He was younger than I’d thought. Maybe a few years older than me. His dark hair was cut short on the sides and longer on top, and looked as if he had been running his hand through it all day. His nose and jaw were strong, and the dark stubble that covered his face somehow highlighted his full lips that were in a sneer now. But his eyes—those dark eyes were as murderous as they were mesmerizing . . .
