I push off the wall. Shove my hands in my hair. “This is crazy. I won’t be threatened.”
“Where are you going?”
“I’m leaving.”
“No. We’re not done.” His features harden. “Come here, London.”
All I have to do is bang on the door to alert the guard. I glance between Grayson and the door, fear collaring my throat in a tight grip. Just how big of a disaster could Grayson make out of my life?
Slowly, cautiously, I walk toward him. “Turning my life into a media circus would get you off, wouldn’t it?” I ask him.
“It’s tempting.” He seizes my waist and hauls me onto his lap. “But I have bigger things in mind.”
“Let go—” I twist against him, and heclasps my wrists.
“I need to know how you felt in that moment,” he says, luring me with the rough caress of his voice. “When you killed him, how did it feel?”
Appall parts my mouth. “God, you’re a monster.”
“I’m your monster.” He grips my wrists tighter, holding me to him. “Tell me, and you’ll own me completely.” His thumb strokes the side of my palm tenderly, and the rattle of his chains forces my eyes closed, awakening dark memories. “You want to tell me, London. Tell me how you killed him.”
My body tenses, yet he expertly draws the confession from me, coaxing me closer to the cage until my mind switches off, erasing all resistance. I surrender, embracing the danger as I straddle the man who threatens everything.
My freedom. My morality. My sanity.
“A key,” I whisper with trembling lips. “He wore a key around his neck, to a dark cellar cage where he kept them. I tore it free and drove it into his jugular.”
His fingers softly brush my hair from my eyes before he removes my glasses, his gentle touch a stark contrast to the hardness I feel beneath me. He’s aroused.
“What did you feel?” he asks, his mouth hovering near mine, tasting my desperate breaths.
“I felt…free,” I admit. “Like I could do anything.”
“You can,” he coaxes. “It’s in your nature.”
No, my internal alarm screams in warning, jolting me back to my senses. I try to stand, but his strong hands clamp onto my thighs, anchoring me against him. The hard feel of him, so wanting, pressed to the most intimate part of me, incinerates my resolve.
I shake my head. “We don’t get to do anything we want. There has to be boundaries, rules.”
Releasing a strained breath, he rests his forehead to mine. “We can make our own.”
My hands glide over his forearms, tenderly feeling the scarshe wears outside that match my inside. It’s intoxicating, the way he seduces my pain away, as though we really do command our own reality.
No pain.
Here with him, it would be so easy to fall all the way, to just let go. No hiding, no shame. That’s how he found me, how he discovered my secret, and it excites him—what it could mean if I’d only release the string tethering me to a life so binding.
But that’s the trade, the risk of losing my humanity. And pain is human. It means I can stillfeel.
“No. I’m not damning myself again.” I break his hold and stand, grabbing my glasses from the table. I back away until my shoulders hit the wall.
“I’m not stopping,” he says, but he doesn’t pursue me. “We were designed for each other. Don’t you feel the pain when we’re apart? Don’t you want relief from it, London?”
I swallow. He’s too inside my head. I have to get away. “Guard.”
“You’re mine, London. We can dance this violent dance until we bleed each other dry, or we can surrender. Your choice, but I will have you.”
“That monster born of sin and death died in a car wreck,” I tell him. “She’s gone.”
