Page 130 of Hidden

“That fucking night!” he hissed, his spit hitting my cheek.

My chest tightened painfully as a flicker of a memory, a brief moment in time, flashed before me.

The hallway.

The shadow beneath the door.

The footsteps that had slowed.

The moment I had stopped breathing entirely.

“I heard you,” he said. “I didn’t need to hear everything. Just enough to know you were up to something you shouldn’t have been. I’ve had you screaming in pleasure enough times to know what it sounds like. And that’s exactly what was happening in that room, wasn’t it, Gabby?”

Humiliation burned hot beneath my skin, sharp enough to make my fingers curl into my palms.

“Were you touching yourself? Were you imagining all the punishments I’d be giving you when I found out? Did you get off to the thought of the pain… or was it something else? Because surely you wouldn’t have been stupid enough to have another man in your bedroom, would you?” he asked, reaching out to twirl a strand of my hair around his index finger.

I said nothing. Panic was flooding through me, and I knew it was better to remain silent and be accused of something than to open my mouth and admit to anything.

“I thought maybe I was wrong,” he continued. “That maybe you weren’t screaming the place down, begging for cock. Especially as I wasn’t around. But then I saw you after. Thatflush to your skin you get after an orgasm. That glassy, almost wondrous look in your eyes. So I paid attention.”

My pulse began to pound harder.

“I watched you in the hall,” he continued, his voice almost conversational now. “Watched you at your door. Watched you staring out of that window like you were waiting for something. And if I wasn’t watching, my men sure as hell were.”

My skin prickled.

“And tonight…” His grip tightened again, dragging me closer, his face dangerously close to mine. “I watched you leave.”

The room seemed to tilt, closing in on itself. And it was then that I realised exactly what had happened.

I hadn’t got lucky. I hadn’t left undetected. There were no gaps in his control. He had seen me, and let me go anyway. This was another one of his tests.

“You dare to walk back into my house wearinghisjacket,” he said, his voice dropping lower with every word. “And you thought I wouldn’t notice?”

My hands came up before I could stop them, shoving at his chest in a useless attempt to create space.

“Fuck off, Nico,” I hissed, regretting it almost immediately.

“What was that?”

His voice was deadly low. Alarm bells were ringing, warning me that I was playing with the devil. But I couldn’t stop. Everything that had been building inside me these past few weeks, the old, buried feelings Vienna had forced back to the surface, the injustice of it all… it all came out in a flurry of anger, directed at the one person who I should have avoided.

“I said fuck off, Nico. You can force me to stay here, you can force yourself on my body, hell, you can even force an orgasm or two out of me. But you can’t force yourself in here,” I snapped, tapping my temple. “So yes, you can go and fuck yourself. You don’t fucking own me!”

His hand moved from the jacket to my throat in one swift motion, fingers closing just enough to cut the next breath from my lungs as he drove me backwards into the wall. The impact rattled through me, my head knocking back hard enough to blur my vision, but he didn’t let me fall.

“There it is,” he said, almost satisfied. He brought his face to my neck, inhaling deeply, muttering his words against my skin. “That’s what I’ve been waiting for. Oh, but how I love it when you fight me, sweet girl.”

He licked up my neck, stopping at my jawline and then pressed a quick, hard kiss to my lips.

“You’re wrong,” he whispered against my mouth. I tried to turn my head away, but he had my jaw in a vice grip, refusing to allow me to escape. “I do fucking own you. And I’ll show you what happens to useless property when it no longer serves its purpose.”

Pain came quickly after that. His fist hit my stomach, knocking the air out of me. He grabbed hold of my hair and threw me from the wall, sending me flying to the floor hard enough that the air left my lungs in a broken gasp, my ribs taking the brunt of it as I hit.

“You’re fucking nothing, Gabby,” he hissed at me, immediately followed by a kick to my side. I curled instinctively around the pain, my arms wrapping tight around my middle as though that might protect me from the next one.

It didn’t.