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She furrowed her brows to make an exaggerated look of confusion. “Darkriver Corporation is an international private security firm. They have contracts to police several major cities and their peacekeeping forces are active in war zones all over the world. Darkriver doesn’t employ people like me, they catch them.”
“That was a stupid lie, Arden.” His voice was low, deadly, and threatening by its very lack of emotion.
She had expected he would get angry with her for playing dumb, that he would hit her and threaten her. Instead, he watched her. She returned his gaze, refused to yield by looking away. Silence stretched between them—charged, intense, and strangely intimate. She had never looked a man in the eye for so long before; not the men she killed nor the men she fucked.
Her heart beat faster. She hoped he read it as nervousness and not arousal. She had been trained to resist torture, but this was something else entirely. She wanted to fidget, to cover her body, to squeeze her muscles tight around her traitorous twat.
She wondered why he didn’t hit her for her lack of cooperation. She wanted him to. She wanted an interaction she could understand, and violence was an old acquaintance.
She licked her lips. His gaze darted down to focus on her tongue, on her mouth. She smiled. Curiosity wasn’t his only weakness.
“You should be frightened.” His voice was rougher than it had been the last time he’d spoken. “You are naked and bound to a chair in a basement. I could do anything to you.”
“But all you’ve done is talk,” she taunted. “If you were going to torture me, you’d be showing me your tools. If you planned to rape me you wouldn’t have tied my legs together. If you were going to kill me, I’d be dead by now. Excluding those options, I can only conclude your plan is to keep me here and ask me psychologically probing questions until I die of frustration or boredom.”
“Frustration?” He took her bait.
She raised her eyebrows and made an “O” of her mouth to create an exaggerated expression of surprise. “Oops. Was that a Freudian slip? An advanced case of Stockholm syndrome? A closet kink for kinbaku? Stop with the talk, Aniketos. I may like killing people, but I hate to kill time.”
“You want to provoke me.”
“Now why would I do that?”
“You stall for time. You want me to lose my temper.”
“What I want is for you to let me go.”
His eyes narrowed with suspicion. “Which of those knots have you loosened?”
He stood and approached her. It was too soon and he was too calm, but she seized her chance anyway. She was not as deft with her left hand—a fraction of a second slower, a millimeter less precise—but she was quick enough to grab a fistful of his shirt and drag his face down to hers.
She pressed her lips to his, hard and fast, before he could draw away. The kiss only lasted a moment, but it was explosive. The universe had been born in an instant; a mere moment could change everything.
He tasted of cardamom, brown bread and bergamot when she pressed her tongue between his lips. His tongue met hers, pushed her back, sliding into her mouth with forceful ease. A tremor of pleasure rocked through her, turning her joints to jelly and making her heart hammer hard against her ribs. She wanted him.
For that one brief instant, she lost herself to desire. She lost herself to the feel of his lips, the smell of his skin, the hot rush of his exhalations against her cheek. And, in that instant, she lost her chance.
He wrapped his hand around her wrist and wrenched it away from his collar. The haze of lust between them shattered like warm glass plunged into a tub of ice.
He stepped to the back of her chair, twisting her arm as he went. It only took him a second to tie her hand to the edge of the chair again. He pulled the ropes tighter this time—her fingers immediately started to tingle with the loss of sensation.
“That hurts!”
“It is your own fault. Was the kiss worth it?”
She leaned her head back to meet his eyes. She licked her lips, slowly, before answering. “I liked it better when you were bleeding.”
