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“Bad. Idea.” Each word is lower, brutal with intensity. “Stop now. Before it’s too late.”
“Your needs are my needs, Master.”
He likes the breathy tone of my voice, the hitch of fear. I’ve learned enough not to hide my emotions. He wants it all. He wants to hear me cry out and scream. That’s part of his kink.
He lowers his face toward me, his teeth flashing. “I. Will. Hurt. You.”
I don’t know how far this will go, but I can’t make myself care. Not when I want him so much.
“Good.”
21
He stands up so quickly that his chair tumbles to the floor with a crash.
His unrelenting grip on my nape drags me to my feet. Without releasing my head, he sweeps his free hand across the table. Dishes clatter and break on the hardwood. He grabs my hip with his other hand, and I let out a squeak as he hefts me up onto the table. But then he releases me and backs away, breathing hard.
His face is drawn, his eyes tortured with the darkness in him, warring against his need to keep me safe.
I won’t let him withdraw. I can’t. I slide my fingers beneath the bottom of my sweatshirt and start to tug it over my head.
“Stop.”
His command vibrates through me, and I can’t not obey. Even if that means he walks away. Forever. The ultimate curse of being so submissive I need to be owned.
I need to be his slave. Even if he orders me to leave and never look back, I will be forced to comply while sobbing all the way out the door.
He bends down, grimacing at the pain in his side, and pulls something out from beneath the cuff of his jeans. When I realize what it is, my stomach turns to cold, hard lead. A knife. It looks small in his hand, about the size of a normal pocketknife, until he presses the end and a blade shoots out. Slim and silver and wickedly sharp.
He sets the knife on the table beside me and I stare at it like a rabbit eyes a hungry wolf.
“I found Tasker.” He pauses, his voice softening. “I kept my promise.”
I drag my gaze away from the knife to search his face. Charlie’s face with soft curls and a gentle smile and a hint of a dimple in his cheek. But it isn’t Charlie’s eyes staring at me. Nor the cold, hard sadist. This is the man with empty, dead eyes. The predator.
“What promise?” I ask, even though dread shrills through me. I know the answer.
“Before I left Blake’s employ, Tasker’s job was to track down a mistress who ran off with her rich john’s baby. The client was a complete bastard. I suspected he’d been abusing the woman horribly, and she fled to protect herself and her kid. But no one took what was his, so he hired Blake to find her and bring back his son. He didn’t care what happened to the woman. So you can imagine what Tasker did when he found her before taking her child away.”
I swallow hard, watching his face. I don’t understand how he can speak so flatly, so normally, about hurting and killing people. I want to ask what he did for Blake, but I don’t want to hear anything that might…
I can’t even think it.
“That’s just one case I know of. He easily had twenty, thirty kills to his name. He was Blake’s best employee.”
“Employee?” I have to clear my throat to make the words come out. “Employees don’t kill people.”
“They do if they’re hired assassins.”
He worked for the same woman at one time. My stomach churns and I pull my knees up against my chest, huddling on top of his dining room table. The man I love. My Master. I don’t want to ask. I don’t want to know. Denial. Stupidity. I don’t care. I don’t want to know the truth.
He left that life. He works for Doctors Without Borders now.
“Tasker won’t hurt you. Ever. I took care of it.” He stands there, hands loose at his sides, unimpressive in height and brawn, nonthreatening, with hollowed-out eyes that suck me under and suffocate me. “I killed him. With that knife.”
I stare at him, tears rolling down my cheeks.
“So the real question now is whether you still trust me. Whether you’ll still let me touch you. Even if I use that knife to cut off your clothes. The same knife I used to kill.”
