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“Kodiak,” I choke out. “That’s your name, right?”
He halts, looking down at me with pure hatred in his eyes. “You know my fucking name.”
My chest heaves when he kneels beside me and slips the blade under my shirt. Without hesitation, he shreds the fabric, tearing it off me in pieces. When I try to buck against him, he presses a huge palm in the center of my back, forcing me to hold still.
“If you wind up cut, you’ll only have yourself to blame.”
“Please,” I beg. “You don’t have to do this.”
“Actually, I do,” he grunts. “You’re fucking filthy, and I’m not letting you soil my house with these clothes.”
My heart rate slows a little, only to ramp up when he cuts off my bra. I don’t know him, and I’m not about to let him see me naked. But again, he proves me wrong. In my current position, the only thing my fighting manages to do is drain what little energy reserves I have left. When I stop struggling and melt into the floor with a choked sob, he pauses for a moment.
“When’s the last time you ate a decent meal?”
I’m not sure if his voice is a fraction softer than it was a moment ago, or that’s just what I want to believe.
“I don’t know.” I squeeze my eyes shut and swallow my humiliation as he cuts off the rest of my clothing, leaving me completely naked.
My ankles and wrists are still bound, and if I held out any hope that he would cut those too, it disappears when he flops my entire body onto the shower floor and turns on the water.
“Jesus!” I hiss when the cold spray bites into my skin.
“Get used to it,” he says callously. “Until you learn to tell the truth, you can expect this to be about as comfortable as it gets.”
I wriggle against my restraints as he grabs a bottle of soap and squeezes it all over me. At some point, my flopping around under the ice-cold spray causes my wig to fall off, and he freezes. When my gaze moves to his, he’s staring down at my natural black hair with an unreadable expression.
“Please untie me,” I blurt out. “I can wash myself.”
“No.”
He shakes himself out of whatever thoughts he was having and scrubs the soap into my skin with his bare hands. It feels rough and oddly intimate, and I can’t bring myself to look up, but I can feel him everywhere. His hands are huge and calloused, and I don’t doubt he could end my life in a few short seconds if he really wanted to. The question is, will he?
Without meaning to, our gazes lock when he shampoos my hair. There’s a fire in his eyes that wasn’t there a few minutes ago, and my natural instinct is to question what he’s thinking. But when my attention drifts down his body, I don’t have to wonder for long. I can see the hard outline of his cock bulging against his jeans like a weapon. Despite his hatred for me, he wants me. And I think that’s the most unsettling realization of all.
When he catches me staring at the evidence of his body’s betrayal, it only seems to piss him off more. He uses the detachable shower sprayer to drown me under a blanket of my own hair as he rinses it clean, followed by the rest of my body. By the time he finishes, my nerve endings have frozen, and I’m too dazed to ask any more questions or even think about putting up a fight as he towels me off.
“You can keep the towel for now,” he tells me. “I’m going to cut off your restraints. But if you even think about fucking with me, I will string you up to a chair and leave you there for a week. Understand me?”
I nod because I’m too choked up, and even when I think I’ve got it under control, my voice still wavers when I do speak.
“What did she do to make you hate her so much?”
He pauses, turning so I can’t see his face, but there’s an undercurrent of pain in his voice when he responds.
“You ruined my fucking life.”
I’m not who he thinks I am. I could never make someone hate me that much. I have to believe that. But even as I tell myself this, that voice in the back of my mind whispers an undeniable truth. Nobody ever came to claim me, and that speaks volumes about the type of person I must have been. I’ve tried to swallow it down and hide it away, but it’s always there, lurking beneath the surface. I was a throwaway. One of the unloved. And that’s how I know I’m not the girl he’s looking for. Because whoever she was, it’s easy to see he did love her once.
