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Lyse scowled. “It would be what you deserve.”
Her words set off more heat in my stomach…but it wasn’t anger I was feeling. That damned spark of defiance made me want to pin her down and show her who was in charge. “Now you know how I felt after your family attacked my brother,” I said.
I had meant for it to be teasing, but my words landed between us like a bomb. “I wasn’t the one who tried to kill you,” she pointed out. “Or your brother.”
“No,” I agreed. “You’re just a poorconejitastuck in the crosshairs.”
“Stop calling me that.”
I scoffed. “No. It fits you too well.” I reached out, and she shrank back, scared.Good, Lyse, I thought.Be scared of me. It’ll be easier for both of us if you are.
“Don’t. Touch. Me,” she growled. “Not ever again.”
I stepped into her space and grabbed her chin. “I’ll touch you whenever I want,conejita. You don’t make the rules here. I do.”
She yanked backward, freeing herself from my grip. “Fuck you,pendejo.”
CHAPTER14
Lyse
Did I really just say that to the man who threw me off a dock?Be brave, I told myself.What’s the worst that could happen at this point?“Helena said that I could come outside,” I said. “Was she wrong?”
Omar shook his head. His eyes were still smoldering and dangerous, but he didn’t try to get in my space again. “No, she wasn’t wrong. There’s nowhere for you to go.” He crossed his arms over his broad chest. “So long as you keep out of my office and my room, you’re free to roam.”
“And…you’ll leave me alone?”
He gave me that snarling smile again, and my heart battered against my ribs. “I never said that,conejita.”
“Because you make the rules.”
Omar's smile grew into a grin. “Exactly right.”
The adrenaline that had kept me going for the last several minutes seeped away. “This is doing my head in,” I admitted and turned back to my sketch. It had gotten a lot bigger than I thought; I must have gotten into the zone. “Why didn’t you just let me drown yesterday?”
“I need your fiancé to do what I asked, and he was waffling. I needed him to know that I was serious.”
“But.”
“Look, if you were dead, I’d have nothing to bargain with, right? It’s not any deeper than that.”
My stomach twisted itself into knots. It was seriousto me, considering it was my life that he was playing with. “That doesn’t explain why you’ve let me out now,” I pushed. “Yeah, I know I’m effectively trapped…but you didn’t seem to think that mattered for the week you had me locked in that room.”
Omar’s smile dropped from his face. He looked uncomfortable, and a savage part of me was glad for it. For once, the tables had turned, and it was a delicious feeling. “I got tired of taking care of you,” he insisted, but I could see it for the excuse that it was. “Now you can take care of yourself. Don’t expect Helena to cater to you, that’s not her job.”
I nodded. “Okay…do you treat all your hostages this way? Giving them just enough freedom to hang themselves with?”
His eyes slid past me to the sketch that I made on the ground, and I had the insane impulse to erase it, cover it up so that he couldn’t look at it. “I’ve never held anyone hostage for this long before,” he admitted. “Either their people don’t care enough, and they end up dead, or the demands are met, and we send them home.”
“Felix is trying,” I said, but my words felt very far away. Echoey almost.
Omar snorted. “Not hard enough.”
Well…he wasn’twrongabout that, but his words stung more than I thought they would. There was no love between Felix and me; he wanted to possess me, show me off, but he didn’tloveme. If Omar had let me drown, he would have been upset about his lost acquisition. “Go away.” I wanted it to be a demand, but the words came out a broken plea. I picked up the pieces of driftwood, thinking that I could move down the beach to keep drawing.
“Can you draw like that on paper?” Omar asked. “Or is sand your medium of choice?”
I glared at him. “Sand isn’tanyone’sfirst choice…unless they were doing sculptures, I suppose.”
