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His fingers caressed my arm, landing on my bandaged wound. ‘How’s your wrist?’ he murmured, his voice smoky.
‘Empty,’ I said truthfully. Emptied of blood and hope.
He continued to caress my arm, his fingers burning into my skin. I had an irrational thought that maybe he would still help me — maybe he would save me.
It killed me that I wanted him to.
‘My father doesn’t believe you’ll behave,’ he said, and a thrill of fear brushed along my spine.
I shrugged. ‘Do you?’
He grinned, letting my wrist fall as both his hands travelled up my arms and across my collarbone, where they rested for a moment before drifting down further.
I drew in a sharp gasp as he palmed my breasts. I still hadn’t had the chance to shower, and as he squeezed my nipples, I felt the nauseating burn of Este’s blood where it stained my skin.
‘What are you doing?’ I gasped, trying to wriggle away, only succeeding in creating a friction between his fingers and my nipples that made a blush creep up my neck. Este. These people killed Esteban. Do not think of him as anything but a coward and a murderer. ‘What do you want with me?’
‘I’m sorry about your boyfriend,’ Dornan said, seeming to read my mind. ‘And I assure you, darlin’, the only thing I want from you right now is to know whether these beautiful titties are real or not.’ He gave one last squeeze for emphasis, something glinting in his eye. Amusement. I amused him, chained up like this, hurt and broken and owned.
‘You don’t have to enjoy it so much,’ I spat, turning my head to look away from him.
His hands continued to skate across my skin, and just as it had thrilled me when he was searching for the thin microchip hidden under my flesh, my body responded again to his touch. This is so wrong, I thought. Shame burned at my cheeks as gooseflesh sprang up on the skin at my collarbone where his hand had come to rest. His grip was loose, but dominating at the same time. So why did I want him to keep his hand exactly where it was?
I had stopped struggling. I realised I had been holding my breath, and I let it all out at once, gulping in new air. Not fresh air. It was the same air I’d been trapped inside since I’d arrived.
Our eyes met again, and his face softened minutely. It was a glimpse past his usual fierce expression, not that I terribly minded his fierceness, and that was the whole problem. I liked his fierce far too much. He was the polar opposite of Este, who had always been gentle and loving and kind.
I despised Dornan Ross in that moment, because I wanted nothing more than for him to take his other hand and put that on me, too. Pick me up and take me somewhere, anywhere, far away from here.
I was pinning my hopes on the wrong man. He’d already said he wouldn’t — couldn’t — save me from my fate.
I tamped down my arousal with every fibre of my being, and called upon the other feeling that flowed through me like poison in my veins. My greatest fear of what was going to happen to me made my hands shake with anger.
‘Taking inventory to sell me?’ I asked bitterly, my eyes defiant as he looked back into my fiery gaze. I had finally voiced the fear that had been gnawing at my edges for hours. Slave. Slave. Slave.
I expected him to laugh, as he and his father did whenever I said something like that. Instead, his grave reaction terrified me.
I wanted him to say no. I needed him to say no.
But what he said instead, one tiny word, was enough to shatter my world.
‘Yes,’ he answered, without missing a beat.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
DORNAN
He didn’t want his father to sell her.
It was business, plain and simple, but the rage that burned inside him at the thought of what happened to girls who were sold . . . it physically pained him. His father had told him from the very beginning the fate he had chosen for Mariana, but that was when she had been just another girl. A commodity. A product.
Now he had tasted her blood. Her tears. And she was oh so fuckin’ sweet. Not sweet in temperament — the girl was a spitfire. But the way her life blood tasted took his breath away.
He paced in the corridor outside her room. A guard near the bathroom studied his sub-machine gun to avoid Dornan’s gaze.
He couldn’t stop what was going to happen. He knew that. And so, he vowed to get on with things upstairs. To forget about the girl. To leave her to the fate she had volunteered for.
Upstairs, club members were mobilising, heading back to LA. He knew his father was up there working hard to try to stem the damage from the cocaine loss. People were baying for Gypsy blood. It made Dornan want to go and blow the DEA’s fucking headquarters sky high.
