“I will handle it. I will pay for your friend.”
I turned and left, the coil of tension wrapping more and more tightly within me with every step, her face burning into my vision, my mind, my soul.
“Thank you,” I heard her say.
The words were like acid thrown at my back, and they burned and burned all night as I ran on the treadmill, trying to run away from Natalia Karkarov and her power over me.
Chapter Sixteen
Natalia
Days turned easily into weeks, until I lost count of them and no longer knew how long I had been out of my life. Sometimes I wondered what was going on there... but I had few real friends, and even fewer things I really cared about. If Lucy’s bills were taken care of, it was all that really mattered anywhere else in the world but here, with him.
I spent a lot of time sitting on the beach, reading books, thinking. I had a floaty mattress I could take out hundreds of yards without the water going up past my chest. It was warm and pleasant, and a breeze came along in the afternoon to cool me off. Sometimes I thought about Andrej, about the dank, shitty club, all the sticky booze on the floor and the terrible men, and I was thankful to be away from it all.
But mostly, lying in the warm water, I thought about Alaric.
There was a darkness to him, and one that couldn’t be denied. If that was all there had been inside of him, though, I would have simply accepted my fate here, trapped on his island, as a temporary, semi-pleasurable thing, that I would end as soon as I could get away from him. Or he tired of me. Or something changed.
He had claimed every inch of my body as his, and when he took me, I let him have me however he wanted. He had bound me into contorted positions and made me beg him for release, and I would have been lying to say I didn’t take any pleasure from it. I liked to submit to him, on a feral level.
And if that had been all there was, that is all I would have thought about—the strength of him, overpowering me, forcing me to do his bidding, punishing me deliciously when I failed to please him.
But there was more to him than that. Something deep and inaccessible, that surfaced in strange moments. At times he could display deep tenderness. One day I had floated into a sea of small jellyfish and they had stung my legs. He was there in a second to fish me out of the water, stoically getting stung all over himself, and then he treated my stings with such gentle care it was hard to believe he was the same man who had pushed me to my hands and knees to pleasure him with my mouth, my pussy, and my ass for hours in the morning. And then, he had summoned from his seemingly interminable on-call workers, ten men to clear the whole bay of jellyfish by patrolling it all with a net.
All so I could enjoy the water again.
But as soon as he became tender like this, and our eyes would meet in a moment so close to being... normal, like two people who were dating or in a regular relationship, he would withdraw suddenly and sharply. His eyes would turn dark again, and he would be cold, sending me to my room. Or sometimes he would take me to his special room to be punished, and the punishment would be severe, even though I had done nothing.
I was determined not to let him break me like that. I knew there was something behind his darkness. Something there that he didn’t want to reveal.
And for a long time, that was the obsession I had with him—he was a mystery I wanted to unravel, more out of curiosity than anything else. My body craved him, and my mind was fascinated by him, and I was trapped there anyway, so I slowly let go of the guilt I felt for enjoying my kidnapping so much.
And then... it happened. And my need to understand him became much more than mere curiosity.
After a few days, he had left a package of pills in my room and told me to take them. That was fine by me, of course I would. But the days were dreamlike, so I lost track of time and responsibilities, and he had left the island, posting his silent, morose guards all around the house. He hadn’t been there to check on me, to remind me, and I had missed a day.
