Fromme.
“Look at you,” he purrs. His eyes belong to the devil, but he’s praising me like I’m an angel that fell right into his lap. “Completely fucking wrecked.”
I can’t form thoughts, much less words. I’m a puddle of whimpering satisfaction, boneless and trembling.
He leans over me, one hand braced on either side of my head, caging me in. “Do you understand now?”
“U-understand what?” My voice is hoarse from screaming.
“That you’re mine.” His thumb tweaks my bottom lip. “That every part of you belongs to me. Your body. Your pleasure. Your pain.”
“I… I… I…” That meaningless stuttering is the most I can conjure by way of a response.
“Say it,” he demands.
I shake my head.
“Say. It.”
“I c-can’t.”
“Why not?”
Because if I say it out loud, it becomes real. If I admit that I’m his, then I have to admit that he’s mine, too. And that terrifies me more than anything else—more than going blind, more than my mother’s endless need, more than the man who tried to shove me in a trunk.
Because people I love always leave.
And Bastian Hale will be no exception.
“Because,” I whisper, “if I’m yours, then sooner or later, you’ll leave me. And I can’t survive losing you.”
His face goes still. Pale. Frozen. Chiseled from the coldest stone. Then:
“Whatdid you just say?”
Bastian’s hand shoots out, grabs my wrist, and yanks me upright. My head spins from the sudden movement, but he doesn’t give me time to recover. He takes me off the counter and drags me toward the floor.
“You think I’m going somewhere?” he growls as we tumble onto the kitchen tile in a heap of tangled limbs. “You think I’d do allthis—risk everything, fight for you, claim you—just to fuckingleave?”
“Bastian, I didn’t mean?—”
“Shut up.” He shifts to a seat against the counter and arranges me face-down across his lap. My bare ass is exposed, vulnerable, but his palm is flat on my back, keeping me exactly where he wants me. “You don’t get to accuse me of abandoning you and then take it back.”
Panic flares as I hear him shuffling around. “Wh-what are you doing?”
His hand finds the spatula on my counter. In the corner of my eye, I watch as he tests the weight of it in his palm. “Teaching you a lesson.”
“Bas—Ow!”
The first strike lands on my left cheek, sharp and stinging. I yelp and try to scramble away, but his other hand pins me in place at the small of my back.
“Stay still,” he orders. “And repeat after me: ‘You’re not going anywhere.’”
“Bastian—”
The spatula comes down again, harder this time. “Say it.”
“Bastian, seriously, I?—”
