My heart hammered but my head stayed weirdly pain-free. The ache remained. The pressure in my eyes hadn’t gone but it didn’t get worse or rise to a crescendo where I blacked out.
Why?
He set my system on high alert and made every part of me hum with stinging awareness yet...I wasn’t afraid of him. Which made absolutely no sense and gave me yet another clue that I was broken by his company.
Rising to his feet, his sudden motion caused Whisper to leap to the floor and prowl to his master’s side.
“Come with me,” Lucien commanded, marching through another archway into a huge kitchen. A basketball team could play in here and have plenty of room without bashing into the black-lacquered cabinets and grey-gold marble benchtop.
Wrenching the cupboards beneath a huge black sink open, Lucien sniffed. “You’re to do as I say when I say it. I don’t want to hear excuses. I’ll punish you if you disobey. Get to work.”
Moving toward him slowly, I eyed up the bottles, rags, and buckets under the sink. “What do you expect me to do exactly?”
He scowled as if I had zero intelligence. “Clean, of course.”
My mouth fell open. “You truly expect me to be yourmaid?”
“Do you want to stay alive?”
“Yes—”
“Then you’ll clean.” Pushing past me, he snapped his fingers for Whisper to join him and both man and panther vanished into the walled courtyard.
He left me wondering how I’d plummeted from being one of the richest women in the world—a woman who gave away her substantial wealth just because it stressed her out—to becoming a lowly maid for a reclusive, quite possibly insane prisoner.
A prisoner of his own company.
A prisoner with inhuman blood in his veins and a life story I really,reallywanted to know.
Chapter Twenty
FUCK, IT WAS BAD THIS TIME.
Worse than bad.
They knew. They had to know I’d finally welcomed a woman into my home.
I thought they’d be happy. That they’d give me a reprieve from the steady drip of burning agony—so I’d actually have the energy to have sex.
Hadn’t theywanteda scenario like this?
They wanted me to get close to someone—to break my steadfast rule never to condemn a child of mine to this endless suffering.
I could’ve raped the invaders they sent my way. I could’ve turned into an absolute monster and had my fill with hundreds of women, but...I didn’t.
Not because I liked being a twenty-nine-year-old celibate virgin but because I refused to take even the slimmest chance that I could get one of them pregnant.
I’d geld myself before that ever happened.
They’d even slipped drugs into my system when I was at the height of puberty—designed to override my stubbornness and make me burn with lust. That level of pain had been almost unbearable, and if Whisper hadn’t been there to chase awaythe girls who tried to sneak into my bed, I might have done something very regretful.
At least they’d stopped trying to make me perform like a human stallion, yet I couldn’t understand why the pain was excruciatingly bad.
My veins scorched to dust.
My blood transformed into flames.
My heart pounded faster and faster, reaching that critical moment that triggered the vitalsync core to dose me with a sedative.
