He took a step forward.
Daisy scrambled sideways, knocking into a heavy table along the wall.
“Careful.” He stopped.
Her spine scraped against the cold plaster, her ruined feet too swollen to stand.
“I won’t hurt you.” His voice dropped, quieter now, stripped of command. “You’re safe here.”
Safe. The word meant nothing.
He’d been out there tonight, masked and hunting like all the rest. Drunk on privilege. Entitled to take at will. Whatever compelled him to stop Hadrian, didn’t make him trustworthy. It made him unpredictable.
She recalled the way he threatened him. His tone, more than his words, was personal. He wasn’t rescuing her. He was punishing an enemy.
Where was his gun?
Her gaze swept the room, cataloging exits and obstacles with the desperate clarity of prey. One door behind him, locked, key on the table. Windows to her left, but they overlooked an extensive drop to the gardens below. A balcony beyond the heavy curtains. She would never reach it before he caught her.
They like when you run…
The suite itself dripped with masculine power. A massive bed dominated one wall, its garnet velvet curtains hanging from an ornately carved canopy, like the trappings of some dark fairy tale. Leather chairs flanked the fireplace where flames crackled and popped. A wet bar gleamed in the corner, crystal decanters catching the light like captured stars.
Everywhere she looked, she found evidence of his advantages. Heavy candlesticks that could crack a skull. An iron poker beside the hearth. His size, his strength, his knowledge of this place. Even soaking wet and shivering, he radiated the kind of power that came from certainty. From control.
She had neither.
He lifted a staying hand. “Stay.” The word landed soft as a whisper, a plea more than a command.
Daisy didn’t move. She watched, unblinking, as he moved toward the wet bar.
Crystal clinked against crystal as he poured water from a silver pitcher into a glass. He walked it toward her, stopping several feet away, and held it out.
She stared at the glass. At his fingers wrapped around its base. At the faint tremor in his hand that might have been cold or might have been something else entirely.
“You can trust me.”
Her head shook slightly, the motion blending into a shiver that wracked her body with chills. Her thoughts went somewhere cold and small inside herself, a place where survival was the only language she understood.
“Watch.” He lifted the glass to his own lips and drank, swallowing once before lowering it again.
Her throat burned. It had been a lifetime since she’d had anything to drink.
“Take it. I won’t hurt you.”
She still couldn’t move. If it was a trap, she’d lose.
But when he set the glass on the floor in front of her and took a step back, she lunged for it.
Snatching the crystal off the floor, she retreated quickly. Her fingers shook, and water sloshed over the rim as she drank it down in desperate gulps, never taking her eyes off him.
“Good,” he said quietly.
A violent shiver wracked her body, her teeth clicking hard enough to make her jaw ache.
“More?”
She set the glass down and shoved it toward him. He collected it slowly, refilled it, and put it back on the floor. When she emptied it again, she was full. She swallowed back the urge to say thank you and held the weighted glass in her hand.
