My lips parted, but nothing came out.
“You’re forgiven, of course, Beau,” he said, voice rumbling against my back. “Take the rest of the day for yourself, and get that eye looked at.”
“Thank you,” she whispered, and fled the room.
Marco grinned. “Quite the right cross you’ve got there, wildcat.”
“Get out,” the captain snapped in an icy tone.
“Yes, sir,” the soldier replied with a salute before he too disappeared.
When we were alone, the captain sighed. A casual thing laced with simmering violence I could taste, that forced a high-pitched whine through my lips. “It’s time you learned your place, pet,” he said, and with a calm brutality, twisted my right arm behind my back.
He marched me through the exit into the brisk air, not letting up on my arm until we’d entered the remains of a beautiful old townhouse.
The sight made my heart ache. My parents had owned a similar residence before the war, and I’d spent many nights curled up in a comfortable chair as I listened to my father regale us with tales of Tritan politics as we sipped tea with biscuits.
In a blur, he forced me through the front door, down the hall, and past the kitchen without slowing. He didn’t stop until I was trembling in the middle of a comfortable study. The door slammed shut with a sharp snap.
“Beau has been in my family for thirty years,” he said, looming over me. “Not once in that entire time has she lost her temper, nor has a single person raised a hand to her, so what,” he drawled, “is it aboutyouthat evokes such passion, hmm?”
Swallowing a thick lump of terror, I shrugged. Affecting an air of insolence, I knew I was playing with fire, but I was too tired and angry to care.
His gaze darkened, glare burning into mine as I tried my best not to blink. To remain neutral in the face of this man.
An elite.
The weight of his unwavering attention heavy enough that my legs began to shake. Fidgeting without daring to blink, caught in the inky pool of swirling, insatiable hunger where darkness festered.
“Let’s start with your name, shall we?” he murmured, opening a drawer and arranging a series of cruel-looking whips and crops across the polished desktop. And then, with rolling hips, the captain stalked toward me. The embodiment of deadly grace I’d only seen once before—in the gait of a mountain lion.
I stepped back, tripping over bare feet as fear poked through my mask of careful indifference.
“I’ll ask you once more,” he said, and touched my chin with a curled knuckle. “And then things are going to get very unpleasant for you. What is your name?”
Silence yawned between us. My breaths shallow.
Pure, unfiltered menace rose to meet my continued disobedience. And in a grip that was almostgentle, he caught my wrists in one large, calloused hand. Pulled me into his chest.
It was an action that might have been considered tender if not for the trembling of our bodies—one in fear, the other in anger.
“I like doing things the hard way,” he said conversationally. Quiet in the intimacy of such close quarters. Precise, calculated when he snapped a set of cuffs on my wrists and dragged me to a hook dangling from the ceiling. “It just feels good to accomplish something no one else can—or wants to, in your case.”
His tone stopped me from reacting to the hurt, but it was the greedy flavor of his energy that had me frozen. Too scared to fight. Too tired to hope.
I could only watch, tracking him with my eyes alone. Breathing through thin lips when he retrieved a bar with two leather bands and strapped it between my spread ankles.
Left restricted,exposed,he chuckled when I grew bold enough to test these new bonds. “When I ask a question, I expect an answer,” he murmured, pushing a lock of caramel hair back from my brow.
It was a reasonable request. One that made my gut clench in dreadful recognition of the slippery slope it was. That giving himanythingwas to accept this.
His rule over me.
Warm fingers slipped beneath the scraps of silk, tugging at the ties keeping them in place.
I whined, a burst of anxiety slipping free of my lips, only to be sucked back in. No matter that he’d spent the afternoon looking at…everything. That he’d ordered me waxed to his specifications, watching for hours as women worked.
This was so much worse.
