He’s relaxed and at ease.
He’sfucking crazy.
If it weren’t for the evidence of his brutality splattered on his face, I wouldn’t believe him if he told me about what he just did.
There wasn’t a single secret between us for almost twelve years, and now I don’t even know how to speak to him and break the silence. The dynamic between us has shifted. It’s no longer the princess and her knight. It’s something far simpler: the prisoner and her captor.
“Where are you taking me?” I ask when I can’t stand listening to any more of his goddamn humming and tapping.
“Home.” He doesn’t hesitate with his answer, and his tone has an almost patronizing edge, like his response was a given.
“You just took me from it.”
He snorts. “That was a house, but it wasn’t your home.” Roman adjusts himself in his seat and checks the rearview mirror. I’m guessing it’s to see if we’re being followed. “Our home is wherever we make it.”
Our. We.He’s talking like someone who isn’t just going to disappear again.
“You went too far.”
“No amount of blood spilled will ever be too much for you.”
“When will it end?”
He smirks. “When I’m in a grave, and even then, Hell won’t keep me from you.”
I jump when his warm hand lands on my leg without a single thread to separate our skin. The contact makes me heady in my already delirious mind. I have to squeeze my legs together, because my body hasn’t forgotten the state he brought me to in the house. I grab his wrist to try to push him away, but my pathetic attempt does nothing against his brute strength.
I know what he’ll find if he dips his hands into my shorts again. No matter how much I tell myself that I shouldn’t want this or that I am meant to be angry at him, my body has other ideas. He has the face of an angel and the mind of the devil.
“But you’ll ruin me,” I whisper.
I watch as his smile turns ravenous, and the desire to run kicks in. “Does that excite you?”
His hand inches higher until it’s at the junction of my thighs. My voice hitches when I say, “No.”
“Don’t worry. If you break, I’ll put you back together. If you run, I’m running right behind you. If you burn, I’ll burn with you.”
When I look down at his hand, I tense for an entirely different reason. Under the fading lights of the city, I spot a black-and-red embroidered friendship bracelet peeking out beneath his long sleeve shirt.
He still has it.
I glance at my own wrist and swallow.
The bindings dig into my skin, and he catches sight of my wince, frowning to himself.
He moves his hand to fiddle with something on the center dash, but the absence of his touch doesn’t make me breathe any easier. It isn’t until soft chirping filters through the speakers that I stop breathing altogether.
I haven’t listened to a nature podcast in years. We had a list of all the podcasts we wanted to listen to, then every day, we would plan which one we’d listen to that night as we fell asleep under a different roof. He said it would be like we were right next to each other, hearing the same sounds and learning the same things.
When he left, I couldn’t listen to them anymore, because I was too busy wallowing over someone who wasn’t there. And now here we are, listening to the same podcast like the past three years never happened.
I watch skeptically as he pulls a blanket from the back seat and drapes it over my lap.
“Go to sleep,” he says, tone filled with the warmth he’s only ever directed at me. “You’ve had a long night. I’ll wake you up once we’re there.”
I know I should protest, and self-preservation requires I stay awake to see where I am going.
His hand moves languidly up and down my leg, lacking any pretense other than comfort. Against my better judgment, the hypnotic touch makes my muscles relax.
