The memory didn’t produce the usual betrayed hopelessness. Instead, his emotional core was numb, like the pain didn’t really belong to him. Her magic bathed him in pleasure so deep, he wantedto drown under it. He’d tell her anything if she’d keep feeding him this drug.
Anna sat, wide-eyed, her shoulders rising and falling too fast. Was something wrong? Was she upset?
“How old were you, David?” she whispered, another dose of the magic shooting into his bloodstream. “Tell me.”
“Eleven.”
In a split second, her dazzling emotional core turned crimson and landed squarely on fury. “Did you kill him?”
“Not directly,” he answered in the same flat, compulsive voice. “I got desperate when I couldn’t see straight, and I told him to jump into our pool and not come back up. He listened.”
Wait.
Wait, wait.
Fuck!
He didn’t want her to know these things, did he? David squeezed his eyes shut, trying to force her magic out of his mind, to push away the pleasure that was better than any orgasm he’d ever experienced.
As soon as he had a hold on it, her slim body slipped into his lap. Her fingers threaded into his hair. When he opened his eyes, sky blue dominated his vision and ecstasy wrapped around his nerves.
“Tell me the worst thing you’ve ever done,” Anna whispered.
CHAPTER 26
ANNA
“Tell me the worst thing you’ve ever done.”
The words spilled from her mouth, and she wanted the answer so badly. For weeks she had obsessed over this man, his past, the things that made him cold, and the answers were right here, ripe for plucking.
He’d told her to take what she could. She was merely obliging.
Still, guilt battled with rampant curiosity as the fight against her coercive magic died on his face. Should she pull back? Would he be angry she’d stolen this from him? He’d drawn no line in the sand, but she was probably stepping over it anyway.
“It isn’t a good story,” David said.
“Tell me,” she pressed, weaving her voice with even more power. In his lap, she pressed her forehead against his. She’d never been so close to another person, wrapped around him, body and mind. They synced, him exhaling as she inhaled. Anna’s heart pummeled her ribs, but she maintained the link between them, silently asking him to bury his secrets inside her.
“My father was a criminal.Isa criminal. From a family of criminals.Drugs, human trafficking, money laundering. The typical stuff. I was just a boy when my father realized I could force others to do my bidding. Back then, it was kid stuff.Play with me. I don’t want to go to bed. Don’t make me eat that,” he said. “But my father clued in that it wasn’t normal. He was never loving, but after that, he was fucking crazy. He wanted to see how far I could take it, so he’d force me to make people take lethal doses of drugs. He’d ask me to compel people to hurt other people, to hurt themselves. And no matter what he asked me, I’d always obey, and they’d always obey me. Over the years, I learned to perfect the voice, because if he didn’t get what he wanted, I’d be punished.”
Every emotion inside her focused on those words.
I’d be punished.
Sorrow exploded from her core, drenching everything in cold darkness.
David touched her face, his hand cupping her cheek, thumb sliding over her mouth. “Are you sad?”
“Just keep talking,” she whispered.
“He wasn’t the oldest sibling of his family, but when his father died, he used me to take his place. The uncles fucking hated me, but my father used me to wire the entire organization with psychological terror. At first, he just wanted me to serve punishments—the guys who didn’t pay or who had crossed the family or whatever—but then he realized he could profit off the torture, too. He seemed to like people’s pain, and he found friends who liked it, too.”
Dread lapped onto the shores of Anna’s sorrow, and she wasn’t certain she wanted to hear the next part. Perhaps she didn’t need to know how he’d been abused after all.
“About a year ago,” David said before she could find the words to make him stop, “he hosted a masquerade. They set up cages and filled them with trafficked girls, enemies of the family, professional rivals of his friends. All of his sadistic buddies paid to choose what these people would do to each other. So at the end of the night, I wasforced to coerce these prisoners—these people in fucking cages—to—” He broke off. Swallowed. “It didn’t matter what I asked them to do. They did it. Some died. Some were irreparably scarred. Some were—” He shook himself. “At the end of the night, my father clapped me on the shoulder like he was proud and called me his little prince of death.”
Anna’s coercive magic stuttered. “David?—”
