Page 11 of Bought By Sin

A smirk.

He was amused by me.

Entertained as I sat back here as the new thing he held a contract of ownership for.

You asshole.

I ground my teeth and exhaled through my nose. I refused to let him see a hint of what I was feeling. Of who I was. To him, to people like him, I wasn’t a woman. I wasn’t a human or an individual with dreams and fears.

I was a thing.

Bought. Sold. Always captive.

Maybe I should’ve answered him.

I forced another rough swallow.

Maybe I should’ve asked for “freedom” in death.

He moved then, reaching for something in the passenger seat. I refused to track the bulges of his muscles as his arm moved. As his shoulder rotated. Without taking his eyes off the road, he tossed an unopened water bottle back at me.

I caught it. My reflexes were too fast for me not to.

I wasn’t interested in an offer of water from him, but as I vowed again to survive even this round of captivity and being owned, I opened the bottle and took a long sip.

I will survive.

I won’t give up.

Whatever it took, I would scrape by and do all I could to achieve my freedom one way or another.

I’d watch. I’d learn. And I’d never, ever appear weak.

It was all I could do until I could find another opportunity to escape this excuse for a life again.

5

LEV

She took the water bottle.

It shouldn’t have meant much, but as I drove her toward my house, a low, sprawling ranch near my cousins’ homes, I mused over all that it did represent.

She wasn’t self-destructive, so bent out of shape about my owning her and taking her that she’d refuse a basic necessity. I didn’t have to try to watch her closely to notice how thirsty and dehydrated she had to be back there. If she was being defiant and uncommunicative out of spite alone, then that would be a damn waste. We both knew she needed water, and she had the wisdom to accept it.

It signified that she wasn’t stupid. That she wasn’t being difficult for the fun of it. I doubted this woman was the sort to play games.

And for that, I was grateful.

It also extrapolated my intrigue by tenfold.

Offering her that water was one gesture I could do, but I knew better than to push my luck.

I didn’t say anything, letting her brood in the backseat. I hadn’t told that Hernandez that I’d buy her just for the sake of company and having a fucking conversation, after all.

The more I drove through the desert, though, I couldn’t be sure of why I had jumped on the impulsive idea of taking her out of that standoff.

I’d need to explain it somehow, and I began to do that once I was stuck at a light as we neared civilization again. I picked up my phone and texted the group thread that included my brother and all of my cousins. A heads up was a common courtesy.