Page 37 of Roped

Those piercing green eyes of his meet mine as he shares, “To hurt me.”

I grit my teeth in response.

“Make me suffer,” he continues, his gaze moving over my features.

My cheeks feel warm under his intense scrutiny, but still, I prod his neck with the knife again as my heart races. “So stabbing you in the neck seems like the right choice, doesn’t it?”

He shakes his head slowly. “No.”

“You’re such a—”

“You wanna hurt me,” he says, “stab me in the stomach.”

My grip on the knife falters. “What?”

He lowers one of his hands, very slowly—as if to show me he means no harm by this; what a hilarious thought—and points two fingers to his thickly muscled torso. “Here.” I look down to the spot he’s showing me before quickly looking up as he continues, “Between the ribs. Just a little pressure and you’ll cut through the muscle. There ain’t no bone here to stop you.”

I don’t know why I’m having so much trouble breathing, but gathering my choppy breaths, I say, “I can very easily do that up on your neck too.”

“You can,” he admits. “But there’s a chance you’ll hit an artery and I’ll bleed out within minutes.”

“Well, wouldn’t that be wonderful then.”

“Not for you,” he says, shaking his head once. “You wanna make me suffer, remember? You want me to hurt. Nothin’ hurts like a stab wound between the ribs. It hurts like a bitch and it heals like a bitch too. Slow, painful, over days. It’s a wound that toys with you, haunts you. Every time I breathe, it’ll hurt. I’ll feel it. I’ll feel you. Like you felt me. Watchin’ you, stalkin’ you. For months. Ain’t that what you said? That I toyed with you for months, hunted you, played with you. So this is your chance. To play with me back. To haunt me, to toy with every breath I take.”

He’s right.

That’s exactly what I want. Killing him would be too easy. I want him to suffer. I want to punish him, teach him a fucking lesson for everything he has done to me. I want him to feel the pain, my pain. That no matter how many times I try to push away, to ignore, to deny it exists, it rears its head back up like a fucking wild animal. Like the wolves he set on me.

My eyes skitter down again before coming back to his face. “Hands back up.”

He lets a beat pass before obeying me.

My heart races in my chest, and somehow, his easy acquiescence only makes my hands tremble more. “Is that what you did? With the calf this morning?” A light frown emerges between his brows and I explain, “You were the only who could calm it down. So what, you told the animal a bunch of lies, lulled it into a false sense of security before snatching it up? Is that your game? Tell the crazy knife-wielding girl whatever the fuck she wants to hear before you fucking—”

He growls like a freaking animal and cuts off my words.

“What?” I bite out.

“Watch your fuckin’ mouth.”

I grit my teeth and poke the knife harder. “Are you fucking kidding me? You just threw me to the fucking wolves, you bastard, and you want me to watch my goddamn mouth?”

He growls again, as if saying yeah.

“You’re—”

He glances down at my mouth before rumbling, “No reason is reason enough to sully your beautiful princess mouth like that. Definitely not for whatever I did.”

A breath escapes me in a rush then. At his beautiful, at his princess. Still spoken in a tender tone. I feel my lips tremble slightly, tingle, as if he really meant it. As if this isn’t yet another game he’s playing. Before I can say anything, though, he continues, “And I told the calf the truth.”

I focus back on what we were talking about. “What truth?”

His eyes go back and forth between mine. “That it was safe with me. That if it let me get close, I wouldn’t let anythin’ happen to it.”

My heart twists in my chest. In both pain and oh God, jealousy. I’m jealous of an animal, a calf stuck in a stream because I thought I was safe with him. I swallow thickly. “As opposed to me.”

His jaw pulses at my words.