“Do you prefer us to fight? Is that it? I mean, what you do, you and your family? What’s the difference if the woman, the Willow Girl, is passed out or not? Maybe it’s easier on her if she is. I mean, let’s be honest here. I don’t imagine it’s your moral sense of—”
But I never get a chance to finish whatever the hell it was I was starting because he shoots one of his arms out and wraps his hand around my throat and he squeezes.
“Be careful,” he warns, leaning in close to my face, inhaling my scent as if he can smell my fear. He brings his lips to my cheek, and a moment later, I feel the scruff of his jaw along the shell of my ear. “Be very careful, Willow Girl.”
I shudder. His words are like physical things, three-dimensional and powerful.
He’s squeezing so hard that he’s lifting me on tiptoe, and I realize I’ve let go of the blanket and it’s slid to pool around my feet. I have both hands wrapped around his thick forearm, clawing at him, digging tracks into his skin, trying to drag him off me.
“Had enough?”
A garbled sound comes from my throat and one of my arms falls to my side. It’s only then that he releases me. I slide to the floor, gasping for breath, my neck tender.
He steps back. “Maybe Lucinda’s right,” he says, and I wonder why he calls his mother by her first name, but I don’t have time to think about it. “I should take you out to the post. Whip you now, get it over with. Is that how you want it?”
I look up at him. Is he serious?
Yes. He is. And he would. I mean, this whole situation, it’s archaic. Like we’ve gone back in time a hundred years. A thousand.
“Is it, Willow Girl?”
“Don’t call me that.”
“You don’t like sweetheart. You don’t like Willow Girl. Tell me, do you need me to whip you?” he asks, nudging my hip with the toe of his shoe.
I shake my head, hug my knees to myself, and look straight ahead. Anywhere but at his mocking eyes.
“Get up.”
I shake my head again. I can see the goose bumps that have risen on my arms, making the faint dusting of hair stand on end.
“Get up, Helena. Don’t make me make you.”
I grab hold of the fallen blanket, but he steps on it. When I look up at him, his dark eyes are narrowed and intense.
“No blanket. I want to see you.”
Hasn’t he seen enough? I want to ask him, but I don’t. I can’t push him too far.
“I’m tired of repeating myself with you,” he says.
I rise slowly to my feet, covering myself as best I can with my arms, keeping my legs close together, letting my hair fall to shield me like I’m Lady Godiva on her horse.
He steps back a little, and the silence between us is heavy, like it can be put on a scale and weighed.
It feels like it’s sitting on my lungs, that weight, suffocating me.
“Look at me.”
It takes me a long minute to do so, to meet his slate eyes, and when I do, it’s like I’m in another dimension, another world.
It’s just him and me and this silence.
It’s too much. Too loud.
Deafening.
And as I study him, there’s something that won’t let me look away.
If I’d met him under different circumstances, I’d find him attractive, not scary, but it’s not that which has me caught like an animal in a trap.
He’s the hunter and I’m the prey.
He and I, we’re connected somehow, and maybe it’s our shared history or our bound destiny, this insane game we have to play out.
I don’t know what it is, but it is. It’s there.
The ring on my finger weighs heavy.
Bone.
I suddenly know what my aunt meant.
The ring, it’s made of human bone. I know it.
I imagine my aunt in this room. I wonder if it looked the same then. If I’m sleeping on the bed she once slept on. I imagine her standing here, much as I am now, facing off with her Scafoni master, because that is what they are. What Sebastian is. My master.
The word boils inside my gut, and I fist my hands.
He steps closer to me, and I realize he’s been studying me all this time. He lifts my hair and pushes it behind my shoulders. He then takes my wrists, and when he wraps his hands over my fists, I see again how much bigger than me he is because my fists, they look like a child’s in his giant hands.
He doesn’t try to open them but sets my arms by my sides. When he touches my jaw, even though it’s a featherlight touch, I flinch.
He lifts my face slowly, turns it from side to side, brushes the bruises with his knuckles, presses against them like he’s fitting his fingers to the marks they left, making sure they’re his. Who else?
He then slides his fingers down over my throat, cups it again, and I panic. I clasp my hand over his forearm prepared to drag him off. To fight even if it means a whipping.
But he surprises me. “I’m not going to hurt you,” he says, his voice low but not harsh. Not threatening.
He could threaten. He could do so much more than threaten.
He could throw me on the bed, force my legs apart, and take what he wants.
I have no power here.
Physically, I’m no match. I am alone in this house of my enemy.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” he repeats.
And I surprise myself because I feel my lip begin to tremble, feel the flush of something—God knows what—at his words because they’re gentle and maybe I’m being fucking stupid but maybe I just need to believe he means them. Even if they’re a lie, I need something to hold on to right now.
I let my arms drop to my sides, and when he swipes his thumb along my face and smears a tear across it, I let my lashes fall closed. He cups my face with both hands and pulls me closer.
“Look at me.”
I open my eyes and look up at him. He’s so close, I can see every speck of gold in his eyes and this, right now, it’s like I’m more naked than if he were to look over my body, if he were to lay me out and open me up and study every detail of me.
This is worse.
This… I can’t hold his gaze because this, now, him like this, it’s like he’s looking inside my soul.
And I’m letting him.
I blink, turn my face, meaning to look away, but turning it into his palm and for a single insane moment, I think I am safe here. Safe in his hands, in my enemy’s hands. I shake my head and with my arms, slap his off.
“You can’t have that,” I snap, more power in my voice than I thought I could muster.
He wipes his thumb on the corner of his mouth, like he’s wiping something away. Then his eyes narrow, and I’m back against the wall. I think he knows what I mean by ‘that’ even though I can hardly make sense of my own words.
You can’t have that.
He may be able to take my body, but he has no right to my soul.
I get the feeling he’s processing the same thing because he shrugs a shoulder and makes a point of looking me over slowly, as if letting his gaze memorize every inch of skin, the rise and fall of my breasts, the concave of my belly, the mound of my sex, the curve of my thighs, the fragility of my naked feet even.
“Turn around.”
I search his eyes, and they’re darker, the pupils dilated.
“Why do I have to ask everything twice?” he says.
I turn, and I realize the walls are not painted. They’re actually papered in a rich and very subtle paper with the most delicate pattern of roses repeating, repeating, repeating.
It’s what I concentrate on when I feel his fingers on me, when I gasp at the slight touch as he gathers up my hair and sets the mass of it over my shoulder to expose my back.
I find myself resting my forehead against the wall. I wonder if the ridges of the paper will imprint their pattern on my skin. I am suddenly tired.
He’s wearing me out, and he hasn’t even touched me yet. Hasn’t yet begun to use
me.
His fingers play like a piano along my spine, tracing every vertebra as if with a feather, as if he’ll know every inch of me, every centimeter.
I set my fingertips on the wall, and I trace the pattern of the roses, none of which is bigger than the fingernail of my smallest finger, and they’re intertwining and suddenly overwhelming as they twist and turn their thorny, strangling stems again and again and again.
And I was wrong.
There is color.
I heard once that white contains all of the colors of the rainbow and thought what nonsense, but I see it now, in the roses that encircle this prison, my borrowed room.
I look up at it, rest the side of my cheek against the cool surface, and know there will be no reprieve, no break in the pattern. The roses are condemned to twist and turn and wind around and around and choke the life out of the next.
There will be no survivors. Not after this. Not after me.
My aunt’s ring seems to burn on my finger.
“I took from them.”
I look at it, meet the empty eye sockets on the tiny skull, and I know that it’s not just any bone, but Scafoni bone that makes up the ring.
I shudder at the icy chill that runs up my spine.
His ancestor’s bone is my jewelry, and I want to laugh.
But then he touches me, and inside my belly, a thousand butterflies take flight as his fingers brush my skin so lightly, it’s almost like he doesn’t. Like it’s my mind playing tricks on me.
I want to turn and look to be sure, but then he cups my bottom with both hands, as if weighing or testing, perhaps for his whip, and then with one hand he gathers up my hair and for the first time in my life, I curse the length, think maybe I should cut it short, shave it like a monk, because he’s twisting it around his fist.
Sebastian turns me to face him, and the fingers of his other hand are combing through the mound of hair between my legs and sliding lower.
He’s hard. I feel him against my hip.
His fingers are in my folds now, and his eyes have gone black. He tilts my head back, and I hear my own shallow breathing because it feels good, what he’s doing, and I don’t want it to feel good, and I’m not expecting him to kiss me.
Why am I not expecting him to kiss me?
My mouth opens only because he’s tugging my head backward, hurting me. I lick my lips, and I feel the warmth of his touch. He doesn’t make the mistake of sliding his tongue inside my mouth. I would bite it off. Swallow it. He knows it.
Bone.
The ring is made of Scafoni bone.
He takes my lower lip between his and he’s kissing me and it’s so soft and erotic. His fingers between my legs have found my clit because it’s swollen and sensitive and craves his touch. Like he’s not my enemy at all.
When I find myself involuntarily arching my back, tilting myself into his hand, I blink my eyes open and find he’s already watching me.
He’s been watching me all along, the bastard.
But that’s what it takes to snap me out of this insanity.
When I slap my hands on his chest to shove him away, he doesn’t budge but instead closes one hand around my throat and keeps me pressed against the wall while his other hand works my clit and fuck, I can’t come. I can’t.
I won’t.
He grins a little, like he knows my dilemma. Like he knows he’ll win, and I feel my hips moving without my permission, feel myself press into his palm.
But then he makes a mistake when he kisses me again.
I close my hands over his shoulders, and I’m so close, so fucking close, and I will not give him the satisfaction of coming.
I snap my teeth and bite down hard on his lip.
The taste of blood, like iron in my mouth, it’s my victory, and I swallow it and I want more, even though I know he will make me pay.
I’m grinning when he pulls back, but not for long.
He uses the fistful of my hair and tugs my head back so hard I feel like he will scalp me.
“That was a mistake.”
He’s pissed, and I am glad. At least he’s not grinning anymore. Not smirking.
He must have known I would fight. He must want me to, because what’s the fun in taking a girl who won’t fight? In breaking a girl who has no fight in her?
He marches me like this, with his face inches from mine, his eyes fierce, right to the bed and tosses me roughly onto it.
His breathing is tight, like he’s trying to control himself, because I’m watching his hands fist and open, fist and open, again and again.
My grin is gone now too, and I don’t have a chance to scoot away before he’s on his knees on the bed and gripping my thigh with one hand—I’ll have bruises like fingerprints there too, to match the ones on my jaw.
He traps my legs with his, knees pressing against my thighs, and he climbs on top of me, capturing my hands when I fight him, taking my wrists into one of his giant hands so easily.
I’m raging, screaming at him, cursing him to hell, cursing his family to hell, using every ounce of power in my body to wriggle away, to at least make him work for it, but he’s just too strong and I’m no match.
I finally stop because I’m exhausted. I look up at him looming over me. He wipes his thumb across his lip and looks at it, at the smear of blood there.
“That was a fucking mistake.”
“You have no right to touch me. To kiss me. Let me go!”
“After I’ve been so patient with you.”
“Patient?”
“You don’t get it.”
He takes the hand with the smear of blood on it and tugs at the mound of hair between my legs, and it fucking hurts.
“You belong to me,” he says.
He must be making a fist with his hand because he’s pulling so hard.
“You’re hurting me!” I’m powerless to move, to make him stop.
“I haven’t begun hurting you,” he says as he moves his fingers, giving me a moment of relief before he slides them lower and grips my pussy hard, digging his fingers inside me.
I make a sound, a whine, a moan. I don’t fucking know.
“You belong to me, Helena. I am your master. I decide when you eat, if you eat. I decide when or if you sleep and in whose bed. I decide if you’re allowed clothes. I decide if you’ll scrub my floors. I decide everything. Me. I am your fucking master.”
“Stop. Please.” It comes out a plea, and I hate myself for it, for the tears sliding out of my eyes. For being afraid of him. Of him like this.
“I decide when you’re rewarded, and I decide when you’re punished. And I should warn you, I have a taste for the latter and you’re already owed. More than once.”
I swallow, and I’m squirming like a tiny animal, helpless. Like a fucking rabbit caught in a trap.
“I own you, body and soul.”
“No. Not soul. Not that.”
He pulls his hand from my pussy, and I can breathe again.
He brings it to his nose, and his smile grows so fucking wide, I want to kill him. To smash his perfect teeth in, his perfect face, and I feel myself burn with humiliation when he smears his wet fingers rudely across my face, my mouth.
I smell my scent, that of arousal above all else. He smells it too, and he wants me to know it.
“You have sharp teeth and a sharper tongue, but I’ll break you of those. I’ll make better use of your mouth, like I will your pussy and your ass because I own every hole. And you will know that you are nothing. Nothing but my fuck toy. And you know what else, Helena? I’ll take the greatest pleasure watching you come. Watching you as you realize your body will betray you. Your pussy will betray you. It already has.”
“I hate you. I’ll fight you.”
He brings his face to mine, and that grin is still there.
“And therein lies the reason it was you and not your meek Barbie doll sisters.”
He sits up, squeezes his thighs around mine one last time, then gets up off the
bed.
I remain as I am, lying there, spent, every muscle on fire like I’ve just run a fucking marathon.
But then he draws my pocketknife out of his pocket and opens the blade.
“So I’ll give you a notch for that little stunt.”
He catches me by the hair, drags me to my knees on the floor, and turns my face into the bed, pushing it into the mattress and holding me there by my hair.
I feel the sharp tip of the blade at the back of my neck, I let out a cry and grip the blanket, pulling hard.
“Be still. You don’t want me to slip up.”
It stings, every centimeter of the cut. He’s carving a line into the back of my neck.
Warm blood runs down my spine. I hold still, like he says.
“There,” he says, releasing me.
“What did you do?” I touch my neck, and my fingers come away bloodied.
He looks at the blade, wipes it clean with his finger, closes it, and tucks it into his pocket.
“I like it when you fight, Helena. I want you to fight. To run. To try to hurt me.”
He glances at his forearm, where tracks of skin are missing from where I scratched it off, and I suddenly am very aware of it under my fingernails.
He looks back at me. “Because it’s so much more fun when I have to make you.”
“You mean when you rape me?”
His jaw tightens. He wasn’t expecting that. I know he’s gritting his teeth. I’ve touched a nerve.
“And then pass me on to your brothers to rape me?” I continue.
“Be careful.”
“Isn’t that what you do? Isn’t that the point? You take a Willow Girl, and you beat her and you rape her, and you break her so that when you return her, she’s already dead even if you don’t kill her.”
I sag against the bed, and I’m not fighting anymore. There isn’t any more fight in my voice, because that last part, I didn’t mean to say that out loud. Not for his sake, but my own. Because with those words, I’ve just read my own death sentence.
He’s quiet for a long minute, just stands there and watches me wipe the stupid fucking tears from my eyes. When he steps toward the bed, I lean away, but he stops, doesn’t reach for me, doesn’t touch me.
“You want to keep your soul? I’m not interested in your soul. But don’t fucking push me. I am your only ally in this house. Remember that.”
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