by Lili Valente
“I said the cage was for you; I didn’t say I was going to put you in it. It was a possibility, not a foregone conclusion.”
“Can’t you just give a straight answer for once?” she asked. “Is that so difficult?”
“The only thing I’ve promised you is that I will break you,” he said, capturing her wrists and guiding them above her head before pinning them to the sand. “I never promised you truth or affection or anything else.”
She held his gaze, her bottom lip trembling. “You’re right. You’re impossible, but you’re right.”
“I’m not impossible,” he said, shocked to feel desire whispering through his core as she shifted beneath him, her hips sinking deeper into the coarse beach. He wanted to fuck her until he was hard again and they both had more sand in uncomfortable places, but the time for pleasure was through.
He needed answers and he intended to get them. “I’m going to give you a chance to make this better,” he said softly. “If you please me, you will sleep in your bed tonight. If you displease me, you sleep in the kennel.”
CHAPTER FOUR
Jackson
Her eyes widened. “No. I can’t. Please, I’m terrified of small spaces.”
“Then I suppose you’d better answer my questions honestly.” Jackson leaned in until his face hovered inches from hers, close enough for him to see the starbursts of gray surrounding her pupils.
Had Harley’s eyes turned into tiny blue and silver suns at their centers? He didn’t think so. Not exactly like this, anyway. If he were a gambling man, he would bet this was her sister, Hannah, but he needed to hear it from her own lips.
And then he needed her to tell him why she’d lied.
“What is your name?” he asked, his fingers tightening around her wrists as he relaxed more of his weight on top of her. He wanted her to feel just how vulnerable she was. Vulnerable, exposed, and completely at his mercy.
“My name,” she echoed, searching his face. “We’re back to this?”
“We are,” he said. “But this time I want the truth.”
She pulled in a breath and held it for a moment before releasing her words in a rush, “What if you don’t believe me?”
“I’ll believe you. If you’re telling the truth.”
“How will you know?”
“I’ll know.” He would. She had no reason to suspect that he’d discovered her secret. If she confessed the truth now while staring up into his eyes with her body slick around him and the steady thud of her heartbeat echoing through his chest, he would believe her.
“All right, I…” Her tongue slipped out, dampening her lips. “My name is Hannah. Hannah Elisabeth.”
He swallowed, keeping his expression impassive, trying not to think too much about all the things he’d done to this woman while laboring under a case of mistaken identity. “Harley is your twin sister.”
She nodded, fear and uncertainty swirling in her eyes. “Yes.”
“And where is your sister now?” He moved his hands away from her wrists, granting her that slight freedom as a reward for her honesty.
“She’s dead,” she whispered. “She died in a car accident six years ago.”
He closed his eyes. If he didn’t, there would be no way he would be able to hide his response. She was telling the truth. Harley was dead and he’d wasted six years of his life hunting a ghost.
Six fucking years.
And now here he was, buried balls deep in a stranger he’d been hate fucking for a week, treating her the way he would only have treated his worst enemy.
Throat so tight it felt like it would collapse, Jackson pulled out and rolled away from the woman beneath him. He sat back on his ass in the sand, propping his elbows on his bent knees and dropping his face into his hands, his thoughts worming into such a wicked knot he couldn’t pluck a single logical thread from the tangle.
“I’m sorry I lied,” Hannah said, the direction of her voice leading him to believe she’d sat up beside him though he still couldn’t bring himself to look at her. “I was afraid you wouldn’t want me if you knew I wasn’t Harley and my aunt and I are in a really hard place. We need the money badly, but after a while I…”
She sighed. “It started to feel so wrong to lie to you, no matter how much is riding on this job. I was going to tell you the truth tonight, at dinner, but when you left the table, I realized I had no way to prove that I had a sister. No pictures or birth certificate or anything. And then I got scared that you wouldn’t believe me, so when I saw the—”
“The cage,” he supplied numbly. The cage he’d bought for the monster who had slipped through his fingers. Harley was probably rolling around on the steamy floor of hell right now, laughing her ass off at his failure.
But that was all right. He would hunt her there, too. Eventually.
“I’m not sure what she did to you,” Hannah said in a careful voice, “but I’m sorry. I’m sure you didn’t deserve it. I loved Harley, but I knew her better than anyone. She could be so cruel. She hurt a lot of people who didn’t deserve to be hurt. Especially men.”
“Why men?” Jackson asked, keeping his eyes closed and his face in his hands. His reality was falling apart, but he wasn’t about to let Hannah see him crumble. She might not be his sworn enemy, but he didn’t trust her. He didn’t trust anyone related to the viper who had put him behind bars.
“I don’t know for sure,” she said. “I think it was her way of protecting herself. My mother was miserable in her marriage. She had an affair when I was a kid. She was gone for almost a year, and when she came back, Daddy was horrible to her. He treated her like a prisoner, but she never fought back or tried to leave. It was…painful to watch. It scared me and I think it scared Harley even more. She was so afraid of becoming like Mom that she became like Dad, instead, taking what she wanted and hurting before she could be hurt.”
Hurting before she could be hurt.
He would never have hurt Harley, not back then. And he certainly wouldn’t have set off a nuclear bomb in the center of her life the way she had his. The explanation didn’t make any sense, but he could tell Hannah was telling the truth as far as she knew it.
But that didn’t mean her psychoanalysis of her sister was the entire story. There had to be more to Harley’s plot to ruin him, and Hannah was going to help him discover the secrets her sister must have been keeping.
Taking a deep breath, Jackson lifted his head and opened his eyes. Hannah was mirroring his position, her legs curled to her chest and her arms wrapped around her knees, concealing most of her nakedness. They’d spent the past week having boundary-pushing sex and he’d just had her so hard his balls still ached, but he felt like he was looking at a stranger.
He didn’t know how to talk to her or be with her and he was too fucked up to cross that bridge just yet. It was better not to think too much about what to do with Hannah, at least not until he had the information he needed.
“Hannah Elisabeth,” he said, even her name softer and sweeter in his mouth than Harley’s. “Pretty.”
Her lashes fluttered as her gaze fell. “Thank you.”
“So what is your last name, Hannah Elisabeth?”
She glanced up sharply before dropping her eyes back to the sand and hugging her legs tighter to her chest. “I’d rather not say. If that’s okay.”
“It’s not. I need to know Harley’s last name. I already know Garrett, the one she gave me, wasn’t it.”
Hannah shook her head, her damp, tangled hair moving heavily around her shoulders. “I’m sorry. I can’t tell you. My family has enemies. That’s why my aunt and I are in hiding. I haven’t told anyone my real last name in years.”
“What kind of enemies?” he asked, wondering if maybe Hannah wasn’t so innocent after all.
“The kind who kill people,” she said, her face paling. “Harley’s accident wasn’t an accident. Someone drove the car she was in off the road. There was reason to believe I would be next so…we ran. It’s been
just Sybil and me ever since.”
“Why would someone want you and your sister dead?”
“I don’t know for sure. I have theories, but I’m not ready to share them,” she said, her mouth set in a stubborn line. “All I can tell you is that it was nothing Harley or I did. She might not have been innocent, but she’d done nothing to earn her way onto a killer’s hit list.”
“I understand not being ready to share your secrets with me,” he said in a patient voice. “But what you don’t understand is that if you don’t tell me your last name, you’re going to make a new enemy. And I’ll be able to get to you a lot easier than anyone else who means you harm.”
Hannah’s lips parted in shock. “Are you threatening me?”
“I’d rather not, but if you won’t give me what I need…”
“B-but I’m not Harley,” she sputtered.
“I believe you, and I don’t want to punish an innocent woman any more than I have already,” he said, muscles tensing, ready to spring after her if she decided to run. “But I need to know the truth. Give me a name and we’ll be finished with questions. For now.”
Her clever gaze darted to the right before returning to his. She was going to run. He almost hoped she would so he would have something to do with all the frustrated rage coursing through him.
“I can’t tell you,” she said with another shake of her head. “If it were only me, it wouldn’t matter, but I have to think about Aunt Sybil. I can’t put her at risk.”
“She won’t be in danger,” he said. “I won’t tell anyone anything about you or your aunt. I just need to know Harley’s last name.”
Hannah went still, holding his gaze in the fading light. “I can’t. Please ask me something else.”
“I thought you said you cared about me,” Jackson said, unable to keep the hard edge from his voice. “Aren’t you supposed to trust the people you care for?”
Her eyes narrowed. “I also said I thought you were out of your mind. So until you prove otherwise, no, I don’t trust you. And if you hurt me because I refuse to answer this question, then I will trust you even less and you will never get what you want from me.”
“Now you’re making threats?” he asked in a low, dangerous voice, some primitive part of him gnashing its teeth in rage that she dared to threaten him now, when his entire world had been ripped apart.
“It’s not a threat,” she whispered. “It’s a promise.”
He shifted forward, but before he could stand, Hannah sprung to her feet and raced back toward the ocean. He leapt after her, eliminating her brief head start in three large strides. Grabbing her hips, he spun her around and bent low, tipping her over his shoulder.
“Let me go!” she screamed, driving a fist into his back. “Put me down!”
Jackson responded by securing one arm around her thighs, banding them tightly together as he turned and started back up the beach.
He’d given her the chance to play nice.
Now they were going to play his way.
CHAPTER FIVE
Hannah
All the way back to the house, Hannah beat Jackson’s back with her fists as hard as she could, but it was like his skin had turned to stone along with his heart.
His heart was always stone.
You were a fool to think differently and a fool to let him know you care. He’ll just use it against you, another weapon in his crazy, senseless war against a dead woman.
“I’m not Harley!” Hannah sobbed as Jackson walked around the side of the house, cutting through the garden. She hated the tears filling her eyes. She wasn’t sad, she was livid, but apparently her stupid body didn’t understand the difference. “I didn’t do anything to you! You have no right to punish me.”
“I don’t need a right. You sold yourself to me,” Jackson said in an infuriatingly cold voice. “I can do what I want with the things that I own.”
“I’m not a thing, you bastard,” she said, delivering another hard punch to his muscled back that, again, seemed to have absolutely no effect. “I’m a person. An innocent person.”
“No one is innocent,” he said, flipping her upright so suddenly the world spun and her knees buckled.
Before she could even attempt to regain her balance, Jackson’s strong hands gripped her hip and the back of her neck, bending her in half and shoving her forward. She fell onto her hands and knees, knowing as soon as she felt the hard plastic beneath her fingers where she was.
The cage. She was in the cage.
She spun in time to see Jackson slide the lock home and wailed at him through the bars, “No! Let me out! You can’t leave me in here!”
Jackson stood and turned, walking away with that slow, predatory gait of his, as if he couldn’t care less that he’d locked a woman he had just made love to in a dog kennel.
“Stop!” she screamed as he crossed the patio. “I’m not a criminal! I’m not an animal. I don’t deserve to be treated this way!”
He paused with his hand on the sliding glass door and turned, glancing over his shoulder with a pitiless expression on his face. “No one gets what they deserve, Hannah. If you didn’t realize that before, you certainly will now.”
And then he opened the door and stepped inside, ignoring her shouted, “Wait!”
She sucked in a breath, frightened by the sound that emerged from her parted lips. It was half whimper, half growl, and all crazy. If he left her in here for any length of time, she was going to lose her mind. She could already feel the narrow plastic walls tightening around her, the thin metal web of the bars digging into her skin, slicing her sanity into pieces.
“Let me out,” she moaned as she wedged herself into the corner of the kennel, her knees tucked to her chest. “Please, let me out. Please.”
But there was no one to hear her beg. The garden beyond the patio was quiet and empty. The only sounds breaking the silence were the wind through the leaves and the insects buzzing and clicking in the soft blue light.
Dusk had fallen on the journey back to the house. Before long, it would be dark and she would be alone until morning. She knew Jackson wasn’t coming back for her any time soon. There would be no one to plead with for her freedom until Eva brought her breakfast tray in the morning and for all she knew, she might be denied food until she gave Jackson what he wanted.
“I hate you,” she growled, her foot shooting out to kick the opposite wall, sending a shudder through her prison. “I hate you, Jackson! I hate you! Do you hear me? I hate you!”
She screamed until her throat was raw, her eye sockets throbbed, and tears streamed down her cheeks. She screamed until she could have sworn she’d used up all the air in her prison and her head felt light enough to float off her body. She screamed and screamed until darkness fell and the moon rose over the black hulk of the mountain and she was too weak to do anything but curl into a ball on the floor of the cage and cry herself to sleep, pitifully mumbling promises to herself.
She was going to hurt him. She was going to make him sorry he’d done this. She was going to show him that sometimes people did get what they deserved and that he wasn’t the only one who could become a monster.
By the time she finally began to drift off to sleep—still feeling the full-body crawl of terror only a claustrophobic could fully understand—she had nearly convinced herself that she didn’t pity Jackson, let alone love him.
How could she be in love with a man who would hurt her this way?
Nothing he’d done in the past week had been as awful as this. Before today, he hadn’t known he had the wrong woman and there had always been pleasure at the end of the pain. The most mind-blowing, heart-wrenching, explosive pleasure of her life, unlike anything she could have imagined until Jackson took her by the hand and led her down his dark path.
But maybe he didn’t want to give her pleasure or pain anymore.
She wasn’t Harley. She wasn’t the woman he wanted. Maybe now that he knew Harley was truly beyond his reach, he wanted answers an
d nothing more. And maybe, if she broke down and gave him what he was asking for, he’d send her home to Sybil.
The thought should have been a sliver of hope to cling to. Instead, it summoned fresh tears that slid down her already hot, swollen cheeks. She didn’t want him to send her away or even to simply let her out of her cage. She wanted him to care the way she cared.
“So stupid, Hannah,” she mumbled to the darkness. “You’re so fucking stupid.”
She’d always heard that love was blind, but apparently it was dumb, as well, and lacking in even the most basic sense of self-respect.
She still loved Jackson, even now, curled on her side with hard plastic digging into her bones, her head full of cotton, and her mouth filled with the sour taste of terror. She still ached for his touch and the feel of his body joining with hers, promising with every brush of skin against skin that she belonged in his arms, and she sensed she would only stop loving him when she began hating herself.
“First thing in the morning,” she whispered as her eyes slid closed. She would start to work on hating herself first thing in the morning.
Right now she was too tired for love or hate or anything in between.
CHAPTER SIX
Jackson
Jackson locked himself in his room, turning the stereo to a classical station to drown out the sound of Hannah’s distant screams. He took a long hot shower, doing his best not to think about anything in particular as he scrubbed the saltwater stickiness from his skin. Afterward, he dressed in silk pajama pants and a cotton tee shirt and sat down to decode a message encrypted on the website his underground contacts used to negotiate prices for his shipments.
If Hannah was still screaming that she hated him an hour later, he couldn’t hear it over the soothing piano music, but he would swear he could feel her contempt stinging across the surface of his skin. The hair at the back of his neck stood on end, his jaw ached from being clenched for too long, and his stomach had solidified into a granite slab that weighed down the center of his body. Working was challenging and eating was unthinkable.
