by Linnea May
“What matters is that I was the one who helped him get out of the shithole he dug for himself,” he continues. “And I’m the one who came out in a better position at the end, mostly because I’m not involved with his failing business.”
My eyes widen in surprise. “You’re not working for your family’s business?”
He shakes his head. “I never really have. It wasn’t what was intended for me.”
“But...,” I utter, gesturing around the room. “I mean... you’re still....”
“Doing pretty well?” he completes my sentence. “Yes, I am, but it’s built from my trust fund money and the compensation I received from saving my brother’s ass.”
He picks up his fork and cuts off another piece of steak, angrily stabbing at it.
“Construction has never really been my thing, anyway,” he mutters before stuffing his face with food.
“So, what do you do?”
He looks at me, still chewing, and his facial expression changes to one I’m all too familiar with.
“You,” he says. “As soon as you’ve finished your food.”
26
Loran
I’m not an idiot. I saw the way she eyed the silverware, the way her eyes darted back and forth between me and the knife in her hand. The way her face darkened every time she pondered potential chances to attack me, and her chances of getting out alive.
The ache these observations evoke in my chest is new to me, and I hate that it’s even there. It shouldn’t affect me the way it does. After all, can I blame her? She’s not here according to her own free will, she’s not getting paid for this, and she has no idea what I might have planned for her once I’m done with her.
To be honest, neither do I. I’ve become a complete living-in-the-moment idiot ever since I took her. She’s like a fucking meteor, destroying everything in its path. I’m no longer the man I was, a man in control, a man with a plan. I’ve never been one to just wing it, taking each day as it comes. With her, it’s all I have done. She caught my attention without even trying, came along with me, albeit as a result of a confusion that neither of us realized, and been messing with my head ever since.
I shouldn’t let this happen, and the only way I was able to make myself feel safe when I brought her up here for dinner was to tie her ankles together. I’ll admit, I never even considered the possibility of her attacking me with a knife—attacking me period, for that matter—until I saw the look on her face as she held it in her hand.
Clearing the table, I can see the hope fleeting away from her as I move the silverware out of her reach as quickly as possible without making it seem obvious.
Her eyes follow my actions as I carry the plates and silverware over to the kitchen.
“Would you have gone through with it?” I ask, never looking directly at her, as I walk into the other room.
“Gone through with what?”
I load the dishes in the dishwater, leaving her wondering at the meaning of my words for a few moments as she waits alone at the table. She doesn’t move an inch, but her eyes remain glued on me. Posing the question and then leaving her hanging was my strategy for preventing any further contemplation on attempting to escape on her part. If I hadn’t distracted her, she might have started analyzing her restraints, maybe even going as far as testing them or searching around for some kind of object that could be used to help her escape.
“Stabbing me,” I say, closing the dishwasher with such momentum that the abruptness of the sound makes her jump in surprise.
I return to the table, hands in my pockets in a move that radiates patience and calm.
“I saw the way you were looking at that steak knife, toy,” I state evenly. “It was written all over your face. You can’t hide anything from me.”
I pause, enjoying the look of horror on her pretty face. Her hands are clasped in her lap, and she’s the image of sweetness and innocence the way she sits looking at me quietly.
“I’m just wondering, would you actually have gone through with it, if I’d given you the chance?”
“I didn’t plan on doing anything, master,” she says in a low voice.
She flinches in surprise when I dart forward, removing my hands from my pockets and closing them around her throat. My motions force her into a standing position as I pull her toward me.
“Don’t lie to me, toy!”
She reaches up to her throat, trying to loosen my grip, but I know it’s mostly for show. It may be uncomfortable, but she sure as hell is still able to breathe just fine.
“I’m not lying!” she insists. “I’m not saying that I never considered or the idea hasn’t crossed my mind, but I didn’t plan on doing anything. I’m being honest, master.”
Her eyes flicker as she stares at me, her face contorted in a conflicting grimace of pain and determination.
“Because it has crossed my mind,” she adds. “How could it not?”
She gasps out when I let go of her. She uses one hand to steady herself with the table since her balance is slightly off-kilter from having her feet bound to the chair. Her other hand reaches up to gently massage the area where I grabbed her throat.
Such a drama queen.
“So you have considered it,” I confirm. “What an ungrateful little slut you are.”
She glares up at me with fire flaming in her eyes. “Ungrateful?”
“You can’t tell me you’re not enjoying this,” I counter. “You can’t tell me you’re not the one who comes every single day while tensing around my cock, the one who begs me to fuck her, the one who has experienced more orgasms than most will ever have during an entire lifetime just while you’ve been here. All of them orchestrated by me, your generous master!”
The blush on her face tells me there’s truth behind my words.
“You said it yourself,” I remind her. “You’re doing this job because you enjoy it. Because you craved being treated like the little slut you are.”
The look she shoots me is the fiercest one I’ve ever seen on her. Her cheeks are glowing a mad red, and her green eyes sizzle sinisterly. This is one of many moments when I’d love to see her natural hair color. Red. Fiery red.
“But this is no job,” she hisses. “This is real. I’m in real danger.”
“And you fucking love it.”
She doesn’t talk back, and before she can object in any way, I close in on her, wrapping my arms around her to make sure I’m in full and complete control of her when I kneel down to unfasten the cuffs to free her from the chair. She struggles in my arms, but her efforts are half-hearted at best, confirming she has no real intention of trying to get away from me.
Because she knows she can’t. And, deep down, she doesn’t want to.
One of the cuffs is still locked around her left ankle when I pick her up to carry her over to the stairs leading to the basement. That’s when she starts fighting me. She’s struggling in my embrace, making it hard for me to keep my balance as I carry her across the living room. She’s small and doesn’t weigh very much, but she’s still a full-grown human being with a strong will and the vigor to match.
“No!” she shrieks. “Not back down there! Not yet! Please, let me stay up here for a little while longer. Please!”
I ignore her, only tightening my grip around her struggling body as I stagger down the stairs.
“Stop it!” I warn her, when she almost causes me to fall because of her silly attempts at fighting me off. “You’ll kill us both!”
“I don’t care!” she protests, and before I know it, I’m reminded that I failed to take specific precautions into account with her yet again.
Her teeth dig into my left shoulder. It’s bearable at first, but when she realizes this is not getting her anywhere, she intensifies the pressure on my skin, so much so that I’m sure she can taste blood.
I yell out, unable to fight my instincts as I let go of her. What happens next is something neither of us anticipated.
It’s one of those
terrible moments that seem to happen in agonizing slow motion. She’s falling out of my arms, trying to stop her fall by grabbing for the railing on the side of the stairs. But there is no rail, only a flat wall.
I can see the expression on her face changing, overwritten by terror as she realizes she’s about to tumble down the stairs, and there is no way for her to catch her fall.
And just as her facial expression changes, so does mine.
Furious rage and shock turns to worry, as I see her toppling down the stairs.
“Ruby!” I cry out, reaching for her.
My hand misses her wrist by only inches, and I’m forced to witness a greater horror, watching her plummet head over heels down the steps. There’s nothing I can do but watch.
27
Ruby
He called me by my name. He’s never done that before.
His voice still echoes in my head, that beautiful sound filling my heart as it fills my mind.
Ruby.
Ruby is my real name. I never considered taking an alias for my job. It’s a part of me, what makes me the person I am. Why would I take a different name?
Until now, he refused to call me by my name. He didn’t even want to hear it or know about it.
Those few seconds of free-falling seemed to stretch into an eternity. It seemed so long, in fact, that it allowed me enough time to envision what would happen to me once I landed at the bottom, the bones that would be broken, the possibility of having my head split open.
But it all faded instantly when he called out my name, and I saw him reaching out his hand in a failed attempt to save me from falling.
“Ruby!”
Nothing else mattered in that moment. Suddenly there’s no fear, my face fixated on his, seeing my name on his lips, but yet I doubted myself at the same time.
Did he really say it? Did he really call out my name? What does it mean?
A split second later, my mind is drawn back to reality, to me falling down the stairs. I helplessly flail about as I try to catch myself, stop the forward momentum of the fall, and swallow the sharp pain from my back hitting the wall, but I realize it won’t be as bad as I feared.
I’m lucky. The fact that I’m bouncing against the wall and trying to hold onto something that isn’t there, cushions my fall enough to allow me to take control, at least to some degree. I’m successful at managing to redirect my fall, no longer tumbling backwards but dropping forward, though I’m sure I’ve sprained my ankle in the process.
I land at the bottom of the stairs. My ankle is on fire, and the sensations coming from my thighs and calves confirm that my lower body will be a colorful rainbow of purples, black, and blue tomorrow. There’s a moment of complete silence, during which I sit on the floor, staring ahead in disbelief as I try to fathom what just happened.
His heavy steps hurriedly thudding down the stairs behind me reinforces his concern. Our eyes meet as soon as he reaches the bottom of the stairs.
“Are you okay?!” He’s breathing heavily and his eyes are huge and panicked when he drops immediately to his knees beside me. “Did you break anything? Is anything hurting? What’s hurting? Talk to me. Don’t move.”
I’m trembling. My eyes slowly shift from my hands up to his dazed face, then back to my hands, and next to my legs. I’m sitting in a very awkward position to say the least, my legs sprawled out at an angle suggesting that I might’ve broken or twisted something. I’m pretty sure my ankle is the worst thing affected.
I try to gather myself, pulling my legs closer to my body. My face contorts in pain when my foot drapes over the last step.
“What?!” he rushes. “What is it, toy?”
There it is. Toy. Now that he’s no longer in a state of shock, I’m no longer Ruby.
“My ankle,” I whimper. “I think I might have sprained it.”
His eyes dart over to my foot, quickly scanning it as if to make sure it’s not twisted in an absurd way, and then he gathers me up from the floor, gently picking me up as if I was a child.
And this time, I’m not fighting him. I wrap my arms around his neck, and from how I’m positioned against his strong chest, I can feel his heart beating so fast that it almost scares me.
Much to my sorrow, he doesn’t carry me back upstairs, but follows through with his original intention. He effortlessly opens the door to the dungeon, making sure that I don’t bump against the wall or the door as he takes me into the room, my cell.
He carries me over to the mattress, lying me down as carefully as possible, but I still groan in pain when my back meets the mattress.
His eyes widen. “What? Does something else hurt?”
I shift a little, changing my position to reduce the pressure on my lower back. It seems I’ve bruised that area, as well.
“My back,” I say. “I must’ve hurt it when I bumped against the door.”
Our eyes meet, and the way he looks at me almost makes me cry. He’s so strong, so big, so secure, my master, the man who controls my every move, and now he looks as if he’s completely lost. As if he’s the one that was just broken, and not me.
“How strong is the pain?” he asks. “Can you breathe? Does it hurt to breathe?”
I shake my head.
“And your foot, how bad is that?” he probes. “And anywhere else? Do you have something else that hurts?”
“Pretty sure it’s just a few bruises and possibly a sprained ankle,” I say, narrowing my eyes as I look at him. “You won’t have to call a doctor and explain to anyone how you threw your captive down the stairs when she tried to fight being restrained, don’t worry.”
It just occurred to me that this might be his biggest worry. That he might fear calling a doctor or taking me to a hospital because I’m seriously injured. I wonder if he’d even consider doing that. After all, it would bring this whole game to a quick end - and he’d wind up in prison.
His expression changes, and before I know it, he’s back to the version of himself that I’m most familiar with.
“You could’ve gotten seriously hurt!” he yells.
I flinch at the tone and volume of his voice, but I’m quick to recover and shoot him a comeback.
“You’re saying that as if it was my fault!”
“It was your fault!”
“What?!” I cry out. “How is it my fault when I merely reacted instinctively to you dragging me back into a dungeon that I don’t want to be in?”
“I told you, you shouldn’t fight me!”
I gasp with indignation, trying to sit up from my horizontal position so that I’m eye-level with him. I’m soon paralyzed by a stinging jolt of pain that lands me back on the mattress.
He lets out a sigh, placing his hands on my shoulders to encourage me to remain where I am. As if I had a fucking choice.
“Well, at least now I’ll be easy to handle for you. Immobile and unable to run, even if I had a chance.”
I glare at him, meeting his face just in time to see his expression break.
He looks hurt, devastated.
It’s another one of those moments when I wish I could take back what I said. He’s cruel, a psychopath.
But he’s not a monster.
“This is not what I wanted,” he says in such a low voice that it almost breaks my heart. He doesn’t have to elaborate for me to know that he’s not simply talking about what just happened.
He’s talking about all of this. About almost everything that has happened since he took me.
But the sorrowful expression disappears almost as quickly as it appeared.
“This doesn’t give me anything,” he hisses, gesturing toward my body. “I don’t enjoy hurting you like this. I don’t fucking enjoy seeing you like this.”
I bite my lower lip.
“You didn’t do it on purpose,” I say. “It was an accident.”
I reach up to his face, placing my hand on his cheek, and he lets me. He even leans into it for a second, but retreats quickly then as if I slapped him
.
“You were right,” I whisper. “I like this. I like what you’re doing to me.”
Our eyes meet, and he reaches up to my hand then, gently removing it from his face.
“But I don’t like this basement,” I say. “I don’t want to be down here. I hate being locked up in here all by myself, every day, all day long.”
My attempts to fight off the tears are futile. I assume that’s one thing we have in common: the inability to allow ourselves to show weakness in front of the other.
I know I’m just churned up by the accident. I was in shock, and now that I’m recovering, I’m bereft of my defense mechanisms to keep the dark thoughts away. They come swarming at me all at once, filling me with despair and hopelessness.
“I don’t like this fear,” I mumble. “I don’t like not knowing what will happen to me. I don’t like the uncertainty of this. I don’t like fearing you as much as I do. I want-”
“Hush,” he interrupts me, placing his index finger on my lips, and only worsening my anxiety.
I close my eyes, trying to calm myself. The first wave of tears is rolling down my cheeks.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” he whispers. “I’m not going to end you, toy.”
“But what are you going to do?” I ask pitifully, opening my eyes so I can meet his gaze.
A dark smile plays around the corners of his mouth, frightening me even more.
“Just promise me you’ll be a good girl from now on,” he says. “Just be a good girl for me - and no harm will ever come your way.”
28
Ruby
Nineteen days. It frightens me that I know the number so well.
It makes me sad that my life is so empty that I’m forced to do little more than count the days as they pass by. At least my life is full enough that the days no longer seem as if they stretch on for eternity.
I’ve ascended, quite literally. He allowed me to leave the basement dungeon after falling down the stairs. He claimed it was only temporary until my wounds healed, but maybe it was his way of minimizing his guilty feelings, whether he admitted to feeling guilty or not. I was pretty fortunate to only end up with a few bruises on my leg, a deep bruise splattered across my lower back, and a twisted ankle, as it turned out that it wasn’t sprained after all. It did swell up the following day, but it went down rather quickly once he started icing it. The ankle is fine now, and the bruises are barely visible at this point.
