“I don’t want to hear it,” I told her. “This is how it is. If you’re ever good enough – and honestly, right now I doubt you will be – I’ll consider moving the cage to my room for a night. Until then, you’ll sleep here by yourself.”
“You’re gonna lock me into a cage like a fucking animal?” she snarled, earning another laugh from me. “You think that’s funny? You think it’s funny to treat a human being like they’re worth nothing?”
I walked up to her as slowly as I could make myself, trapping her little body against the wall.
“Not nothing, Angel,” I growled at her. “Like you’re worth the five million bucks I paid for this.”
I slid a finger down her front and she hissed at me as my fingertip experienced her sweltering hot skin.
“Like a man who can do what he wants with his own goddamn property,” I said in her ear, and she melted against my body. I moved away too fast, and she nearly crumpled to the floor. I enjoyed seeing the embarrassment on her face as she picked herself back up, refusing to meet my gaze.
“Anyway, I’m sure you’ll settle in just fine,” I told her, turning my back on her and wondering if she’d come at me. I was surprised she didn’t, she seemed like the type. “I’m leaving town for a few days, on business.”
I could feel how displeased she was by this new information, not that I gave a fuck. I always stuck to the same routine with every new girl, and it always meant I left town for a few days at the beginning. Only in theory, because in reality, I went to my city apartment and watched the girl’s every fucking move on the cameras all around the house, to get a better feel for my sweet little prisoner.
I was already curious about what this one was going to get up to. But what surprised me was the sheer, insatiable lust I felt for the girl behind me. It was so intense I felt it in my gut, in my dick, and in my damn balls. I wanted to be buried inside her again. I wanted to feel her cunt throbbing as I slammed my cock home over and over again, and I damn near regretted sticking to the rules and leaving. But it had to be done.
I didn’t give her a single look after that, just walked the fuck out of her bedroom and down the stairs. My driver was waiting, and I pretended my thoughts weren’t fucking full of her as we drove away from the house.
She was all over me. Experienced, dainty little fingers toying with my collar, tugging desperately at the zipper of my pants and trying to get me out of them. Her sweet whispers in my ear, the smell of her pussy heavy in my nostrils. Yet it wasn’t fucking working.
I pushed her off my lap gently, and she pouted as I got up from the overstuffed sofa in the private room that was my space in the club.
“What’s wrong, Daddy?” she asked me, just like she’d been taught. But all it made me think about was the girl back at home. The pretty captive brunette stuck in my house while a stripper entertained her new owner.
“I can’t today, Darla, I’m sorry,” I grunted, tucking some bills behind her crystal thong. She was beautiful, like my girls always were. And it was another habit of mine to go out to a club I owned when I was away those first few days, fill a different pussy with my cock and force myself to forget about the new girl for just a few hours.
But not this time, because my damn thoughts were swimming with sweet little Angel, and my cock was hard as a rock for all the wrong reasons.
Darla frowned as I left the room, my driver peeling his broad form from the wall as he saw me. He walked behind me to the exit and sped ahead to open the car door for me. Neither of us said a word as he drove me back to my apartment in the city, and I dismissed him when I took the lift up to my penthouse.
Once I was alone, I took off my jacket and poured myself a glass of the oldest whiskey I had. I stared out of the window, the city skyline below me beautifully illuminated.
The cameras back home sparked into life when I moved my mouse, and my screen came alive with her.
She was a fucking mystery, this girl.
She spent half her time alone acting like a lunatic, and the rest like a little girl.
I’d caught her reading so many times it almost bored me, her nose always stuck in a book. She didn’t leave her floor, didn’t leave her rooms. She’d read book after book, when she was in the bath, when she was eating. A reader. And she seemed to make notes in those fucking books. I’d noticed more than once that she was scribbling inside the pages and it drove me fucking insane, the thought of her destroying my library for the girl that would inevitably come after her. I was going to have to punish her for that.
The rest of the time, she did shit that was inexplicable to me.
She stared at her own reflection for hours. Not in a conceited way, not in the way some of the other girls did, dissecting every feature, staring at their imperfections. She just stared into the mirror as if she didn’t recognize the girl looking back at her.
She stared out of the windows, too. She’d bring a cushion and sit on it cross-legged, sometimes completely naked, which drove me especially insane. She just stared and fucking stared and then moved away to read as if nothing had happened.
She spent most of the day, and all night, completely fucking naked. Her skin would glisten from the showers she took way too many times a day; her hair would shine from the products she found in the bathroom. She was a damn vision. There was a reason I picked her in the first place, but I sure as hell couldn’t allow her to drive me as insane as she already seemed to be doing.
Right then, I saw her sitting in her cage.
It was late at night, but she was awake.
The floor inside the cage was littered with cushions, but it was a hot night, so she’d pushed all the blankets to one side. She laid on her back, staring at the metal ceiling. Beautiful, confusing little girl.
What really shocked me about her wasn’t that she actually slept in the cage. I felt it in her the moment she’d been brought to me, the submissive need to please me even though she hated my damn guts. Other girls had defied me and brought the pillows and blankets to the floor, and slept there, for which they’d been appropriately punished upon my return. Not this one. But that wasn’t what surprised me most.
No, that was the fact that she closed the door of the cage every night. Someone seemed to have forgotten the key in the lock, and this girl locked herself inside the cage from the inside, night after night.
I couldn’t make sense of it.
What the fuck was she afraid of?
Why would she confine herself to a space so small, so fucking constricting when she’d already confessed to me how much it scared her?
I didn’t get it at fucking all, but staring at her like that, I wanted to. I wanted to get it. I wanted to know what she had going on in that pretty little head of hers, what compelled her to lock herself in her cage every night. I was going to find out.
I called my driver and barked some orders at him, gathering my shit in a hurry. I wanted to go home.
I wanted her at my side that night, and I wanted my Angel to pay for my failed fuck with Darla. Maybe I’d have her pussy instead. I sure as hell felt fucking tempted.
Four
Evangeline
The cage felt like the safest place in the whole house.
I wasn’t planning on locking myself inside it that first night, but ever since then, it had become a sort of ritual.
I had no idea what to do with myself in that damn house. I felt more alone than ever, alone and desperate. I needed to get things going, to set my plan into motion. But it seemed like such a long time ago that I came up with it. A lifetime since I’d decided I wanted to see Carter Knight’s empire go up in flames. I wanted to see him hurting.
That night wasn’t just balmy, it was hot as sin, and I lay on my back on those pillows and stared at the metal bars above me, thinking about the anger that had consumed me for all those years, since I was just a little girl.
Rage.
Anger.
Revenge.
Vengeance.
Wrath.
I thought about him, Carter Knight. The tattoos that sneaked all over his skin, over his hands, over his neck and under his hairline. They were everywhere, his whole body covered in ink I couldn’t begin to understand, and hoped I never would.
I didn’t want to get close to him. I didn’t need to, to execute my plan.
I thought about my daddy. Mr. Savage, as I’d come to know him when my mother met him. The man who raised me, the man who I owed everything to. And in the end, the man who signed off my fate when a stranger put his signature on the dotted line and bought me like a piece of fuckmeat to enjoy for as long as he wanted… as long as I didn’t end up a dead body, like I’d heard the rest of his playmates had, once he got sick of them.
I would never let that happen.
If he wanted me dead, so be it.
But I was taking Carter Knight down with me.
I didn’t realize I wasn’t alone for the longest time. My eyelids were heavy with sleep and my limbs felt numb as I lay on my back.
I jumped when he approached the cage, when his lean, tattooed fingers wrapped around the bars of my prison.
“W-what are you doing back?” I stuttered, pulling my knees close to my chest to cover up my naked body.
It was a move I made on instinct, and I cursed myself for it. I wanted to be open for him, I wanted him to desire my body by putting as much of it on show as possible. I wasn’t supposed to be hiding like this, and he wasn’t supposed to know how scared he made me. I’d already slipped up before he’d left, snapping at him and possibly doing irreparable damage.
I bit into my tongue with all the force I could muster up to punish myself.
Anywhere else I hurt myself on my body, Knight would be able to see, and I couldn’t have that.
I tasted the metallic taste of blood and swallowed it, pleased of the reminder I’d just given myself.
“Am I not allowed to come back and see my pretty little toy?” Knight murmured, his voice deep and gravelly but quiet at the same time. It almost made me whimper out loud, but I stopped myself just in time, wondering whether he’d like it or not. “Come out of the fucking cage, Angel.”
I reached for the key under the biggest one of the pillows, my hands shaking badly as I put it in the lock. He stared at me, and I wondered what he thought about me locking myself in there. I didn’t think he’d care, or even notice, by the time he came back.
I opened the low door and crawled out of the cage on my knees since there was no other way to get out of it, and sat on my heels once I was out. Just like I’d been taught, just like the best little sex slave any man could ever want.
I looked at the floor and he knelt down next to me, sending shivers of panic down my spine.
He reached out for me, those inked fingers twirling my hair as I stared numbly at the floor.
“You felt safe in there,” he said matter-of-factly. “You felt safer locked inside a little cage, because you were the one to do it.”
My heart pounded as he toyed with strands of my hair. I wanted him gone, I wanted him dead. I wanted to dance on his grave and spit on the tombstone.
“Pretty little toy,” he muttered. “You’re going to be even prettier once you’re broken. I can’t wait to put you back together, Angel.”
I shrank back from his touch when he tugged on my hair, and he chuckled and got up.
“Come on, girl, we don’t have all day,” he said, his voice rougher this time around.
He didn’t help me up, and he didn’t offer me anything to wear either.
“Are you hungry?” he asked me once I got to my feet.
I stared at him, contemplating my answer. I’d been fed regularly, platters of food being delivered to my quarters after it became clear I wouldn’t come to eat downstairs. Always by the same woman, that Carolina who bore the nasty scar on her face. It scared me every time I looked at it, not because it looked gruesome on her stunning face, but because I wondered if my master had been the one to put it there.
“Yes,” I said in my smallest voice, and he motioned for me to follow him out of the room.
I decided it would be okay to do it, since it was an order from him, and followed behind at a safe distance.
I kept my eyes trained on the floor as we left the safety of the hallway, down the pretty marble staircase and into a state-of-the-art kitchen. It was beautiful, and I let my fingers trail along the cool rose-colored marble, cooling off from the heat of the day. It was pleasant in there, and I noticed the faint hum of the AC unit in the corner. It seemed as if every room but mine in the house had them, and I wondered why I’d been excluded.
“Was it too hot in your room?” he asked me, as if he could read my mind.
“A little,” I said softly, risking a look at him.
He was wearing a shirt cuffed to his forearms, revealing inch after inch of skin blackened with ink. He was in jeans and work boots, an outfit that felt so unusual on him it made me wonder. I felt so exposed next to him, and even though I knew I had nothing to be ashamed about, I felt embarrassed about my nakedness.
“I’ll make sure the AC unit is put back in your room,” he told me, taking something out of the fridge and giving me the quickest of glances. “Never got around to it.”
“Why did you take it out?” I asked, because I couldn’t help myself, and he stared at me so intently I wished I’d never asked the question.
“A girl,” he said simply. “A while before you. She always had the room ice cold and I hated it when I was fucking her.”
And there it was, out in the open just like that. A sharp reminder telling me just what I was to him, just what a man like him could want from a girl like me.
I looked away, unable to hold his gaze.
“Do you like steak?” he asked me, and I shrugged. “I want words, not fucking shrugs, Angel.”
“I guess,” I replied, still not looking at him.
He busied himself, getting the grill on the stove ready. I stood there awkwardly while he took the meat out. The sauce it was in made my mouth water, but I did my best to hide it.
I knew what men like him liked. I’d heard of the whispers, the ones that said he liked his girls to call him Daddy. He wanted a girl that barely looked her age, young and skinny in a body more fit for someone younger. It disgusted me, but I let myself be the way I thought he wanted me. I would be perfect for him, because I wanted my love to ruin this man.
“You’re too fucking thin anyway,” he told me, and my eyes shot up to stare at him.
He had his back to me, busy with the meat. A meat hammer was right next to him on the counter, and my eyes focused on the sharp ends.
“I don’t like skin over bones,” he kept talking as he put the meat on the grill. “I want something to hold onto when I fuck you, girl.”
His derogatory use of the word pissed me off, but I barely noticed. I kept looking at the meat hammer.
I could end this, all of it, right then and there.
I could kill him, and be rid of him forever.
No need for the plan.
I’d have his blood on my hands and it would be fucking worth it.
I waited for a distraction. Waited until he was so immersed in his cooking he barely noticed me moving closer and making a grab for the hammer. I weighed it in my hand, the combination of wood and metal so heavy in my palm it felt like I was holding up my guilt in one arm.
I swung it against his head without thinking twice about it. I wanted him gone.
But he turned around so fast I shrieked in surprise when he wrestled it out of my grip. He had me pinned against the wall in a second, the hammer falling to the floor and breaking the beautiful marble tile. My breath quickened and I struggled against him in panic as he grabbed my throat and pressed me tightly against the cold wall.
This is it, I thought. This is how I’m going to die. Stupid, foolish fucking girl, to
let it end this way.
“You’re not the first one to try and hurt me,” he told me in a low hiss. “Not the last one either, Angel.”
He twisted my arm so hard I cried out in absolute pain and terror.
“Don’t break it!” I begged him. “Please, don’t hurt me, please don’t.”
“Are you scared?” His breath was hot against my neck and it felt like hell. Like fire. Like he was turning me into a pile of burning ash with his mouth. “You fucking should be.”
He let go of me and went back to cooking the steak as if nothing had happened.
I clutched my throbbing wrist and stared at the red marks he’d left across my flesh. I wanted to hurt him more than ever.
“You broke a tile,” he said simply. “I’m going to have to punish you for that, I hope you know. Pick up the hammer and put it on the counter.”
I did it almost robotically, and he ignored me for the next few minutes as he grilled the meat and steamed some vegetables on the stove.
“Get out two plates from that cupboard,” he told me next, and I ignored the pain in my wrist and did as he told me.
He ladled the vegetables onto the plates and added the meat, and made me carry both plates to the dining room, still completely naked and now with my hand streaked with marks of his violence.
The man was a monster.
He sat me down at the table, and lit a fucking candle on it, like this was some kind of romantic fucking dinner.
“I think I know just how to punish you,” he told me conversationally, and I hated him with every fiber of my body.
He took the seat next to me and I picked up the fork and knife.
“No,” he said, and I dropped the cutlery. It clattered to the table loudly. “You don’t eat until I tell you to.”
He cut into his steak and the scent of meat and buttered vegetables made me hungrier than ever.
“Now, Angel,” he said, tasting the meat off his fork and giving me a smile. “I want you to be my amusement while I fucking eat. How are you going to do that?”
I stared at him blankly.
Vengeance: A Dark Billionaire Romance (Empire Sin) Page 3
