Chapter 27
DARIUS
Ikicked the apartment door shut behind us. The broken lock didn’t matter. No one was getting in here.
Anna was still thrashing against my grasp, her fists pounding uselessly. Each impact sent a jolt of something dark and hungry through me, but I shoved it down. Not yet.
I set her on her feet in the middle of the living room. She immediately lunged for the fire escape window.
I caught her wrist before she’d taken two steps, spinning her back around to face me.
"Don't." The word came out low. Dangerous.
She yanked against my grip, her gray eyes wild. "Let me go."
"Sit down."
"Fuck you."
My jaw clenched. "Anna. Sit. Down."
She glared at me with such venom I almost smiled. Almost. But then I saw it again—the scratch on her cheek, the swelling beneath her eye.
And the fresh scratches on her neck from where she'd clawed at the necklace.
The necklace I'd put on her like a collar.
Something hot and vicious coiled in my chest. Fury at myself. And underneath it all, something worse—something that felt dangerously like fear when I'd first heard she'd been hurt.
I couldn't afford fear. Fear was chaos. Fear was loss of control.
"You're bleeding," I said, my voice rougher than I intended.
"I don't care."
"Well, I do." The words were out before I could stop them, and I saw her eyes widen slightly. Good. Let her be confused. Let her wonder. As long as she stopped trying to claw that fucking necklace off her throat.
I guided her—not gently, but not roughly either—to the sofa. She tried to pull away, but I tightened my grip just enough to remind her that fighting me was pointless.
"Stay," I ordered, then went to her bathroom.
The medicine cabinet was a disaster. Half-empty bottles, expired prescriptions, a tangle of hair ties. My eye twitched, but I grabbed what I needed: antiseptic, cotton pads, antibiotic ointment, then wet a washcloth.
When I returned, she was exactly where I'd left her, but her whole body was coiled tight, ready to bolt.
"Don't even think about it," I said as I knelt in front of her.
She flinched when I reached for her face.
"I'm not going to hurt you." The irony of those words coming from me, with my bomb still locked around her throat, wasn't lost on either of us.
Her laugh was bitter. "Right. Because you've been so careful with me up until now."
I ignored that. Carefully, I tilted her chin up, angling her face toward the light. The bruising was already deepening, a violent bloom of purple and black spreading over her cheekbone. Her eye would be swollen by morning.
"Who did this?" I asked quietly.
"Does it matter?"
"His name, Anna."
"Peregrine." She spat the name like a curse. "My fake ex. He came into the shop, started yelling about how I embarrassed him at the Kennedy Center fundraiser, how I was supposed to be part of his image. Then he—" Her voice cracked slightly. She swallowed hard. "He was high. Cocaine."
He'd be dealt with. Slowly. Painfully.
"And the necklace?" I asked, carefully cleaning the dried blood off her face before dabbing antiseptic on the scratch. She hissed in pain but didn't pull away. "You were clawing at it downstairs."
"What do you care? It's your fucking bomb."
I pressed a little harder than necessary with the cotton pad. She winced.
"Answer me."
"The scarf I was using to cover it came off during the attack.
He saw the diamonds. Started screaming about me being a whore, that I was selling myself for jewelry, that some rich sugar daddy was buying me pretty things.
He was beyond reason." She stopped, her jaw working.
"Your men came in before he could—before he could finish whatever he was planning. "
My hands stilled. He'd seen the necklace. Had called her a whore for wearing my diamonds.
The fact that my men had arrived in time should have satisfied me. But all I could see was the terror still in her gaze when I arrived.
He'd hurt her worse than I'd initially thought.
Before I—
No. Stop. I didn't care about her. This was about control. About possession. About not letting anyone else touch what was mine to destroy.
But my hands were gentle as I applied the antibiotic ointment over the abrasion.
"The scratch is superficial. It shouldn't scar," I said finally.
"That's a pity." Her eyes met mine, defiant even with tears tracking down her face. "A scar would be a reminder of exactly what happens when I let men like you into my life."
Men like me. Not just Peregrine. Me.
The words landed like a physical blow.
"He hit you,” I said, my voice dropping to something cold and lethal. "I'm going to pull every bone out of his body through his sinew and skin until he begs for a death that won’t save him from the pain.”
"Why?" She shoved at my chest, and this time I let her push me back a step.
"Why do you care? You've done worse to me.
You've terrorized me for days. You've used me, fucked me, degraded me, and strapped a bomb around my throat.
But he hit me once, and you want to kill him? Make it make sense, Darius!"
She was shouting now, her voice climbing higher with each word.
"You don't get to be angry on my behalf. You don't get to play the protective—what, boyfriend? Owner? Captor? You don't get to pretend you care about me when you're the one who's been torturing me this whole time!"
"I do care." The words came out harsh, guttural. Wrong. "I shouldn't, but I—"
I stopped. Bit down on the rest of that sentence before it could escape.
What the fuck was happening to me?
This was another reminder of how I was losing my iron grip on controlling the world around me.
I could not, I would not allow my world to descend into chaos and anarchy.
And yet here I was, kneeling in front of this woman, my hands still gentle on her battered face, feeling things I had no business feeling.
Madness would not dominate my life; only I would. And if that meant dominating this woman, stripping her of the madness that was making her unable to listen to reason, then so be it.
I stood abruptly, needing distance. Needing to think. But the apartment—
The order I had put this place in only yesterday was already fracturing.
There were dishes in the sink. The throw pillows I had arranged were now on the floor, the quilt that I had folded was spread out over the couch, and the practically spotless coffee table now had a dozen uncapped pens and a few journals lying about with scribbles all over their pages.
My eye twitched as I looked at the apartment, at the things that I had put away and how easily, in less than a day, she demolished the order I had instilled. The chaos felt personal. Felt like an attack on everything I was trying to maintain.
"You want to know why I care?" I turned back to her, and she was standing now, backing away from me. "Because you're mine. That bomb around your neck? That's not just a threat, maya soloveyka. That's a brand. A claim. And no one—no one—touches what belongs to me."
"I don't belong to you."
"Don't you?" I took a step toward her.
She took one back.
"Your body responds to me. Your cunt gets wet when I command you. You come apart on my fingers, on my cock, screaming my name. You can hate me all you want, but your body knows exactly who owns it."
"That's not—" Her breath hitched. "That's just biology. That's not—"
"Submission?" I took another step. "Because that's what I felt when you bent over for me. When you took your punishment. When you let me fuck you until you forgot your own name."
She flinched like I'd struck her.
"And now you're hurt, and you're scared, and you're lashing out because you don't know what else to do. So let me make this simple for you."
Another step. She backed into the wall. "I'm going to take care of you. I'm going to make that piece of shit who touched you regret the day he was born. And then I'm going to remind you exactly who you belong to."
"No." She shook her head, but the word came out weak. Uncertain.
"Yes." I was close now, close enough to see the pulse hammering in her throat, just above the necklace.
"Because despite what you think, despite what I think, I can't fucking let you go.
Not now. Maybe not ever. And that—" I slammed my fist into the wall beside her head, making her jump.
"That pisses me off more than anything else. "
I shouldn't care. Shouldn't want to protect her. Shouldn't feel this rage burning in my chest every time I looked at her injuries.
But I did.
And that meant I'd lost control.
The one thing I couldn't afford to lose.
Control was everything to me. It was my identity. It ensured the survival of my family, and it was the very foundation of our family's dominance. My nephews had forgotten that. I was here to remind them.
For decades, I remained calm, calculated, and emotionless in the face of great adversity. When my brothers died, I became the puppet master pulling the strings from the shadows, but in recent years those strings had snapped, and my influence had eroded.
No more.
And it was starting here. With her.
"I hate you," she whispered.
"I know." I pushed away from the wall, from her, before I did something stupid like kiss her. "But you're going to behave anyway."
"Make me."
Wrong thing to say.
The moment she said it, something snapped inside me. All the rage, the fear, the unwanted caring crystallized into one singular need.
Control.
She wanted to fight? Fine. I'd give her a fight. And when it was over, she'd remember exactly who was in charge.
She must have seen it in my face—the shift from controlled fury to something darker—because she bolted.
She ran across the small apartment, heading again for the window that had a fire escape.
Too bad for her, she wasn't quick enough, and I was just pissed off enough to enjoy chasing her down.
It only took me seconds to catch her from behind and lift her. She screamed and fought, biting, kicking and scratching at me.
"Keep it up, little one. You are only going to make this worse for yourself."
I carried her into the bedroom and dropped her unceremoniously onto her bed. She immediately got on her hands and knees and scrambled to flee from me again.
I grabbed her ankle and yanked her back, snatching the scarf that was around her shoulders. Her arms flailed; her nails tried to reach for my face. So I grabbed her wrists and pinned them to the bed above her.
She twisted and fought using everything she had—strength, intelligence, and fire.
I almost admired the fight. She had more fight in her than most men I knew.
Or maybe she had truly been pushed past the point of reason, and what I was seeing was primal animal instinct. It was simply a matter of survival.
All I knew was that watching her struggle against me, having her fight back, made my cock hard for her.
It appealed to something deep inside me, a darker side I rarely indulged in.
A side that wanted to break her down and build her back up.
A side that wanted to see her submit not because she was weak, but because she chose to give that power to me.
But today was not the day, and I was not the one. Pinning her wrists to the bed, I straddled her hips, forcing her to stay still.
"Get off me," she spat.
"Behave," I demanded.
"Fuck you," she screamed, and I leaned down and dragged my tongue across her uninjured cheek. Tasting the salt of her sweat and her tears as she fought.
"Only if you beg," I whispered in her ear before taking the scarf and wrapping it around her wrists over and over, getting in between them and then binding them together.
I secured her arms above her head with the scarf looped tight around the headboard before climbing off her. Freed of my body weight she flailed, rolled over, trying desperately to get her hands free.
It was of no use. My first act of control. She was secured and couldn't run from me again.
Then I reached for my belt buckle. I unbuckled it slowly, letting the whoosh of the belt sliding through my pant loops wash over her. She froze.
"What do you think you're doing?" she demanded, looking at me, watching me with those gigantic eyes full of fear and defiance.
When I was done, the only things in her eyes would be appreciation and submission. And maybe understanding that the man who hurt her would pay. That I would always make them pay.
Because she was mine to hurt. Mine to protect. Mine to break.
Mine.
"I told you to behave. I've tried over and over to make you fall in line the nice way. That failed, so now I'm going to regain control in the only way I know how. I'm going to take it."