Chapter 2 #2
What? Terror crashed through her body, driving away the strange warmth that had filled her with the brush of his fingers against her skin. Now those fingers—now his strength—frightened her to the marrow of her bones.
“And you threw me away? Threw us away?” A hard, negative shake of his head. “It doesn’t work that way, Melody. You have to give me more than that. You will give me more than that or by God—”
Her hands flew between them. “I need you to back up, right now.” Fear made her words quiver.
His dark brows snapped together. He looked down, between their bodies. Blinked. “Melody.” Softer. “Is that a knife in your hand?”
It was. Her fingers clenched tightly around the handle. She’d snagged the knife from the pocket of her coat. She wasn’t stabbing him, she was not. But the blade pressed roughly over his heart. “I didn’t give you permission to touch me.”
“I didn’t give you permission to pull a knife on me.” No emotion at all in his voice now.
“You broke into my room.”
“I opened a door.”
“A door I’d locked.” As if she would have left any doors unlocked in this house.
“I had the key.” A pause. “Fine. That’s a lie. I picked the lock.”
Her mouth was desert dry. So much about Victor Alexander’s life had been a mystery.
Too many blank spaces when she tried to dig deeper past the faint details she’d unearthed.
Details that had seemed too perfect. “You picked the lock,” she whispered.
“Just where would a fancy lawyer-slash-MBA type like yourself learn such a skill?”
If possible, his eyes narrowed even more. “Just where would a pampered princess like yourself—born with a silver spoon in her mouth and a staff at her beck and call—have learned to hide a knife and to pull it so easily on a…friend?”
She did not lower her knife. “Are you my friend?”
His lashes, oddly thick and so dark, flickered. “What else could I possibly be?”
“My enemy.” An immediate reply. “Everyone knows we hate each other. Common knowledge. You stole my father’s company from me.”
He took a step back. Shook his head. A faint furrow remained between his brows. “Common…knowledge,” he muttered.
Why were they just repeating each other?
“I’m not your friend. I’m your enemy. Nothing more.” Victor nodded. A steely mask had covered his face. No emotion showed at all. “Strawberries.”
She was utterly and completely lost. She was also just holding a knife in the air because he’d moved so far back that the blade no longer touched him. She should lower the weapon. “Why on earth are you talking to me about strawberries?”
“Why, indeed?” Hard. No, brittle.
Melody lowered the knife. “I was just defending myself.”
“From your enemy. Right. Heard it the first time.” He turned away from her.
She thought that he’d stalk from the room. He didn’t. Victor began to prowl around. Very much like an angry lion. Meanwhile, Melody just stood there, still gripping her knife, uncertain what to do or say.
He eyed the bag near the door. A slightly battered, black, luggage bag that she’d picked up at the same thrift store where she’d gotten her coat. His shoulders tensed as he stared at the bag. Then, slowly, he glanced over his shoulder to peer at her. “Your hair is different.”
Should she put the knife down on the bed? She was afraid to let go of her weapon. Trusting anyone in this house would be a major mistake.
They don’t care about me. None of them do.
“It’s so much shorter than it was before,” he noted.
Not like she’d had much choice on that.
“The cut suits you, of course. Everything always suits you.” He turned fully toward her. His gaze raked over her body. “You’ve lost weight. That I don’t love.”
“I don’t care.” Why in the world was he criticizing her appearance?
She’d taken special care with her damn appearance before coming to the Mage Mansion.
She’d found designer jeans at a secondhand shop.
A soft, white sweater. She looked wealthy enough, didn’t she?
Her boots were a bit scuffed, but she’d done her best to polish them.
“You’re at least ten pounds lighter, and you didn’t have the weight to lose in the first place.” He stalked toward her. Yep, stalking again. His stare rose over her, inch by slow inch, until he was carefully assessing her face. “Sharper.”
What was sharper?
“Could be from the weight loss.” His head tilted. “But something else is…slightly different.”
Yes, something else was slightly different. Her left cheek bone had been fractured. Her nose broken. The doctors had patched her up, and she thought they’d done a very good job. When she looked at the pictures, she truly did look like Melody Mage. Almost an exact match.
Victor stopped right in front of her and ignored the knife that she still gripped. He reached toward her face.
Automatically, she lifted the knife, as if bracing for an attack.
“Have fun with that,” he told her, voice flippant and mocking.
“My heart has already been carved out once by you. By all means, feel free to do it again.” Instead of touching her face, his hand dropped, quickly, and his fingers curled around her wrist. He hauled her hand up and forced the tip of the blade against his shirt-front, right over his heart. “Want me to help?”
Her breath heaved out. “Let me go.” Was he crazy?
“No. I’m never fucking doing that again. You’ll be lucky if I don’t chain you to my side. Handcuff you. Wherever you go, I go. You will never get away again.”
He was pushing her hand against him too hard. If he wasn’t careful, she’d cut him with the blade. “Stop.”
He didn’t.
“Stop, or you’ll be bleeding! I-I don’t want to hurt you.”
“How the fuck do you think I felt when you left me before?”
Her eyes widened at the savage pain that suddenly flashed on his face.
“Oh, sorry.” A mocking smile curled his lips. That smile never reached the darkness of his eyes. “Am I cursing too fucking much for you? Since when did you become such a prude?”
“I—” She stopped. She was playing this scene wrong. Melody Mage wasn’t a prude. Far from it. There were even rumors that a sex tape of Melody had once been about to leak, only for the tape to vanish.
Just like I vanished?
“You look different. You act different.” His hold on her wrist sent heat streaking though her. “What else is different about you? After the year from hell, what else is different? I am dying to know.”
Everything. She wanted to say that. To admit that everything was different and that it would never, ever be the same again. That she would never be the same.
“Let’s find out what’s different,” Victor growled. Then his head lowered and his mouth crashed down onto hers.