10. Contessa
10
Contessa
I’ve always thought of myself as an optimist. These days, that’s starting to feel like a synonym for idiot. After the dinner with the Moris’s, I stupidly believed that something would change. It hasn’t. These plain walls get uglier and uglier by the minute, and I spend most of my time stewing over how I was so good for him, how I behaved just like he asked me to. I even wore the stupid engagement ring, which has been abandoned on my nightstand ever since.
I’m still trapped here.
I try to pretend it has nothing to do with Salvatore missing our usual dinner together—twice. The past two evenings in a row, I’ve eaten alone in my room. There’s been no sign of him.
Is he getting bored with me?
The thought is like a splinter buried in the middle of my back, unreachable, so that I can’t pull it out.
The third morning, I decide I am not spending another day waiting for someone to come pay attention to me like a bird in a cage. Being his stupid good girl isn’t getting me anywhere, and without him, my thoughts turn circles around getting out. Freedom itches constantly at the back of my thoughts. I want to FaceTime Kay, check my socials, even call my father. If there was ever a sure sign that I really am losing it in here, that’s it.
When Ava arrives, I make excuses about having a migraine. I tell her I plan to sleep in and spend a quiet day in bed until it goes away. She promises to check up on me in a little while.
Hopefully, a little while is enough time.
My window opens into a three-story fall to the ground below. It might kill me. It might also just leave me crippled and lying there for Salvatore to find later if he ever remembers that I’m up here. If being trapped in this room is this bad, the last thing I want to do is end up trapped in just the bed. I can’t tie a knot that I trust enough to make sure that doesn’t happen.
The door is my only real hope.
I know the old credit card trick, but my only credit card is currently out doing illegal activities. I have to improvise somehow.
I take out my sketchbook, hesitating only for a second as I consider the very real threat of getting one of my few sources of sanity taken away. Desperation vetoes my fear. I rip out a page and fold the paper over and over on itself, trying to get it to the right thickness to slide between the door and the lock. It feels genius right up until it doesn’t work. The paper is either folded too thick to fit or is too flimsy to slip between the bolt and the lock. I try to find a middle ground, ripping apart the sketchbook’s thin plastic cover. It’s sturdier but doesn’t fold on itself as easily. I scowl over my ripped paper and mangled sketchbook, the door still soundly in front of me.
Face to face with the lock, I notice the tiny hole in the middle of the doorknob. I’m not certain it has anything to do with the latch, but I can’t think of any other practical reason for its existence. I scour my room, taking pencils, dental floss, nail files. Little props in my own personal, maddening escape room.
I use the nail file to thin out the tip of the pencil, but it breaks when I apply any pressure.
While bitterly staring at the pieces of my mutilated Beige Sienna, I suddenly remember the pen in the drawer. Chicago calls to me.
The cheap pen comes apart easily in my hands, and I take out the ink chamber to try in the door. A perfect fit. Something shifts inside the knob, giving way as I put pressure on it and fiddle it around.
The locking mechanism audibly clicks, the door shifting marginally as the tension breaks.
My breath catches in my throat.
Walls and armed guards still wait between me and the rest of the world, and a pen isn’t going to help with those. But I still have one objective—I need to find a computer, a laptop, a phone. Anything that connects to the outside world. I need to know what’s happening beyond this room. I frantically hide the evidence of my method of escape, squirreling away the pen and everything else that I tried to use in vain.
For the first time, I step out into the house alone.
I strain to listen, but I can hardly hear over the pounding of my own heartbeat. Old floorboards creak under my feet. I only know my way for sure to one place—Salvatore’s bedroom. A dangerous gamble, but I don’t know why he would be there in the middle of the day.
I ease the door open a crack.
Empty .
I slip inside and shut the door behind me.
The very room seems to judge me as I enter, a trespasser into his space.
In the glass case, the old weapons glint under the display lights, drawing me to them. I never got to look at them closely before. Each weapon has a corresponding plaque. Cryptic dates and initials, significant in some horrible way, are inscribed on each. My eyes drift to the last one, S. M. engraved in gold lettering alongside a sleek, modern pistol. A chill bristles over my skin. I put the case behind me.
It’s surreal, opening the closet and looking under the bed of the monster itself. I find nothing interesting—shoes, clothes, suitcases. In his nightstand drawer, expired passports and fake I.D.s sit alongside a pack of condoms. I blush, noticing the generous size, and shut the drawer in a rush.
Even solo, I can embarrass myself.
In the drawer below it, a pistol slides out to greet me. I freeze at the sight of it, no glass case between me and a gun. I’m desperate to wander, to look around the house, to have a taste of freedom—but even imprisoned by the enemy, my urge to kill someone sits at a steady 0. I leave it behind.
I write the room off as a loss, forced to tip-toe further into the house. Every open doorway steals my breath, anxious that someone will be inside looking back at me, but the third floor seems mostly empty.
The main floor sounds loudest, the kitchen bustling with frantic noise. I prowl through the second landing, hunting for bedroom doors that aren’t closed. Suddenly, feet come stomping my way, two men talking loudly. I duck into the nearest room, a sitting room, my back to the wall as I listen to them pass.
I don’t dare to breathe—which is lucky. Otherwise, I would have screamed. No more than ten feet away, Vera stretches out on a fainting couch, her feet kicked up and a tablet in her hands. She stares over the screen, directly at me.
“I’m sorry,” I say, a frantic half-whisper, heart pounding against my ribs. I have no idea what I’m saying. The words are desperate to leave my mouth before they get in trouble along with the rest of me.
“I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to disturb you, I was just, uh—”
“Whatever you’re doing, princess,” she interrupts, in her low drawl, “is it gonna piss him off?”
I can only assume him means Salvatore. I nod tentatively. It will, absolutely, 100% piss him off.
“That sounds fun,” she says and looks back to her tablet, as if I’m not even there.
“You don’t care that I’m here?”
“His problems aren’t my problems.”
I eye the device in her hands hopefully.
“…Do you want to help me piss him off?”
“Absolutely fucking not,” she says with no emotion. She doesn’t even think about it. It was worth a shot. I stay posted up against the wall, listening.
Suddenly, my body tenses. I recognize those footsteps before I ever hear him speak. I’ve already learned the sound of his walk, and soon his voice carries through the hallway, speaking to what sounds like one of Vera’s children.
I dive under the closest settee, barely squeezing myself under it.
“Sal,” Vera calls.
My heart drops into my stomach.
I watch Salvatore’s shoes as they prowl by, followed step for step by Nate’s light-up sneakers that illuminate inches from my face. I’m dazzled by blue and green light.
“Do you ever get the feeling that you’ve misplaced something?” she asks.
“Not often.”
“No? You never get that feeling, when you should know where something is, and you think you know where it is, but the damn thing just isn’t where you last left it?”
No, no—why would she do this?
“What did you lose?”
“Me?” she laughs, taking too much satisfaction in this. “I didn’t lose shit. I’m not careless with my things.”
I brace myself for just how much Vera is going to tell him, but she holds her silence. It doesn’t take him long to figure it out. When Salvatore moves again, it’s almost at a run. Nate hurries along, shoes squeaking after him. When the footsteps fade, I scramble out from under the settee.
Vera leans back, tilting up her tablet again as I scoot out of my hiding place.
“Sorry, princess. Your problems aren’t my problems, either.”
Shit. Shit, shit, shit.
This is the one place Salvatore knows that I was seen, and once he confirms his suspicion, I expect he’ll come right back down to interrogate Vera. I do the only thing I can do—I make a run for it. I bolt through the house, trying to put as much space between me and Salvatore as possible.
While he goes up, I go down, taking the staircase to the main floor, where the racket from the kitchen muffles my frantic footsteps. The house spins me in circles as I run. There are a hundred places to hide in a place like this, but trading being stuck in my room to being stuck in some random storage closet isn’t how I pictured this going.
I veer around a corner—and find Nate at the end of the short hallway. I thought he had followed Salvatore up the stairs. I freeze in place, like a deer caught in headlights. I press my fingers to my lips, begging him to be quiet. He turns around and bellows for Salvatore at the top of his little lungs.
Like mother, like son.
Through the floorboards, I feel the vibration of quick footsteps, the ambience of the house falling into a hush. On every side, people stir and doors open, attracted to the sudden commotion. I have no idea where to go, trying to decide on a direction, a plan. I have nothing except the frantic pulse in my throat now.
Salvatore’s shadow darkens the end of the hallway.
“What do you think you’re doing?” he demands.
For that single moment, we study each other. Our eyes meet in the quiet lull, each of us anticipating what is about to happen. I could come clean right now. I could walk up to him, crawl to him, throw myself at his feet and beg for his forgiveness. That’s what a good girl would do.
But there is something in the air between us, something charged and electric. A wanting, the way the wolf wants a rabbit. The same intensity I felt in that nightclub when we first met.
There’s an intoxicating masochism in staring down something dangerous and wild, knowing how badly it wants me.
Salvatore takes a single step forward.
I bolt.
He prowls after me—not even dignifying me with running as I bound away from him.
“Contessa!” He calls, like a shot ringing out.
I turn a sharp corner and find myself in a long sunroom. A pool and a spacious backyard stretch out far beyond the glass walls. I throw myself against the door, fingers fumbling on the lock. Salvatore’s footsteps approach, closing in. I fling the door open with such force, the glass cracks like a gunshot as I make a break for the outside.
I run for the gardens as fast as my feet can carry me, into rows of tall hedges and climbing vines. My heart pounds in my throat, every other beat switching between fear and thrill, fear and thrill. Salvatore’s shadow blocks out the light spilling through the latticework fencing, meeting me step for step.
“What’s the plan, Contessa?” he calls out. “It doesn’t matter what you do. Where you go. It doesn’t even matter if you make it over the wall. You think I won’t come after you? That I won’t find you?”
We weave around each other, circling. I can’t stop, always keeping his voice ever at the same distance as I stumble around the twisting paths.
“Where can you go that’s so far away, that I can’t reach you? Run, drive, fly—whatever you want. I’ll still come after you.”
He doesn’t sound as angry as he does insane, utterly sure of every word he speaks. His conviction is as strong as his anger. He hunts me through the paths, along the gardens, following the soft crunch of my footsteps as we lose ourselves in the makeshift labyrinth.
“Your sister is kind of an asshole,” I call back to him. The betrayal still stings.
“We finally have something we can agree on. Why don’t you come out here, and we’ll commiserate about it.”
As if.
“You left me alone in there. In that room,” I accuse him, my feet never stopping, always on the move. Our paths begin to circle in on themselves. I’m retracing my steps already, the gardens not that large, our conversation a back and forth play of Marco Polo as I hold my distance.
I hear his footsteps, too close suddenly and scamper away.
“Afraid I’d forgotten about you?”
My shamed silence answers him.
“I’m right here now. Come to me and let me make it up to you.”
I hate that there’s a part of me—in a particularly southern direction—that quickly warms to the idea. I’m a little better than my instincts. I don’t trust it. I turn, creeping steadily around the outside edge of the garden. I have no idea of what I will do even if I manage to throw him off my trail.
I never meant to make it this far out. It all went so wrong so fast.
One more corner. That’s all I get before I am face to face with Salvatore, cutting me off in an ambush like a seasoned hunter. His cryptic expression is utterly unsurprised, our eyes meeting in one tense moment. Gravel kicks up as I throw my momentum back, pivoting into the opposite direction. Salvatore is right on my heels. For a few endless seconds, I know what it is to be a prey animal. To be something soft and clawless, bounding through the forest for its very life.
Salvatore catches me effortlessly.
I yelp as we tumble onto the hard ground. His body pins me on my back, and I give in beneath him, limp and defenseless, flinching away from him on sheer instinct. He takes me by the jaw, making me look up at his face.
I’m shaking and aroused and terrified all at once, when Salvatore starts swallowing my shallow breaths, kissing me greedily as he pins me there in the dirt. My heart soars under his attention as he acts on that same desperate charged tension that I feel, the static heat in my belly.
My hands cup his face as he kisses me, like he has to reclaim me all over and make me his again. And for the first time—maybe out of sheer elation that he isn’t furious—I kiss back.
He breaks only long enough to growl a furious and satisfied, “You missed me.”
“Please,” I whisper, between kisses, “please don’t send me back into that room.” He silences me with his mouth again until my lungs ache.
My breaths heave when the kiss finally breaks. Salvatore strokes his fingers against my cheek sending shivers down my spine and warmth into my stomach. He looks at me as if everything is right in the world now, like he was never afraid of losing me.
Like he enjoyed the hunt , my instincts whisper, the same part of me that treacherously enjoyed the chase.
My relief turns brittle as Salvatore laughs. I’ve never heard that sound before. A mirthless, cruel noise that makes me second-guess the elation in my veins.
“Why would I send you back there, Contessa? A room with a view. Regular meals. All the clothes and makeup and whatever else you asked for.”
“I’m not—I’m not ungrateful ,” I say, feeling mad for saying those words to my own kidnapper, “but you can’t just keep me in there—”
His wild strength pins my hands above my head, toys with the sheer threat of our size difference. If only it made me afraid instead of achingly aroused.
“I could have you tied down and strung out every day,” he says lowly, “I could make it so you don’t even remember who you are. I know how to take someone’s life without killing them.
Is that what you want, Contessa? There are places on this property you can’t imagine. No light, no warmth, no beds. A place where people rot before they’re dead. If you don’t want your room, I have other places for you.”
The threat hangs over us, the moment bristling like lightning is about to strike this very spot.
“That’s not what you want,” I say, flipping the threat around on him. “You told me your plans for me. If you wanted me to be just another prisoner, I already would be. Locking me up in some dungeon, that’s not getting your way. That’s just settling. And you said it yourself—you always get what you want. I believe that.”
Salvatore is unreadable as I use his own words against him. All at once I am back in that parlor room, playing poker, staring down my opponent and guessing at his cards. But I’m certain that Salvatore doesn’t threaten. When he barks, he barks. When he bites, he bites. If he was going to throw me in some dark pit for the rest of eternity, he’d already be dragging me there now.
He tastes my trembling lips again.
“…Maybe you’re not as stupid as all this bullshit makes you seem,” he says, the backhanded compliment stinging and making my cheeks red, as surely as the real thing. “Did you scheme to throw a little tantrum so I’d come and make you quiet with my hands between your legs again?
I have no smart retort for that. I’m afraid my voice will betray that it’s exactly what I want in this position now, trapped and breathless under him.
“Is that what this is? A cry for daddy’s attention? You can’t even make it 48 hours without coming for me? So spoiled,” he accuses and dips his hand into my tight jeans. My pulse races in a frenzy of fear and longing.
I arch against his touch. I don’t want it to be true, but it is, in its own sick way. I missed him. His touch, his voice, his moody silence. I missed my routine, the dark hush of his bedroom, and the anticipation that grew in my belly when the plates were almost empty.
I whisper my agreement as if it’s a secret I can entrust only to him.
“Fuck,” he breathes, his own wanting seeming to run up against his desire to punish me.
“Roll over for me. Let me have you.”
I twist beneath him eagerly, stretching out on my hands and knees as he drags my jeans down around my thighs, right here on the ground like an animal. I don’t care. It’s him, and we’re not in that awful room, and he doesn’t seem bored with me at all—
His open palms clap hard against my ass. I cry out at the sudden pain, unprepared for the sharp, heavy sting. Salvatore gets down on one knee and effortlessly hangs me over his other. He bends me across his leg, my bare ass up in the air. With his other arm, he leverages me against his broad muscles.
“Did you really think you’d spread those legs and get out of being punished?” He asks lowly, his voice hot and dark. Another heavy-handed slap falls against my ass. The force of it ripples. I lurch forward, my hair a curtain that hides my pained expression from him. A throbbing ache blossoms under his palm.
“Do you think you deserve to come, after what you did?”
Faster strikes follow, the quick barrage of his hand laying one stinging pain on top of the last. The hurt builds and builds, until it has me trembling, a cry falling from my lips.
The next heavy strike makes me cry out, shuddering and twitching against him as if I can escape it.
Suddenly, he slides his fingers between my legs. He massages comfort into my cunt, a blissful distraction that compliments the pain. I rock against his touch, chasing the pleasure like it’s a salve for the stinging heat pulsing in my skin. I open myself wider for his fingers, begging to have that sensation of taking him inside me again. Instead, he levels a firm smack against my over-sensitive pussy. It jolts through me.
I lurch and cry out, betrayed. I squirm against him, but each hit sends a quake of pleasure through my belly. My body cries no while my mind whispers harder .
“Tell me what you were going to do.”
I shake my head until he spanks me again, as if I am winning the pain. My whimper is almost, dangerously, a moan. I dig my fingers into his arm, legs trembling, thighs quaking with every hit as the pleasure and pain build together, inextricable from each other.
“Please—”
“Tell me,” he says, as my legs fall open for him and let his hand snap against my pussy again.
I buck wildly.
“I was looking for a way to contact someone,” I admit, kicking my feet pathetically. “I just wanted to check in. To see if they were okay or what’s happening—that’s all—I—” Salvatore strokes my pussy for the truth until my vision crosses. My words become a high-pitched whine, holding back my cry as I tremble against him.
Come on, come on, come on —
He spanks me again, stealing my breath as another sharp pain interrupts the flow of pleasure ready to burst inside me. I cry out at the denial.
“I just can’t be in there anymore. I can’t. Please.”
I’m begging him on two fronts.
“It’s not enough—”
The double-meanings fall without meaning to, my thoughts jumbled, body rocking on his hands as he spanks me pink and teary-eyed. He runs his huge hand up and down my pussy, soothing it, stretching it, making me grind my hips. And then he smacks it again and again, until the same sting builds on the most sensitive parts of me.
I don’t know if I’m going to cry or come.
“Do you know what could have happened if you’d run into the wrong person out here in these halls?” Salvatore asks as he smacks the already vibrant welts along my backside. I hitch and cry out. “One wrong misstep, that’s all it fucking takes in a place like this, Contessa. Do you understand? You do not leave that room without my permission. Ever .”
A final smack of his hand finally makes me sob.
“I’m sorry,” I finally say, the words pulled out of me like teeth. “I’ll be good. Please—”
“Get up,” he says.
I’m reluctant. Even with the threat of Salvatore’s hand right against my burning ass, I don’t want to move when the pleasure is still pulsing right alongside the pain. I’m so close. He could bring me over the edge if he wanted, I know he can.
“Please—”
He doesn’t give me a choice. He hauls me to my feet.
“You’ll walk back to the bedroom. Calmly. If you want any respect or dignity in this house, you have to stop playing stupid games like this.”
It hurts just to pull up my jeans.
“It’s not my fault if stupid games are the only things that keep you interested,” I mumble.
Salvatore smacks his hand against my ass for that comment. Even through denim, it nearly buckles my knees. He commands me to walk.
My pussy is slick, ass aching, and Salvatore makes me feel every step between me and that awful bedroom.