Chapter Two #2
What indeed? I thought. It was… Velvety. Cold, like the rest of him, but it seemed to bathe me in fire.
Especially when he called me that name. I didn’t have to know what it meant. I was pretty sure I didn’t want to know what it meant. It still seemed to burn through me like the alcohol I’d drunk only once, in secret. It lit me up and rolled through me, setting brushfires.
Everywhere.
He studied me like I was an experiment. Or he was conducting one.
“Ruxandra Emilia Ardelean,” he said, pronouncing my name like it was a secret password. An incantation.
“Yes,” I agreed, though agreement felt a little too much like complicity. Even surrender. “Though my friends, if I was allowed any, would call me Rux.”
His dark gaze seemed to light on fire.
I followed suit.
I felt the roar of it wash over me, through me, then seem to gnaw its own place deep inside me.
“Then that is what I will call you, baggiana,” he said, his voice rougher, then. Lower. Velvet after dark.
As if he was my friend in any capacity. But somehow, I didn’t have the nerve to be quite so reckless as to say that out loud.
He was still leaning against the far wall and his very nonchalance seemed to set off a dark, dangerous rush of sensation within me. All he did was study me and I felt myself shaking, from the inside out.
As if the trembling was starting deep inside me, down low in my belly, rising like a swell of a song the longer we shared the same air. The same ferocious silence.
I didn’t dare look away from him to check the clock on my nightstand but I could tell that it was late.
Very late. My father had insisted that I accompany him and my stepmother to another party, and the two of them had gotten into one of their moods on the way back.
In other married couples, it might be considered a fight.
But Katarzyna didn’t fight with my father.
No matter how insulting he was, or cruel, she responded to him in the same deadpan, literal way.
As if he was really asking her questions. As if he was really in some confusion when he asked her things like what kind of this or that—and it was always something insulting—she thought she was.
All the other stepmothers had screamed or cried or come apart. If I could remember my own mother, I imagine she would have done the same, much as I’d like to think otherwise.
Katarzyna was, in many ways, my hero.
I tried to channel her now. I tried to arrange my features into that mask of placidity she always wore.
As if it could not possibly matter what this stranger in my bedroom said or did.
That he was worth as much notice as a spider that made its way onto my ceiling one night.
Nothing I wanted to see of an evening, and something I would like very much to remove from my vicinity, but without any need for theatrics.
I don’t know what he saw when he looked at me, but something shifted. I saw it, but couldn’t make sense of it. “You must know, of course, what happens now.”
I was certain I did.
“Do I get to know your name?” I asked instead of dwelling on what was coming.
Maybe that was a kind of weapon, too.
That odd, gleaming light in his gaze that made me think of liquid gold, gleaming there in all that darkness. “Why should my name matter?”
“It’s only sporting to know the name of one’s executioner,” I pointed out with great bravado. “Surely we can agree that it’s a matter of honor.”
Something changed again, then. I could feel it before I saw anything to suggest it. A moment later, barely a breath, he tilted his head to one side.
“Do you think that will save you?” he asked, his voice quiet and mild, and far more dangerous for it. “It is only a name, after all.”
“It’s only polite,” I replied.
That tilt of his head seemed to intensify. So did his gaze. “You can call me Jovi,” he said, in that accent of his that spoke of warmer climates, olive trees, warm sunshine—
That was what the gleam in his gaze reminded me of, I realized. It was that kind of gold. It was the endless summer of a perfect, Italian afternoon. The kind I’d only seen in movies, because I’d never been farther south than Bratislava.
He lifted a hand, and I tensed. And it wasn’t that I’d forgotten the situation I was in, or my peril, but the reality of it all came flooding back then.
Hard.
I was expecting to see something ugly and violent in his hand—but it was only his hand.
My heartbeat didn’t seem to note the difference.
“Come,” he told me, and it was an order. “We will leave this place.”
I did a quick calculation in my head. My father and Katarzyna would either be fast asleep or otherwise occupied. If history was any guide, my father always preferred to get his own back in their bed if he couldn’t get a rise out of Katarzyna otherwise.
A daughter didn’t like to think about these things, but it was unavoidable. It wasn’t as if the man had any shame.
Jovi—and it should have introduced me to more shame than I already felt, the lilt I felt inside when I thought his name—could not have come in through my windows.
They were facing me. Even if I somehow hadn’t seen him come in, the windows themselves would have made noise.
At the very least I would have seen him move across the room to face me the way he was now.
He had to have come from outside this room, having found a way into this fortress of a house that my father always bragged was impregnable.
And if Jovi had come in somewhere else in the house, that likely meant that he would want to retrace those steps.
But I wasn’t sure how he planned to do it when there were so many guards in the house.
To say nothing of my father himself. Just because he didn’t like to do his own dirty work didn’t mean he wouldn’t.
And he had been known, even on nights of excess, to find his way back to his study.
To count and stroke his money, I had always supposed. As far as I knew, it was his only joy in life.
“You can try to escape me,” Jovi told me, as if he was there inside my mind. As if he’d found his way in, no matter how hard I tried to convince myself that, like Katarzyna, I was unreadable. Unknowable. “But as in all things, baggiana, there are consequences.”
“Meaning you’ll kill everyone in the house?
You’ll burn it into the ground? You’ll torture me later?
I’m afraid you’ll have to be more specific.
” When his eyes seemed to widen, very slightly, I lifted a shoulder, then dropped it again.
“My father is a very unpleasant man. I imagine you know that, since you’re here.
I’m conversant in consequences. I’m just wondering if yours are different. ”
“You hold the lives of everyone in this ugly house in your hands. Is that a departure for you?”
“It is an ugly house,” I breathed, my heart still too loud in my chest. “You have no idea how long I’ve been waiting for someone to say it. I think the Emperor has no clothes, but in this case, the Emperor is the house, and the clothes—”
“Shut up, Rux.”
He said that so calmly. That was actually what made me go quiet. The simplicity of it. The quiet command and the fact he said my name.
Weak men shouted and lashed out. Weak men always showed their hands—usually in the form of fists.
It was crystal clear to me that Jovi was not a weak man.
“You are different, so I will explain this to you,” he said.
“I’m not like other girls?” I asked brightly. “I don’t know if that’s a compliment or an insult.”
“Most women who find me in their vicinity in this way faint,” he told me in that same low voice. So mild. So devastating. So delicious. “Sometimes from pleasure, it is true. Sometimes from terror. I’ll be honest with you, I expected you to do the latter.”
“I would love to faint,” I told him, and if I was a little breathless from the sometimes from pleasure part, well. I could lie to myself about that. “It sounds like a lovely escape from the pressures of daily life, don’t you think?”
His voice was like the night, his gaze darker still. “I do not.”
“Out of curiosity, how many women have you abducted?” I tried to sound nothing but politely curious, the way I might at a dinner party.
“It’s not that I’m checking your references or taking a hard look at your résumé, but you know how it is.
Many have tried, none have succeeded, so what sets you apart? ”
I thought he shook his head, slightly. When he continued speaking, it was as if I had never said a word at all.
“We will exit this house. We will not make any noise. I cannot trust you to remain quiet, even if you promise to do so, as that is the nature of your situation. You may therefore choose a gag, or I will knock you out.”
And when he lifted a dark brow at me, I decided that my genetics were making themselves known after all.
Because the things he was saying to me should have made me feel sick. I should have been horrified. I should have flinched away from him as he prowled closer to the bed.
I should have screamed the house down all around me the first moment I saw him.
I felt that treacherous heat move all over me, wrapping me up and burrowing its way deep inside. Deep between my legs, I felt a heat unlike any other, a kind of ripe weight, and a slickness.
And I might have been more upset about this, but I was too busy seeing myself for who I really was at the worst possible moment. All this time I had convinced myself that I was nothing like my father. That I had nothing in common with him. That I was a pure, clean, normal person where it counted.
But the truth was here. Right here in my bedroom, stalking toward me. Then towering over me, a column of finely wrought sculpture made man with those flashing dark eyes of his, that impossible, disastrous mouth, and this throbbing thing between us and all over me that I was afraid to name.
Jovi leaned in closer, until his face was so close to mine that I couldn’t tell if he wanted to—
But he didn’t.
I should have been happy he didn’t.
He only watched me, even closer now. He smelled like pine and spice. And he was only more beautiful up close.
Jovi looked at me like I was a puzzle that needed solving, but I told myself that had to be a good thing, because I knew too many terrible men already and they only looked at me like I was meat.
He shifted slightly. His gaze moved all over my face.
I held my breath.
“Rux,” he said, like my name was some kind of prayer. “Is something wrong with you? I mean this on a deep level. Your brain. Is it functional?”
“I…don’t know how to answer that.”
His mouth curved, but it was not a smile. “Why aren’t you afraid?”