Chapter Five
AN EXCELLENT CURE for my bravado, it turned out, was being hogtied, thrown in the back of a thankfully swanky Range Rover, and then chained up in a room that looked…exactly the way a room like this always looked in every version of it I’d ever seen on television.
I told myself to be happy it wasn’t a serial killer’s basement or a run-of-the-mill warehouse in a conveniently abandoned industrial estate.
I would have preferred that strange heat again. That heart-poundingly close call with the wild, rising wave inside me that he had seemed to control so easily.
That he had managed to rouse and then deny, twice.
My mouth was dry again now, but still not from fear. “I don’t actually know if you mean that literally.”
“I think, Rux, that you know I do.”
But something happened to him, too. Right there in front of me as I watched.
I could see it like another sort of wave, crashing over him and evident to me in the way his dark eyes flashed that molten gold. And the way his impossible mouth tightened.
Now that we were past the intrusion into my bedroom and the whole kidnapping escapade—which had been both much less traumatic and a bit more uncomfortable than expected, because I hadn’t felt the terror I should have but I really did not enjoy the pins and needles in my hands or the fabric of that gag against my tongue—I really tried to take him in.
I tried to really see this man who had done the thing I’d never managed to do and gotten me out of my father’s clutches.
The typical kidnapper of my imagination, a common boogeyman for children raised with guards the way I had been, always wore dramatic stocking caps to announce their intentions from afar.
They were always in head-to-toe black, might or might not sport the proverbial moustache, and could easily be confused for a cat burglar.
Or a cartoon.
Jovi was not wearing any of that. Jovi was wearing a crisp and perfectly tailored suit that had obviously been lovingly and exquisitely tailored to his precise and singular physique.
He looked like he ought to have been wandering about Milan with a pack of fashion photographers in his wake.
Or perhaps on a film set somewhere suitably sophisticated, all hushed wealth and abundance.
There was nothing about him that suggested he was the sort of thug who abducted young women—other than the fact that he was a man, of course, and statistics suggested they were the ones out doing these things.
I doubted there were a lot of women who went about collecting girls like me for fun and profit.
The thing about Jovi was that he was beautiful here, too, in this secluded house. In this carefully empty room with only that secured window to suggest there was anything outside anyway.
But he wasn’t only beautiful. Not even up close like this, where I suspected I could scream all I wanted to no avail—the way I hadn’t even thought to do back home.
There was that seething, brutal masculinity mixed in with all that perfection that somehow made not just his features seem less pretty and more formidable than they should have been, but made the inarguably elegant suit he wore the same.
Another man might have looked too done. Too manicured.
On Jovi, it was simply another indication that he was as deadly as he was beautiful. It was all part and parcel of the same package.
And looking at him made all of the heat in my body sink deep between my legs, then hum.
More than what he wore and how he behaved, it was clear that he was refined.
Educated. Sophisticated in ways I could only imagine, given the confines I’d always lived in.
There could not have been a greater contrast between my father and a man like this.
My father, who considered himself all of those things, but was not.
Boris Ardelean was nothing but a bully, thuggish and cruel.
A bully with too much money and a deep and abiding disdain for the lives of others.
Jovi, on the other hand, was something far more dangerous than a bully.
For one thing, I doubted very much that it was money that motivated him the way it did my father, even though it was clear to me that he had more than enough of it. He also wore his beautiful clothing too carelessly for him to have had to scrape and budget to earn them.
And now, whatever it was that was happening inside him—and maybe I was just making that up to make myself feel better, no matter what I thought I’d seen—he was staring at me so impassively that it made me stop breathing.
I blew out what air was left in my lungs to get myself started again, and I thought a little harder about what I felt. What this was. What was likely to happen.
I thought it all through and I still wanted it to be my choice. That was the main thing.
It was the only thing.
“Okay,” I told him. “I’d like to die well, Jovi.” I could see that hit him, and hard. It was like an electric bolt, and I could feel it as much in me as I could see it in him. “Maybe no one will ever know, but I think I will, somehow. And I think it matters.”
His gaze went frigid for a moment. Then it blazed.
“You’re a fool,” he belted out at me, no hint of all that ice and control and stillness. “Death is death. Good, bad, indifferent. Nobody cares, nobody will remember you, and all of us will turn to worm food in the end.”
“Thank you,” I managed to say. “That’s a lovely rendition of the last rites. Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust. One big circle, leading us ceaselessly back into the past—though I don’t think that’s quite the right quote—”
“Death is death, Rux.” His voice was dark. Grim. His eyes were on fire. “You might want to think about taking yours seriously.”
He was right. I should. Then again, maybe I was.
My throat was dry again, and not because of ripped shreds from my pillowcases. I could still feel that thumb of his in my mouth, pressing into me, somehow beautiful when I knew it shouldn’t have been.
But the real truth was that it had been one of most exciting things that had ever happened to me, and all of the other ones had happened tonight, too.
One after the next.
And no, I wasn’t mentally challenged as previously accused. This was simply the reality of it all. He was the most excitement I’d ever encountered and that would have been true even if he wasn’t gorgeous beyond measure.
But he was.
He really was.
“I’m taking this all very seriously,” I assured him, and I tried my best to sound as calm and collected as possible, given the circumstances.
“It’s just that I think it would all be a little bit sadder and more heavy hitting if I had any kind of a life leading up to this moment, but I really didn’t.
” Some inkling came to me at that, and I studied him.
His stern expression. His stiff posture.
Those unfathomable eyes. “Did you? Do you?”
He blinked, and on another person, that wouldn’t even have been noticeable. But this was Jovi. This was a man who was so still he could teach stone how to settle.
That blink echoed in me like a revolution, so I didn’t want to pay too much attention to it. I didn’t want him to hide it if it happened again.
What I wanted was for him to keep looking at me the way he was doing now, with fire everywhere and that answering kick of flame inside me. Because I had the strangest notion that these last moments of my life were the first and only ones I was actually living.
That all the rest of it had been empty pantomime on my father’s nasty little stage, but this was the real thing.
Life was supposed to be messy. It was supposed to contradict and complicate, hurt and leave marks.
I’d read about these things.
But until tonight, I’d never experienced them.
I decided that it wasn’t the strangest thing in the world that I wanted more. As much as I could get before it ended. It didn’t make me broken or questionable or any of the other things people would say if they could look into this room and see us like this.
It made me a whole grown woman, not the little doll my father and his cronies had been bickering over for the past few years. It made me alive.
“What do you think having a life means?” Jovi frowned at me, but I took that like a victory. Any change in him was a triumph.
Anything that reminded me that this was a man, not a sculpture.
Or at least, that’s what he was for me.
I wanted to believe that he had the same catastrophically intense reaction to me as I did to him.
Okay, I already believed it.
“Having a life is not being locked up in convents or my father’s house,” I told him, sitting up a little straighter.
“It’s…being able to walk down any avenue in any city I fancy, and doing as I please as I go.
Being able to eat what I want, when I want, and have to explain myself to no one.
Not having to ask for permission or forgiveness for what I wear or think or say.
To make some money that is only mine and spend it as I like.
Is that so hard to imagine? To me it seems quite simple. ”
“This is what you’re missing?”
There was something wrong about the way he asked that, I thought. It resonated in me, jagged and sharp.
He moved closer, so that once again he was nearly standing between my knees, and I had to tilt my head back and look far, far up the length of his torso to see his face.
I thought he would reach out to take my chin in his hand once more, or something like it—
But he didn’t.
And the fact that he didn’t make me feel something perilously close to undone.
“What small, insignificant things these are to bother wanting, baggiana.” He sounded particularly dark and I felt my cheeks go hot, as if I’d exposed myself.
“Where is it you think that people are living these uncomplicated lives you imagine are so fulfilling? I have been everywhere, and I will tell you, they do not exist, these lives.”
I could not pull my gaze away from him. “They must.”