Chapter Eight
I SLEPT HARD.
Maybe I passed out.
To be honest, I didn’t really care either way. I toppled into a deep unconsciousness and as far as I could tell, I didn’t move at all.
When I woke up, I was disoriented. I felt heavy in a number of marvelous ways, but I was in that dark bedroom that clearly wasn’t my own. There was no light. It took a good couple of breaths for everything to come flooding back to me.
And when it did, it was red-hot.
The important part was that I was still alive. And yet, as embarrassing as it probably ought to have been for me to admit even to myself, I had lived my best life right here in this bed.
I snuggled deeper into the bed, realizing two things in rapid succession. First, that Jovi wasn’t here in this bedroom with me. Maybe that wasn’t a surprise.
What was, however, was that he had clearly let me sleep.
Just…let me sleep.
This did not strike me as typical kidnapper behavior. Then again, neither did what had happened between us before I’d fallen asleep.
Further investigation revealed even more fascinating discoveries. My hands weren’t tied. Neither were my feet. When I glanced over at the door, I could see a ring of light around the frame where it was shut tight, though I didn’t know if that was daylight or electricity.
I could have slept for fifteen minutes or ten years. I couldn’t tell.
It was possible—really, it was likely—that he’d locked me in here. But I couldn’t bring myself to worry about that too much. It was still a major upgrade from a chair in a bare room with my hands tied above my head.
Though if I was honest, that hadn’t been too bad, either.
Or maybe you’re used to so many terrible things that you think slightly less terrible things are a delight, a voice that sounded a lot like Katarzyna countered inside my head.
Though if it was really my stepmother, she was far more likely to toss back a hefty pour of her preferred wodka and intone something like, No one ever promised that things would be good, so if you simply decide that it is—no matter how revolting—it is the same thing in the end.
I found myself smiling, as if she was really here and had really said such a thing in her typically dour way.
I do not lift spirits, Ruxandra, she had told me once. I drink them.
I was shocked to discover that I was going to miss her, when I had never thought much about my other stepmothers. Then again, none of them had been so close to my age.
I turned on my side and let everything that had happened since Jovi had appeared before me like the hottest possible apparition flow through me.
I was very tempted to lie where I was and daydream my way back through all of the things he’d done to me last night.
Or earlier this morning, as the case may be.
Again and again, since even the faintest touch of memory made me feel warm all over.
Though what was infinitely more tempting than that was the idea that Jovi himself was right there on the other side of the door.
Because all I really wanted to do was touch him again.
I decided to forgive myself both retroactively and in advance for any foolish things I did while under the influence of that man.
“I’m just a girl,” I whispered to myself, beneath my breath. But I smiled into the dark. “I can only be expected to do so much.”
I sat up and swung my legs over the side of the bed, taking stock of my body. This body that had been entirely and only mine for my whole life until last night.
He had taken me bodily from my father’s fortress of a house.
Then he had taken things I hadn’t known I’d been saving only for him.
That I was pleased I’d never shared with anyone else—because even though I’d been kept locked away my whole life, there were always moments that could bloom into bigger things.
I knew a lot of the girls in the convent who had “prayed together.” And there were always the guards with greedy looks and too-long glances, more than happy to take a bite of the forbidden fruit.
But I’d never indulged.
Now I thought I knew why.
Now, I thought, he’d made my body his as if it had been destined for him all along.
I knew my body all too well. I despaired over the flaws I saw in it that I liked to pick apart in the mirror.
I admired its strength. What I really liked was the way the most dangerous man I’ve ever met looked at this body.
How he’d moved his hands over me in seeming awe and wonder.
How he’d used his mouth like some kind of benediction.
After all those days and nights in lonely rooms in both the convent and my father’s house, it seemed to me that I had finally found holy ground.
By this point, I realized that I could see in the dark well enough, so there seemed little reason to linger where I was when he was the only thing on my mind.
I could see my pajamas crumpled in a heap on the floor, so I pulled on the little shorts and only remembered that he’d torn all the buttons off the top when I shrugged it on.
The girl I’d been before him paused, because she had never let another person see her naked since she’d been a baby.
But the woman I was now decided I didn’t really care if the man who’d had his hands and mouth all over my body saw that body in the light.
Though even as I thought that, the idea made me shiver a little all the same.
Because the darkness was one thing. There were places to hide. Or maybe I just wanted to believe that there were.
I swallowed, but I moved over to the door anyway.
I put my hand on the doorknob and accepted that this was a moment of truth, in its way. Had he locked me in here? Was this just another cell?
He was my captor. He was my only lover.
But which one was he right now?
I held my breath and tried the knob—
And when it turned easily in my hand, I pulled the door open.
I felt emotion pummel me then, as something alarmingly close to a sob threatened to erupt from deep inside me.
Maybe because I couldn’t remember the last time I hadn’t been locked away.
In the convent. In my bare little room in the dormitories there.
In my father’s house, sequestered on my own lonely hall, guards at the end to keep me there.
And sometimes, depending on my father’s mood, with the bolt thrown on my bedroom door—to which only he had the key.
I had no idea what expression could possibly be on my face as I let all the light that greeted me wash over me, but I didn’t fight it. I didn’t stop, either. I let all that shocking emotion roll through me as it would, then I let it go.
And it was only when I was sure I wasn’t about to break down in sobs that I looked around and found Jovi watching me with a curious look on his face from where he sat at the counter in the open plan kitchen, a tablet in his hand.
“Good morning,” I said, with laughable courtesy, given the circumstances.
But he didn’t laugh, of course.
“It is afternoon,” he told me, expressionless. But with a hint of reprimand in his tone, as if I’d been lazing about like some kind of spoiled princess after a night out partying.
For some reason, that made me laugh.
“Yes,” I said, nodding. “It’s very important to keep the correct time in a circumstance like this. And I do apologize. I usually prefer to wake up bright and early to fully experience the breadth and depth of traumatic kidnaps. My bad.”
Jovi did not respond to that. He only watched me, darkly.
This was fine with me because there were important details to consider, I realized belatedly. Such as the fact that he was wearing a pair of what looked like athletic trousers. They were black, sat low on his hips, and, more importantly, they were the only thing he was wearing.
Meaning I could see the full glory of his chest.
I had felt it last night. I’d driven myself happily mad against it, and even now my hands longed to do a better job with it. I wanted to find my way over every ridge and scar. I wanted to commit them all to memory.
I wanted to brand him on the inside of me, so he would always be mine.
What I noticed most of all was the tattoo over his heart. It was a circle of words in all-black ink, stamped deep into his skin. With a snake coiled in the middle of it.
“You should eat,” Jovi said in a gruff voice.
His eyes were still dark, but I imagined that I could read them better now. There was that intensity that I assumed was simply him. But there was more now. Something else that I very much wanted to call…care, maybe? Affection seemed like an overreach. And yet.
“Must I?” I asked, because I didn’t feel like I had anything even faintly resembling an appetite—
Yet the moment I thought that, I was suddenly aware that my stomach felt hollow. That I wasn’t simply hungry, I was famished.
“You must,” he said shortly.
He switched off his tablet and set it down. He turned, and as I watched with a sort of astonishment that made every beat of my heart feel jarring and strange, he began to pull food out of the refrigerator. Not food, ingredients.
And then, with only a fulminating glance in my direction, he proceeded to prepare me a meal.
Eggs with vegetables and meat. A bit of a salad. Fruit.
When he was finished, he slid the plate across the counter, and pointed at the seat in front of it that he wished me to take.
I was still standing there at the door to the bedroom in my half-opened pajama top, staring at this man I knew to be perhaps the scariest on earth.
Who had just prepared me a cheerful-looking brunch, from scratch.
“What if I don’t like eggs?” I asked, and I didn’t even know where the question came from, because I liked eggs just fine.
In any case, he only lifted a brow. “I did not ask what you liked. I told you to eat. I cannot have you fainting away, Rux.”
“Is this like fattening up the calf for slaughter?”
But even as I asked that, my stomach was grumbling. I moved over to the counter, took the seat he indicated I should, and tried my level best not to fall upon the meal he’d made me like a wild animal.