Chapter 11 Allegra #2
“Tell me. Did you miss me?” he asks, ignoring my comment, eyes searching mine. “I might like it if someone missed me,” he continues making me wonder where his head is. “I might like it if you missed me, Moth.”
Danger. Warnings ring loud in my head, and I push against him, intending to scoot past him, but he has no intention of allowing that to happen.
“You’re drunk. Let me go,” I say.
“Answer me. Tell me if you missed me.”
“No, Cassian. I didn’t miss you.” It’s true, I think.
Maybe I missed him, but not for any reason other than that, without him, I’m pretty much ignored here among his guards.
Ignored and preferably locked away. “You’ve been gone, just vanished, after what happened.
After you almost killed my brother. Did you kill him?
Oh my God, did you? Is that why you’ve stayed away? ”
He looks confused, slow to process. He blinks and I see the moment he recalls what I’m talking about because he gets an irritated look on his face. At least he releases me. “That piece of shit is alive. Or he was when I left him. I’m not sure why you care though.”
“I care because he’s my brother.”
“I don’t think it’s him.”
“You don’t think what’s him?”
“Those marks. I think you’d kill him if he did that to you.”
Instinctively, my hand rises to touch the back of my neck, but I catch myself. Why is he so focused on this? “You’re completely drunk. I’m going to bed.”
“Not yet.”
I try to scoot past him, but he blocks my path.
“Get out of my way,” I say, sidestepping him.
He blocks me again planting the flat of his hand against my stomach and walking me backward until my back hits the altar. “Why are you angry?”
“Why am I angry? Really? I’m angry because I haven’t known what the hell is going on. I’m angry because this is three days of my week, and it might be the last week of my life, and you were just gone and—”
“Last week of your life? What the hell are you talking about?” He shakes his head. “I had business that did not concern you. Don’t be fucking dramatic.”
“Well, I’m your prisoner so everything you do concerns me and it’s my life we’re talking about, so you’ll have to excuse the drama.”
“Don’t fight me, Allegra, not tonight. I’m fucking tired.”
“Well, send me back home and your problem is solved.”
He pushes his hand through his hair again and I see just how exhausted he is.
How dark the shadows under his eyes. “It’s been a very long three days,” he says as if to confirm what I’m thinking.
He slides his hand up my back and grips a handful of hair, tugging my head backward.
There’s a rawness in his eyes, a weariness that runs deep like he hasn’t slept in years, not days, and it’s hard to look at him without feeling a tug, a strange need to lean close, to burrow into his chest and have his arms around me as if we could give each other comfort.
As if that’s remotely possible when it’s completely ridiculous.
But the way he’s looking at me, it’s like he’s looking for the same in me. Searching for it in earnest. Like he needs it.
“I never really knew mine,” he finally says, voice different, uncharacteristically vulnerable. “My mother,” he clarifies because he must realize I have no idea what the hell he’s talking about. “I never knew her face apart from photos. Never heard her voice.”
That’s not what I expected. Not at all. I stare up at him, see the strange look in his eyes and I’m unsure how to respond.
Why is he telling me this? We are enemies, he and I.
When I made that comment about forgetting my mom the other day, I don’t know where it came from.
I don’t know why I said it and why I said it to him of all people when I haven’t told anyone ever.
I’m not even sure I’ve ever consciously thought about it.
Why did I tell him and why is he telling me this now?
I should never have given him that little bit of me because this?
What he’s doing now? The way he looks so lost?
It just confuses things, and I’m already confused when it comes to Cassian Trevino.
After my mother’s death, after what happened, I’ve learned how to hide myself, how to remain unseen. How to survive. I’ve learned to trust only myself because I know what those you trust can do to you and I refuse to give anyone that power over me ever again. I won’t be that vulnerable ever again.
“It’s what happens when someone dies,” he says like he read it somewhere.
“Why are you telling me that? I don’t need you to tell me that.”
His eyebrows furrow and I swear what I see in his eyes is hurt.
Like he did not expect that rebuttal. Like it’s somehow a refusal of him and I guess it is.
We can’t become each other’s confidantes.
That’s not what we are. It’s not what this is, and I need to make sure he knows it.
I need him to know that I don’t need him, and I don’t want anything from him and he shouldn’t expect anything from me.
He and I are enemies. We will remain enemies.
“You’re drunk,” I say again, forcing steel into my voice.
“I’m not drunk. I was, but I’m not—”
“And I don’t know what you think telling me that will get you, but whatever it is, you’re wrong because I don’t care about it. I don’t care about you,” I add, that last part making me feel like such an asshole. “All I want is to be free of you, Cassian Trevino.”
“Free of me?”
“I want to go back to my life, and I don’t want you or your problems or your little confidences.”
His eyes harden, his jaw tensing as he sets his hands on either side of me on the altar, trapping me there.
“My little confidences?” he asks, eyebrows high.
“You would rather go back to a brother who would sell you off? A consigliere who has overstepped. Who has his own plans for you and your family?”
“And what plans do you have for me?”
“I wouldn’t sell you to the highest bidder, for starters.”
“No? Isn’t that what women are for? Isn’t that what you told me? Let me go, Cassian.” I shove against him, but trying to move Cassian Trevino is like trying to move a freight train.
He grips my waist and tugs me to him, bending down so his face is an inch from mine. “You want to be my enemy, Allegra?”
I push again, but again, he doesn’t budge. “It doesn’t matter what I want. I am your enemy, Cassian. Or did you forget?”
Something in that makes him stop. There’s a shift in his eyes, a shadow falling across his face, something dark shrouding us. Cassian Trevino may be the most dangerous man I know. He may walk around like he rules the fucking world. But he’s also broken. Broken and unpredictable.
I’m walking on a field of land mines with him, and I never know when one will go off.
Correction.
One is about to blow.
He takes a deep breath in and straightens to his full height to look down at me, eyes cold as steel now.
My heart pounds against my ribs, blood roaring in my ears.
“No, Moth, I did not forget,” he says calmly before spinning me around so fast that my arms shoot out and my hands land on the altar. Cassian sets his overtop of mine. “Keep them there,” he whispers into my ear before I hear the ripping of material and cry out as my sweater slips away.
“What are you doing?”
“You’re my enemy. You said so yourself. So, I’m punishing you,” he says, hands in the waistband of my leggings pushing them down and off.
My panties are next to go and when I pull my arms from the altar, he slaps my ass hard.
“You listen like shit,” he says, and unclasps my bra, pulls it off my arms and tosses it aside.
“What the hell are you doing?” I cry out when he sets his big hand between my shoulder blades and pushes me forward so I’m bending over the altar, the stone freezing against my bare skin.
“When I tell you to stay, you stay,” he starts, then leans over me.
“I’m just making sure you remember that,” he whispers that last part, his breath hot against my cheek, my ear.
I crane my neck to look back at him, seeing how dark his eyes have gone as he takes in my bare flesh before tipping his nose into the crook of my neck and inhaling deeply.
“But don’t worry, I’m going to teach you, Little Moth,” he says, meeting my eyes before reaching over me to pick up a candle, the wax that has melted and hardened again snapping. “Now be still.”
He tips the candle and hot wax drops onto my lower back. I suck in a breath with the instant burn. I try to pull away, but that hand at my back keeps me down and it doesn’t matter that I wriggle this way and that, he pours hot wax over my back, my ass, down my thighs.
“It hurts!” I call out, and although it does hurt, the pain is gone as soon as the wax cools and solidifies, stiff on my body, cracking with every move. I press my chest into the altar and realize he’s not holding me down anymore as I stare straight ahead, trying to control my breathing.
“Had enough?” he finally asks.
I turn my head. “I hate you.”
“But have you had enough?”
“Yes!”
“Let’s see. Don’t move.” He sets the candle down and backs away. I don’t move, but watch from the corner of my eye and even in the dim light, I see how his eyes are fixed on me, how dark they are, no longer cold or hard, but molten. Like lava.
He meets my eyes and begins to unbutton the top buttons of his shirt before pulling it off over his head, sending the rest of the buttons popping to the stone floor.
“I like you like this, Moth.”
“Cassian,” I start, having to clear my throat because once again, the air has shifted, that electrical charge back.
“Don’t. Fucking. Move.”
I swallow, the look of him so different than I’ve seen it. That first night he was taunting me. This? Now? There’s only one thing he wants now. And the sight of him like this and the way he’s looking at me like he’ll eat me whole makes me feel like I’ve swallowed a hundred moths.